Economically, politically, socially and environmentally the destiny of the US is far more intertwined with our global neighbors, and they with each other, than ever before. The ripple effects going both ways are much more pronounced and occur at blinding speed.

Whether this symbiosis is a source of fear or comfort seems to depend on the particular issue being discussed and who’s doing the discussing.

But however you look at it, the interconnectedness of the global community is now profound and will have huge influence on what happens to us from here on out.

When I think of the life my father endured growing up on a Missouri farm before running water or electification or the arrival even of the internal combustion engine, enlisting in the pre-war Army just to escape riding the rails, buying a post-war house on the G.I. bill that no one of his age today would take a second look at, being turned down for job after job for lack of a high-school degree - all this makes me a bit sceptical of the proposition that the young folks today have it hard. We’re so pampered by prosperity that the relatively slight discomforts we face (slight in the light of human history) make us think the world’s coming to an end when there’s a shiver in the housing market.

Maybe we’re living at the end of something. Maybe you’re right about all the above. People have always said this. My uncle was saying it in the fifties when he prepared a stripped-out bus to escape nuclear holocaust. Herman Melville was saying it in the century before last when he thought the excesses of the Gilded Age presaged the end. Kerouac and Ginsberg were saying it when you and I came of age and feared too much prosperity, feared becoming that most horrible of creatures - “the Organization Man”.

Those apparent crises passed. Mankind - especially the genus Humanus Intellectualis - thrives on crisis, thrives on thoughts of doom. This stuff is O.K. to say, it’s even interesting to say. But is it true? Once I thought so, now I’m more inclined to put my money on another option - that the genus Humanus Americanus will muddle through, as it always has done, with potential never yet quite developed but never yet repudiated in light of anything else on offer.

Anyhow, none of this milennial pie-in-the-sky stuff matters much for today’s young people who are faced with the same essential choices every generation of the young are faced with - either lie down and give up, or try to make something of your life. And here’s another question: Would you rather be making these choices in America or some other place? –To opt for elsewhere is a luxury few seem to actually act on.

For you and me it no longer matters. We can talk at this level of generality because all our choices have been made, and we are what we are and where we are. We’re freer than we’ve ever been in our lives to consider the big picture. Query: Does this very freedom skew our vision? William James thought it might. All wisdom in the end is practical wisdom. We can think these disconsolate thoughts about our culture because we’re no longer forging our way in it. Those end-of-time thoughts are “true” for us as we are today. They wouldn’t have been true for us as we were when we were starting out, and they may not be true for our children as they are starting out. (God knows what thoughts our grandchildren will think.) But the problem of Life will always be the same. As Bellow said, “Either live or die, but don’t ruin everything.”