At this month’s plant exchange, watching three young boys cavorting while squeezing juice out of fresh rosemary leaves brought a flood of emotions. First, hope. The hope that there is hope for the youngest generation. Second, a realization of how old Aunty is.
I’m old enough to remember when we had a social contract to care for our most vulnerable members and mentor our youngest ones. Maybe it was the pandemic that broke the contract. I think it was the pandemic that finally broke the contract.
A social contract is the basic set of rules, norms, and mutual obligations that bind together individuals, firms, civil society, and the state. A social contract defines what we implicitly owe each other. Throughout American history, whether carried out or not, there was an understanding of what ought to do for one another. Sometimes wars were fought over these values, such as happened during the Civil War and World War II.
Recently, when I told my son that we used to have a social contract, it was met with skepticism. His view was so largely colored by negativity that the concept of fair play or justice alone was foreign. Aunty is not old enough to remember World War II, but I am old enough to have heard of my own mother’s exodus from Japan in its aftermath. Back then, in the name of humanity we picked up the pieces of what was destroyed — even if it was on then-enemy turf.
The generations whose ages span from the teens through the thirties (born in the early ’90s through about 2010) have a very limited view of the world. Even history books cannot save them as history seemingly rewrites itself. I fret for them, knowing I cannot fathom the level of fret they already experience.
No one wants to work.
We hear it all the time. No one wants to work. If you’ve ever visited a restaurant in the past year, you know the feeling. If you’ve ever gone to your decades-old local store only to find it closed due to staffing shortages, you know the feeling. The phenomenon has gone from anecdotal to widespread.
How do we stop the backward momentum? In a word: trust. We need to give others more reason to trust us, and we need to learn to trust in others to do what they say they will do. We also need to learn to give implicitly, as we have with the plant exchange.
I’ve told the story of the plant exchange donation jar verbally, but here’s the story of the donation jar. We never used to have one. Then, as occurred several times, when someone asked how much a plant was and we told them it was free, they put the plant down and walked away. It’s as though they can’t fathom a world in which parties don’t act in their own self-interest rather than that of the greater good.
We solved the problem by putting out a donation jar, using some for purchases such as labels and pots, and donating the remainder to the high school PTSA. That solved incongruencies so that takers didn’t think that we were somehow “weird” for not wanting an explicit return for our goods and labor.
It all worked out for the best. Goods exchanged hands at the rate at which someone was willing to pay for them. The PTSA loves the plant exchange: the plant exchange brings in both Farmer’s Market traffic and monetary donations used to help students offset fees and costs related to school. By the way, there is no written agreement for this. This is all based on trust: the idea that we will act in collective interest rather than greed.
This is what is missing for today’s youth. I am asking — begging — every one of us to bring back trust. Trust in our communities first, our labor markets next, and if we are up to it, our democratic government. We can fix this one step at a time but it will take a collective momentum to make it happen.