Yolo, Fomo, Skylab, Now: Anxious Generations and the Lost Art of Living for Tradition

A conversation with an Indian American teacher led to a nostalgic moment many of our generation might recognize: what we were doing back in 1979 when a panic spread through India that Skylab would fall on us and everyone would die!

She recalled that poultry farmers around her childhood home near Mumbai suddenly decided to kill and eat their hens all at once because well, the world was going to end anyway. Vegetable farmers too, she remembered, stopped watering their plants and decided to take their last few days easy as best as they could. Finally, when Skylab didn’t hit and the world didn’t end, they found themselves devoid of their harvest and livelihood for that year.

I have a vivid memory of farmers in distress from that time too. Skylab had indeed crashed, but in far away Australia, and those of us who bunked school that day were duly reprimanded in the assembly the following morning by Mrs. Raja Rao, the formidable and respected Vice Principal of our school. We were told, logically so, that if Skylab did fall on Hyderabad, it could have fallen on our homes as much as our school buildings! That part was humorous. But what was indeed concerning was the sight one night many days later of a family of farmers carrying their belongings in bundles and tin boxes waiting near the gate of our home for my parents (my mother, Jamuna, was a famous actor and public figure and it was not uncommon for visitors to the city to make their way to our house if they needed help; she was a familiar name in an alien world to them perhaps). Our visitors told my parents that they had sold their farm for a pittance and fled to the city because they were told something was going to fall from the sky. Others in their village had even consumed pesticide and killed themselves. It was a sad reality. I am sure my parents did what they could to help them.

Decades later, I am reminded of this incident because of how our teacher-to-teacher conversation connected the fear of Skylab (or immediate extinction) to the attitude of students in schools and colleges today. I teach in college and she teaches high schoolers. But what she noticed is something we have all seen offhand perhaps – a prevalent pessimism among teens (the “Gen Z”) that the future is awful in every possible way; AI ensuring no jobs, climate change ensuring no environment, polarization and politics ensuring no representation or hope for democracy. So why study? Why get married? Why live, even?

The Anxious Generation

This generally pessimistic attitude about the future among members of “Gen Z” (born roughly between 1995-2010) is also discussed in depth by psychologist Jean Twenge in her monumental study Generations (a great read alongside Jonathan Haidt’s critique of social media and mental health, “The Anxious Generation”). From a sociological point of view, there is nothing here to judge morally, but much to learn about how economics, politics, culture, all intersect in shaping the way we tell stories about ourselves and the world.

And these stories too are increasingly polarized and fragmented. Some might view the bleak economic outlook (expressed in examples like not being able to afford to buy a house even after studying hard and working hard) as the result of greedy, short-term thinking by previous generations. “Our ancestors caused climate change and messed it all up for my generation” is more or less an exact quote I have heard from a high-school-age friend. “Old people are simply refusing to die so my kids are unable to buy homes” is a harsher pronouncement I have heard along similar generational-blame-apportioning lines; this one though, was said by a fellow Gen X-er!

This story about intergenerational blame is of course not one-way. Older generations have rightly been challenged by youngsters for their cliched thinking that Millennials and Gen Z are wasting their money on “avocado toasts” and expensive coffee lattes instead of saving for a down payment and mortgage. I wonder though if both sets of tropes are actually less representative of real life and more of a media-induced phenomenon; another dimension of “divide and rule” which leaves us ignoring how societies have always lived in time, with different cohorts moving through life-stages with overlapping but different social and cultural experiences (poetically compared by Strauss and Howe in their famous book Generations to trains moving past each other).

Too Much Information to Blame?

In any case, to return to the lesson that Skylab left for two teachers talking about students in America nearly fifty years later, the point was really about what happens to our ability to live, work, and grow naturally through life if we are left bereft of a balanced view of our future. My teacher friend felt that the main reason for the deep pessimism among her students was the growing wall-to-wall social media and news media focus on bad things happening in the world, all the oppression, tyranny, war, and such. She advocated for a wise, patient, self-mastered approach.

I think teachers, especially in the social sciences, should share harsh truths, but not so harshly that students lose a sense of hope or agency, or descend into simplistic generational-blaming.

Someone may be up today and down tomorrow, and vice-versa. We see it in our own families, she noted. Contrary to the perception that many Indian American students seem to have that previous generations had it good and now they were going into a future where economic outlooks were bleak, she pointed out that for many first-generation immigrants, especially of an older era, such a memory simply didn’t exist. Most memories of parents in the 1960s and 1970s were marked by austerity and very little economic and material privilege. Perhaps younger Indian-Americans were conflating their experience of their parents’ generation’s success in America with a long past of privilege and indulgence, leaving little for the future. Her prescription, or philosophy, based on how the Skylab-fearing-farmers in the 1970s had killed all that could have sustained them out of fear of the future, was that we avoid negativity and do what we must now.

