Welcome back to today's deep dive. Today, we're
unpacking a, well, a massive stack of historical
research surrounding a group of people you have
definitely heard of. Oh, absolutely. But you
likely misunderstand them. We are talking about
the lost generation. Yeah, it's a huge topic.
It is. And our mission here isn't just to skim
the surface or rely on the usual cliche. Not
just the jazz and the literature. Exactly. We
want to map out the entire chaotic life cycle
of this cohort. we're pulling from a incredibly
detailed Wikipedia article covering the demographics,
the history, and the massive cultural impact
of the very first generation to actually come
of age in the 20th century. It's a crucial demographic
to explore, you know. The world they built, mostly
out of sheer necessity and survival, is the foundational
framework of the world you are still navigating
today. Yeah. But to understand them, we have
to establish exactly who we are talking about.
Demographically skipping, this cohort consists
of people born roughly between the years 1883
and 1900. So these are people who spent their
formative childhood years entirely in the late
19th century. And then they just collided headfirst
into the 20th century, just as they were hitting
young adulthood in the 1900s and 1910s. OK, let's
unpack this. Sure. Where does that specific term
actually come from? Because Lost Generation sounds
incredibly poetic, but it also carried this heavy,
tragic weight. Did they actually see themselves
as lost or was this a label imposed on them?
It was very much imposed and I mean the origin
is surprisingly mundane. Really? Yeah. The phrase
is widely credited to the American writer Gertrude
Stein and it actually started with a broken car.
Wait, broken car? Yep. Stein was at a French
garage and the young mechanic working on her
vehicle just wasn't fixing it fast enough for
her liking. Oh, wow. And the garage owner became
intensely frustrated and started berating the
young man. He was shouting that all of these
young war veterans were a generation per due,
a lost generation. Wow. He felt they lacked focus,
they lacked discipline. It's just fascinating
that a mechanic's frustrated rant became the
defining label for literally millions of people.
But Stein takes that phrase and runs with it,
right? She does. She later repeated the story
to a young Ernest Hemingway, basically pointing
a finger at him and his peers. Like, this is
what you are? Exactly. Saying, that is what you
are. That's what you all are, all of you young
people who served in the war. You are a lost
generation. And then Hemingway just catapulted
it. Right. He catapulted the phrase into the
global lexicon by using it as an epigraph for
his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. Though if
we look closely at the text regarding Hemingway's
own reflections, he pushed back against that
label quite a bit later in life. He did. He acknowledged
that his generation was deeply battered, sure,
but he completely rejected the idea that they
were entirely lost. He famously asked who was
calling who a lost generation. Yeah. He felt
there was a profound resilience there that the
older generation just completely ignored. And
he was right to point that out. To truly grasp
that resilience and, you know, why they were
so battered in the first place, we really have
to look at the world that formed them. Right.
Their childhood. Let's set the scene of their
upbringing in the 1880s and 1890s. When you picture
this era... You have to strip away that sepia
-toned romantic nostalgia we all have. Oh, totally.
This was a time defined by incredibly rigid conservative
social values. You had massive multi -generational
households. It was completely standard for three
generations to share a single, often very cramped
home. Which meant children were under constant
strict surveillance. Always. Numerous elders
watching your every move. And the concept of
child rearing was just vastly different. Physically
beating children for minor infractions wasn't
viewed as abusive. Not at all. It was actively
championed. It was seen as a responsible caregiver's
basic duty to mold a civilized adult. And stepping
outside those strict households, the physical
environment they were navigating was this bizarre
transitional mix of incredible industrial progress
and daily existential peril. Yeah, progress and
peril. For instance, you have massive modern
sewer systems finally being excavated. in major
cities. Right, to halt the spread of waterborne
disease like cholera, society was just beginning
to grasp the science of hygiene. Exactly. But
simultaneously, the adoption of electricity in
the home was incredibly slow. So during the formative
years of this entire generation, they are watching
modern infrastructure being built outside. But
reading and eating by the flickering light of
gas lamps and candles inside. It's such a stark
contrast. And the health statistics of that era
from the source material, they're just staggering.
Oh, infant mortality was a brutal everyday reality.
In the United States in the year 1900 one in
ten babies died before reaching their first birthday
and what's deeply sobering about that statistic
is that Historically speaking, it represented
a massive triumph. Which sounds crazy to us.
