TODAY ā the Pond
TOMORROW ā the World!
Guess, Iām not the only one who thought that.
Here is the link to their websiteā¦
None in the ATL thus farā¦
Very sad news:
Iām wait-listed for the August 23rd event, but no one who was already going is going to cancel this time.
That was quite good, thanks for posting it
https://www.ft.com/content/5cd77ef0-b546-4105-8946-36db3f84dc43
Are they not happy with becoming corporate drones?
For what itās worth, the Big Five is a clinically validated personality metric (unlike, say, just about all the ones that people put on their linkedin profile). That said, the BFIās definitions for the metrics goes a long way to explaining what might be going on, if you know Thing One about contemporary society and young peopleās experience in it.
- Openness to Experience (10 items): This subscale assesses traits like intellectual curiosity, creativity, and a preference for novelty.
- Conscientiousness (9 items): This component evaluates an individualās tendency to be organized, dependable, and self-disciplined.
- Extraversion (8 items): Indeed, this part measures characteristics such as sociability, assertiveness, and emotional expressiveness.
- Agreeableness (9 items): This section gauges tendencies to be compassionate, cooperative, and trustworthy.
- Neuroticism (8 items): Finally, this subscale assesses the propensity to experience negative emotions like anxiety, anger, and sadness.
I canāt imagine why, say, young adults might have more trouble succeeding on metrics of organization and dependability, or why they might be experiencing more anger, anxiety, and sadness in 2025.
Also, itās interesting that the report omits openness. I donāt have the patience to dig through the study to see whatās going on with those scores, but Iām ready to conjecture that there are changes to that metric that FT has chosen not to report since it interferes with their narrative.
Incidentally:
The BFI is scored on a 5-point likert scale on 44 items. For āconscientiousnessā the items are:
Ā 3. Does a thorough job
Ā 8. Can be somewhat careless
Ā 13. Is a reliable worker
Ā 18. Tends to be disorganized
Ā 23. Tends to be lazy
Ā 28. Perseveres until the task is finished
Ā 33. Does things efficiently
Ā 38. Makes plans and follows through with them
Ā 43. Is easily distracted
ā¦ with items 8, 18, 23, and 43 scored āreversedā (so that a score of 1 is tallied as 5, and vice versa).
(NB there are a few different versions of this instrument, all pretty close to each other, but I am not sure if this particular version is authoritative. I used this source.)
In any case, it should be clear how living in a collapsing society as a physically, emotionally, and temporally overtaxed vassal to corporate culture might drag these scores down.
(And to be sure, a glance at the instrument also makes it clear that a personās responses will not direcly measure their personality but rather how their personality fits into the culture the person is in. So FTās framing that āyoung adults are less conscientious to a concerning degreeā is naive at best and dishonest at worst: the real story is that āyoung adults find themselves in a society where the demands of conscientiousness are increasingly impossible to meet.ā)
(edit: fix markdown auto-numbering)
And all of that is coming out after isolation in COVID, which seems to have disproportionately affected young people and children, who were developing life and social skills at the time.
Disasters interest me and this is certainly a disaster, written as a thoughtful account of how people managed (or didnāt).
Something something situational awareness somethingā¦
From the graphs posted above, it looks like all of those trends were already in action years before the pandemic, which is interesting.
Itās such a short timeline with so few data points (6) though. It would be much more interesting to see a plot going back to say the 1960s (when pretty much all the graphs in Bowling Alone show a marked change), or before.
It would be interesting to see the data from before 2016. Maybe starting at 2008ā¦
Hooverās adherence to failed republican economic policies cultivated the great depression. He doesnāt get a pass on that despite who is in the White House today.
Yeah, and his vacuum cleaners just sucked.
I think a lot of people crave something real in an increasingly denatured world.
And to really own something tangible that canāt be deleted by our overlords.