The Society of Eternal Youth

The book deals with the impact of one of the biggest socio-cultural changes of the second half of the 20th century, the unprecedented growth of a new social category - adolescents. The author discusses the mentality of those who are in a transitional phase of life, characterized by the undecidedness of life choices. This new social category has become unusually strong in number and importance since the Second World War, a period that is also transitional in terms of the whole of society on its way from an industrial to a post-industrial society. The book analyses how this situation gave rise to the cult of eternal youth, centred around the motifs of desire without limits, the denial of authority and the illusion of unlimited individual choice. The author demonstrates to what extent the cult of eternal youth has inspired so-called postmodern thinking. It also shows how this way of thinking persists even in a situation where the outlines of a hypermodern society have been emerging since the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The carefully constructed cult of youth is subverting the real relationships in society. It helps to obscure the fact that the qualities attributed to the younger generation are in fact demands coming from the outside and triggered by the logic of the functioning of companies, politics and the media. The cult of eternal youth helps to obscure the conditions in which the new generations are growing up and distracts from the real problems they face. This artificially cultivated cult relentlessly drives members of all generations to higher performance in the interest of increasing the profits of large companies and financial markets in particular.