It does. But just a century earlier, in 1800,
early childhood mortality was closer to one in
three. So this cohort was surviving at better
rates than any generation before them, but death
was still an ever -present specter in their childhood
homes. But alongside that hardship, they experienced
a massive leap forward in education. Now, the
methodology was incredibly rigid. Road memorization
was absolute king. Yeah, just standing at a desk
and repeating facts. over and over until they
were permanently drilled into your brain. But
as a societal mechanism, it was incredibly effective
for basic illiteracy. By 1900, illiteracy had
plummeted drastically. It was under 11 % in the
US, around 3 % in Britain, and an astonishing
1 % in Germany. But we should probably clarify
the limits of that education. While elementary
schooling and basic literacy were becoming universally
accessible, secondary school was still a massive
luxury. Reserved mostly for the elite. Exactly.
Only 11 % of American teenagers actually attended
high school at the turn of the century. In Britain,
working class kids were legally leaving school
at 12 or 13. To enter the factories or the mines.
Right. So they could read the newspaper, but
they were thrust into adult labor incredibly
early. Yet, paradoxically, they were also the
first kids to really experience childhood as
a distinct cater -to phase of life. What's fascinating
here is that this was the very first generation
to experience a mass -produced, commodified childhood.
Prior to the 1890s, toys were artisanal, fragile,
and exclusively for the wealthy. But industrial
mass production changed the entire paradigm.
In 1893, the British company William Britten
invented hollow cast metal toy soldiers. Making
them cheap, durable, and widely available. Exactly.
The early 1900s brings the debut of the teddy
bear. You have street vendors in major cities
selling tin -plated penny toys for just a single
coin. Making them actually accessible to working
-class children. And they actually had physical
spaces built specifically for play. Oh, the parks?
Yes, this is the era where rapidly expanding
industrial towns suddenly started carving out
public parks. These were deliberately designed
to give people trapped in crowded, smog -filled
cities some green space. Allowing kids from varying
backgrounds to actually interact and play together,
completely outside the the watchful eyes of that
three generation household. So you have this
cohort growing up in a world that is rapidly
becoming more literate, more consumer focused,
and more media saturated. You're reading mass
circulation magazines, playing with factory made
toys. They are even witnessing the debut of silent
moving pictures. They were entirely primed for
an optimistic modern future driven by technological
miracles. But here's where it gets really interesting.
Because all of that industrial progress. The
factories that stamped out their penny toys the
engines that powered their expanding cities That
was all about to be redirected into a machine
built entirely for destruction Yeah, they hit
their young adulthood and they walked straight
into the meat grinder World War one It is the
absolute defining event of their lifespan, and
the sheer mathematical scale of the conflict
is almost impossible to fully comprehend. It
really is. Globally, more than 70 million people
were mobilized into military service. 70 million.
Eight and a half million soldiers were killed.
21 million were physically wounded, many with
permanent disfiguring injuries, and another two
million died simply from disease in the camps
and trenches. And the mobilization rates in Europe
specifically are staggering. Eighty -one percent
of aged men in France and Germany served. Think
about what that does to a society. Right, when
over four -fifths of an entire demographic of
young men is suddenly pulled from their homes
and fed into trench warfare. It was a societal
mobilization unlike anything in human history.
Britain operated a bit differently at first,
relying strictly on volunteers until conscription
became necessary in 1916. But even with that
delay... Five million British men served out
of a total population of just 46 million. And
we have to look globally, too. The European powers
drafted millions of men from their colonial empires
across India, Africa, and beyond. This wasn't
just a European tragedy. It was a global extraction
of youth. And the psychological dissonance they
experienced must have been completely shattering.
Think about how they were raised. They were raised
on strict Victorian ideals of honor, cavalry
charges, and heroism. Right. They were taught
that war was a noble path to redemption and a
true test of a man's greatness. They marched
off in pristine uniforms, expecting glory. And
instead they were met with endless industrialized
slaughter. poison gas, relentless artillery barrages,
machine guns, and the muddy, disease -ridden
horror of the trenches. Years of agonizing pain
that seemed to yield zero strategic progress.
It completely shattered their foundational worldview,
creating a profound generational disillusionment.