My takeaway from this conversation was in agreement on the spirit of it (I think teachers, especially in the social sciences, should share harsh truths, but not so harshly that students lose a sense of hope or agency, or descend into simplistic generational-blaming), but with a little more attention to the nature and power of the stories that shape our thinking about our place in time; our past and our future. I think the biggest change from earlier generations to more recent ones in the Indian community has been the shift from thinking about time through life-forms and life-stages and life-stage-markers such as duties to our children, our elders, and our ancestors through various rites, to a one-life one-timeline monoculture, underscored by a pressing “bucket-list” attitude to achievement, success, competition and so on.

A Question of Balance

From moksha, dharma, samsara, and other ideas, we now function with just two acronyms: YOLO (You Only Live Once) and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). These attitudes may seem like common-sense and scientific even, but they are frankly very culturally-specific. They come out of post-pagan Europe’s encounter with apocalyptism, linear time, and then spread to the world through colonialism. If our ancestors lived with the idea that they had to go through life performing rituals for their ancestors so the whole lineage would attain moksha, we live with the idea that our duty extends at best to one living generation before and one living generation after (if we choose to go there that is). One might say “to each their own” and I do say that. But we also have to understand the effect that the forgetting of our relation to past and future might have on our ability to balance optimism and pessimism. If we believe we are the “last generation,” are we not in some way thinking like the farmers who feared Skylab? Are we not inclined to make short-term choices born out of fear and desperation rather than an idea that the future will exist even after our “one life” might end?

In terms of practical choices and dilemmas, this question plays out in my view most pertinently and poignantly in the question of marriage, parenting, and families. While the percentage of high-schoolers who think of marriage or a relationship as less and less of a major goal in life (according to Twenge, the percentage of U.S. 12^th graders who consider “marriage and family extremely important” has dropped from around 75% in the mid 1980s to around 65% in the early 2020s), the question of inter-religious or inter-cultural marriages also hits this question in some complex ways we don’t always think about. I was reminded of this context not only because it is and will remain a growing reality for the Indian American community and diaspora broadly (and I emphasize again that I believe in love over dogma and borders of caste and creed, but perhaps tempered by borders of logic, reality, and cause-and-effect), but also because of a recent article by the young Indian American historian Vivek Rallabandi on two famous inter-religious marriages in Indian-American conversations: that of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s parents and that of current Vice President J.D. Vance and Mrs. Usha Vance.

Rallabandi addresses the choices that the American “melting pot” offers us with a mature, balanced, and non-judgmental eye. He underscores the obvious without overstating the intrusive or presumptuous: Shyamala Gopalan and Usha Chilukuri were of course free to have loved and married who they liked, and it is no one else’s business. But what is the nature of America’s melting pot and our place in it, if in both cases a certain tradition which has passed on for hundreds or thousands of years (which he broadly describes as Tamil-Brahmin and Telugu-Brahmin respectively) comes to an end? Neither Kamala Harris nor the Vance children will have the idea of living for a future in which the perpetuation of traditions, rites, mantras, devotions to deities, and such, will be the reason for their existence. 

“YOLO” will be their way of knowing life and time. Again, these are just two examples which happen to be in the public imagination, so we talk about them. But the broader takeaway for all of us engaging in conversations across time, across generations, is this. Do we have a duty to educate our children on the cultural-specificity of YOLO, apocalyptism, and the ways in which our understanding of our place in the flow of time and life has been fragmented and commodified? Do we have a duty to say, “we may or may not know if the future will be better or worse, or if there are lives beyond and such, but to assume it all ends with us, or ends so soon it’s all pointless, is a terribly sad, self-defeating, ideology”?

Our children may or may not marry, have families, have children of their own. Or if they do, they may or may not marry within the same definitions of community that existed in previous times. A liberal mind should accept these with grace. But a parental mind, an elder’s experience, should also speak to the reality of what is bothering the young when they have no alternatives in their minds to the YOLO framework, devoid of a sense of purpose around traditions, ancestors, gods, the cosmos, as it were. As children ourselves growing up in Nehruvian India’s shadow, we were educated relentlessly about the burden of tradition and fought to rid ourselves of it in the name of progress. Now, given the widespread gloom among our young about the future, perhaps we should recognize that it is the future that feels like a burden to them. We can’t guarantee so many things for them, and so we focus so much almost entirely on what we might call “artha,” the material advantage of colleges, jobs, and such. But we can assure them that love can exist for them, and from them, in the future too. The practice of traditions, the questioning of dogmas which have become dominant in our time including the unbearable weight that fears of falling satellites or world-ending political events exert on our choices, all of these are conversations worth having.

Om Shanthi.

Top image, courtesy of pediatricsafety.net

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Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He is the author of “Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television” (Peter Lang, 2003), “The Mythologist: A Novel” (Penguin India, 2010), and “Bollywood Nation: India through its Cinema (Penguin India,” 2013), “Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence “ (BluOne Ink, 2024) and “The Guru Within” (in progress).