Betrayal of the American Dream?

In chapter 1 of “The Adult Years”, Frederic Hudson writes an elegy around of the complexity of the modern world, the yearning for the ideal and the loss of innocence that has been experienced since the 1950s. At the same time, he laments the myth of happiness and security.

While this serves as an effective buildup to the later chapter of the book and how these struggles are effectively addressed (or not addressed) by different generations, I wondered how much this was an American, rather than a universal phenomena.

Do other countries who are less achievement-oriented and more family focused experience this type of crisis? And is this truly a modern phenomena? How universal are these feelings to the lower and upper extremes of society? And were the 50s really that great of a time, full of hope or lots of alcohol and emotional repression?

Wordsworth, in the early 1800s wrote “The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” The poem is about getting lost in that then modern world. Hudson has subheadings such as “cyncism”, “powerlessness”, “personal isolationism” “hopelessness” , followed by the next section called “the new adult challenge.”

What’s new about any of this? It seems to be just a different way to articulate one aspect of the human experience that everyone struggles with in some way, probably throughout the world. What may be unique to a time and culture is the response.