And that disillusionment wasn't confined to the
battlefields. The women of this cohort saw their
realities forcibly and radically reshaped overnight.
Absolutely. With the men gone, women were pushed
into heavy industry to keep the war machine running.
They were suddenly manufacturing high -explosive
munitions, building ships, engaging in intense
manual labor. While thousands of others volunteered
as frontline nurses or managed massive refugee
crises. But alongside that sudden necessary independence
came an immense wave of tragedy. The sheer volume
of war widows changed the democratic graphic
makeup of entire nations. You had millions of
women left to raise children entirely alone,
heavily reliant on meager government pensions.
And those pensions, according to the research,
were essentially tools of state control. Yeah,
that part is so dark. A widow's financial survival
came with heavy moral strings attached. The authorities
could literally revoke a woman's pension if she
engaged in what the government deemed frowned
upon behavior. Precisely. If they were seen with
another man or if they remarried, their financial
lifeline was cut. The grief, compounded by intense
financial pressure, drove many into severe depression.
Furthermore, the catastrophic loss of young men
meant that millions of single women simply could
not marry. The traditional Victorian path of
finding a husband and keeping a home was no longer
a mathematical possibility. This demographic
reality essentially forced an acceleration of
women seeking permanent careers and greater societal
independence. And just as they're processing
the end of this apocalyptic war, they get hit
with a devastating double whammy. The Spanish
Flu. The late 1910s brings the Spanish Flu pandemic.
And the cruelest evolutionary twist of this specific
virus was its target demographic. It didn't primarily
kill the elderly or the immunocompromised children?
No. It triggered an overreaction in strong immune
systems, meaning it specifically targeted and
killed otherwise healthy young adults. The exact
same demographic that had miraculously survived
the trenches was now suffocating in hospital
beds. When you look at the sequence of events,
it's almost unbelievable. You take a generation
raised with strict conservative Victorian rules.
You feed them into a mechanized global war that
destroys their belief in human progress. You
hit them with a deadly targeted pandemic. How
does a collective psyche respond to that level
of compounded unimaginable trauma? They rebel
utterly and completely. That trauma response
leads directly to the cultural explosion of the
Roaring Twenties. They survived the unimaginable,
so they collectively decided that the old rules,
the rules of the generations that sent them to
die simply didn't apply anymore. You see, this
vividly embodied in the rise of the Flapper,
this wasn't just a fashion trend. It was a visceral
physical rebellion against the restrictive norms
of their mothers and grandmothers. They violently
rejected the Victorian silhouette. They chopped
off their hair into short bobs. They wore significantly
shorter dresses that allowed them to move and
dance. They applied heavy, visible makeup, which
just a decade prior had been strictly associated
with sex work or the lower classes. They embraced
a radical new code of behavior defined by reckless
partying, public smoking, and overt sexuality.
They were operating on pure existential dread
disguised as a party. Exactly. The mentality
was we could die tomorrow. We literally watched
millions of our peers die yesterday, so we are
going to wring every drop of life out of today.
And this sentiment birthed some of the most enduring
literature of the 20th century. You have the
famous American expatriate writers congregating
in Paris. You have Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
John Just Pasos. The central themes of their
work perfectly capture the hollow core of this
era. Their novels focus heavily on decadence
and the incredibly frivolous, almost frantic
lifestyle of the wealthy. But underneath the
jazz and the endless flowing champagne, there
is a profound aching emptiness. A recurring motif
is the total death of the American dream or the
realization that traditional ideals of success
are entirely morally bankrupt. You see that so
crystal clear in Fitzgerald's great Gatsby. The
narrator, Nick Carraway, gets swept up in these
lavish, incredible parties. But by the end of
the summer, the illusion completely shatters.
He looks around and realizes the absolute moral
corruption and carelessness of the people around
him. It's all a glittering facade over a rotting
core. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
this literary movement perfectly mirrored the
spirit of the war survivors. That initial quote
from Gertrude Stein defining them as disoriented,
wandering, directionless. That is exactly the
psychological profile of the protagonists in
1920s literature. They are wandering through
a fractured post -war world desperately trying
to find meaning where all the old systems of
meaning have been obliterated. But a society
running on pure adrenaline and credit can't sustain
itself forever. Definitely not. The wild party
of the 1920s came to a brutal screeching halt.
