The Collapse of a False “Natural Order”

There is a growing lament across the American commentariat about a generation that, through no fault of its own, can no longer perform the basic rites of adulthood. Homeownership is out of reach, stable jobs are scarce, college is crushingly expensive and millions of young adults remain in their parents’ homes long past the age at which previous generations struck out on their own. The lamentation is familiar: Something is broken, something once dependable is slipping away. The loud ones accuse “culture,” others, equally loud, accuse “politics.”

Yet the debate rests on an unexamined conviction that the modern life script, born in the United States and in the middle of the 20th century, is not only desirable but a natural, universal trajectory from which any deviation signals civilizational decay. The script goes as follows: Leave home at 18, attend college, take a salaried job in a city far from where one grew up (to assert “independence”), marry into a nuclear household, purchase a home, have a couple of kids and accumulate savings in tax advantaged retirement accounts.

A more honest reading reveals something different: What is slipping away is not a natural order but a constructed one.

The life-script we mourn was produced by a specific economic formation that required mobile workers, isolated households, and perpetual expansion. Karl Polanyi described this transformation as the “great disembedding,” in which human beings were pried away from traditional forms of life and reorganized around the needs of market society. Max Weber chronicled the parallel rise of rationalized bureaucracy and the erosion of older communal ties. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman celebrated this reorganization, insisting that the liberation of individuals from inherited structures was the precondition for prosperity. But these liberations came at a cost that was visible even at the system’s peak.

The truth is that the nuclear household, held up as the pinnacle of personal responsibility, is historically anomalous. For most of human existence, families were intergenerational, not out of quaint tradition but because life depended on reciprocal care. The elderly lived with their children; the young were raised not only by parents but by cousins, elders, neighbors. The modern arrangement, in which an aging parent lives alone in a distant suburb, visited episodically by adult children who must balance full-time jobs, child-rearing and commutes is not an ancient inheritance but an industrial contrivance. This structure directly contributes to the crisis of elder care, leaving millions without adequate support.

The same isolation that generates elder-care challenges also amplifies precarity: A broken car, a sudden illness or a temporary job loss can unravel an entire life when individuals are expected to manage everything on their own. Suburban design, meanwhile, further compounds the problem: People can live side by side for years without forming meaningful social bonds, and the need for formal daycare emerges because extended families are no longer co-located to share childcare responsibilities. The combination of isolation, fragmented communities and relentless mobility fosters mental health challenges, stress and social alienation, creating a society in which human connection is mediated by necessity rather than nurture.

The contemporary crisis of homeownership is not a deviation but a revelation. When young people cannot buy homes, it exposes how dependent the system was on perpetual expansion: New suburbs, new mortgages, new markets, new debt. Friedrich Hayek observed that capitalism requires not only the creation of wealth but its continuous circulation; in the absence of such circulation, structures collapse. David Graeber often noted how absurd it was that societies wealthy enough to automate vast portions of labor still hinge basic survival on the fragile threads of employment and credit scores. Economic independence—idealized as adulthood itself—turns out to be a form of exposure, a social arrangement in which each person bears risks once distributed across kinship networks.

Even the spaces designed to house the model betray its failures. Suburbs were marketed as havens, yet they produce a peculiar loneliness. People live side by side for years without forming meaningful bonds, their interactions mediated by garages, long commutes and the privacy imperative that underwrites the nuclear family. Social isolation has become so common that the United States Surgeon General now describes it as an epidemic, one that manifests in anxiety, depression and the quiet despair that so many carry with them.

Those conditions are now eroding. Wages have stagnated, housing has become speculative, education has been financialized, work has grown unstable and the dream of upward mobility functions mostly as ideological theater. To say that young adults cannot buy homes is less an indictment of their generation than a revelation of the system’s underlying fragility. The model worked only when growth was constant, when corporations offered long-term employment, when housing expanded endlessly, when the family could serve as a miniature consumption unit and an isolated site of reproduction. Now that growth stalls and assets concentrate in fewer hands, the model falters. The crisis is not that a natural order is being lost. It is that an unnatural order is being exposed.

The irony is that the world is better equipped than ever to revive what industrial modernity displaced. Digital connectivity makes it possible to live in smaller communities without forfeiting access to knowledge, culture or economic opportunity. Remote work, cooperative housing, community land trusts and intergenerational living—arrangements that resemble the village more than the suburb—are emerging not as nostalgic retreats but as practical responses to the exhaustion of the old model.

Yet there is a profound caution to be observed.

Any attempt to realize this rooted, village-like life must escape the grip of the oligarchy, which can easily insinuate itself as the financier or organizer of these new forms. Private equity firms and institutional investors such as Blackstone, Invitation Home, and Pretium Partners now control tens of thousands of single-family homes in metro areas like Atlanta, Philadelphia and Jacksonville, turning entire neighborhoods into investment portfolios. “Build-to-rent” developments and corporate-managed suburbs are framed as solutions to housing shortages, yet they concentrate control, raise rents and replace generational ownership with dependency on distant landlords. Without vigilance, the same forces that produced the unsustainable nuclear-home model could reinvent themselves, using the language of “returning to our roots” to embed a new kind of control: A capitalism that is subtler, more socially pervasive, and cloaked in the narrative of human flourishing. To prevent this, power cannot simply be “seized back” in the sense of restoring an old representative democracy, for that assumes that we ever had full democratic control. What is required is radical innovation, so that decision-making is truly exercised by the people, directly, rather than by an elite of oligarchs, politicians and financiers. Only by establishing governance structures in which communities collectively determine priorities, allocate resources and design institutions can this new rootedness achieve the liberation it promises instead of reproducing the inequalities of the past.

What appears as a generational failure is in fact the system revealing its limits. The life-script that defined mid-twentieth-century America is not a timeless norm but a brief episode made possible by cheap energy, manageable debt, expanding suburbs and abundant jobs. Its unraveling offers not only the opportunity but the obligation to rethink what a sustainable, psychologically sane and socially rich form of life might look like. The village can return, adapted, connected and decentralized, but only if control over land, housing and essential services is taken out of corporate portfolios and placed directly into the hands of people themselves.

In this vision, decision-making is molecular: Authority is distributed to the smallest functional units of society, and participation is continuous, deep and tangible. Citizens are not passive voters or clients of the state; they are active participants, constantly patching, problem-solving and negotiating together, aware of what is happening throughout their community. Just as in a village, everyone knows one another, knows the needs and resources around them, and takes responsibility not only for themselves but for the collective well-being. Governance is iterative, adaptive and embedded in everyday life, rather than delegated to distant figures serving their own interests. Eldercare, childcare, housing and community maintenance are shared responsibilities, continually reinforced by networks of mutual accountability. In such a society, the bonds of cooperation replace abstraction, social isolation diminishes, and the village itself becomes the medium through which freedom, security, and resilience are realized.