Indeed that was the old paradigm: stay in school, don’t do drugs, go to college, get a middle-class office job by accident, buy a house, mail-order endless medium-quality imported manufactures, “invest” in your “401K”, retire, have a pension, suckle at the teat of Social Security Administration, abuse aspirin and Bengay until eventual expiration, etc.

The new paradigm, as you suggest, is somewhat different: stay in school, use doctor-approved amphetamines and other drugs, go to something calling itself “university”, graduate with a mountain of nonbankruptable debt, barely get any office job if you’re lucky (maybe), don’t buy anything because you can’t afford anything, eat the bugs, live in the pod, accept the microchip, be assigned to the fifteen-minute city, etc.

The old paradigm was skewered by Fight Club. The new paradigm they call Degrowth because the alternative was Shrinkage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG2dF5PS0bI

Get fed the outrage of the day, update your hashtags accordingly to show you believe and you care. Watch digital content, spend additional money on day-one content and DLC. Never notice that the news and series about the war in Oceania have been scrubbed by the AI and replaced by new content. Celebrate early cozy time online as your smart heating turns off early to save the planet.

Yeah; the ethos of our time is encapsulated by the adage: “To save the village, we had to burn it down.” Fossil fuels now suck, according to the Narrative, so its infrastructure and products all have to go.

And the whole throw-away society plan. I spend my days driving to a big box store; loading up on the latest fashions; on the way home, the chip in my head reveals a multitude of new and improved products I must buy; so I swing by the landfill; dump my now obsolete stuff; go back to the store to make my life even better.

I guess it all ends when the landfills are full.

Fortunately, nothing is beyond our reach.