In 1929, the stock market crashes, initiating
the Great Depression. So this generation, now
entering their midlife, suddenly faces a catastrophic
global economic collapse. The stability they
thought they had finally achieved just evaporates.
Unemployment skyrockets, global economic output
collapses, and bread lines become a common sight.
And during this deeply unstable, desperate decade
of the 1930s, a new technology completely revolutionizes
how information and culture are consumed. The
mass market radio. By the end of the 1930s, the
vast majority of Western households had a radio
in their living room. It was an incredible source
of comfort, bringing daily soap operas, live
sports, and real -time news directly into the
home. But dangerously. It also created a direct,
intimate channel for autocratic regimes to broadcast
political propaganda straight to a desperate,
economically ruined populace. And the geopolitical
shifts happening around them were truly seismic.
Empires that had dominated for centuries were
actively dissolving. The United States was cementing
its rise as a global superpower. The Soviet Union
had officially formed out of the bloody Russian
Revolution, and fascism was taking deep, terrifying
root in places like Germany and Italy. It's a
bizarre historical reality that this single demographic
cohort produced world -altering figures across
the entire political spectrum. Yeah, the list
is wild. You have leaders like Harry S. Truman
and Dwight D. Eisenhower. But from this exact
same generation, you also get Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Winston Churchill, and
Mahatma Gandhi. The historical consensus points
to the heavy lingering resentment over the World
War One peace settlements as the primary fuel
that allowed totalitarian dictatorships to successfully
exploit economic anxiety and take root in the
1930s. Which is reporting what the sources say
here impartially conveying how that resentment
fed into those fascist movements. It's purely
historical analysis of cause and effect. Right.
It was a powder keg built on the unresolved trauma
of the First World War and the desperation of
the Depression. leads to a truly bitter devastating
irony for the lost generation. This was the cohort
that bled in the trenches for the war to end
all wars. They suffered through unimaginable
horrors specifically so that such a conflict
would never happen again. And yet in their midlife.
As World War II erupts in 1939, they find themselves
standing on train platforms, having to watch
their own sons march off to a second, even more
destructive, global battlefield. The psychological
burden of that is almost impossible to fathom,
knowing exactly what your child is about to endure.
The artillery, the fear, the death. Because you
still carry the physical and mental scars from
just 20 years prior. Exactly. And while their
sons were on the front lines, the lost generation
participation in World War II was largely relegated
to civil defense and maintaining the home front.
Older men who had fought in the first war were
heavily recruited to defend their local towns.
In Germany, older men who weren't already in
the regular military were obliged to join the
Volkssturm. Which was essentially a last -ditch
people's militia mobilized in the final desperate
months of the war. Right. And in Britain, they
volunteered for the Home Guard. They became the
final line of resistance, scanning the skies
for bombers and preparing to defend their streets
while the younger generation fought abroad. After
enduring all of that, the strict Victorian childhoods,
the industrialized slaughter of WWI, the frantic
rebellion of the 20s, the crushing poverty of
the Great Depression, and then the heartbreak
of World War II, this generation finally reaches
their twilight years. In the West, the survivors
largely hit retirement age in the 1950s and 1960s.
And what's incredibly poignant to me is that
even then, several decades in another World War
later, their World War I service was still viewed
as the absolute, immutable, defining moment of
their lives. Yeah, you see it in the records.
When their retirement notices were published
or their obituaries were printed in local papers,
their service in the trenches of the First World
War was almost always the most prominently featured
detail. When we look at their longevity, the
average life expectancy in the developed world
during their retirement years hovered around
70 years old. But some remarkably resilient members
of this cohort lived astonishingly long, surviving
deep into the 21st century. It's hard to believe.
A notable example is Nabi Tajima of Japan. She
was the last known surviving person verified
to have been born in the 19th century, making
her the very last known living member of the
lost generation. And she passed away in 2018,
at the incredible age of 117. 2018, just think
about the arc of a life that begins with horse
-drawn carriages and reading by gaslight, and
ends in the era of smartphones, global internet,
and artificial intelligence. What does this all
mean for you listening today? Why should you
care about the lost generation beyond viewing
them as characters in history textbook? It's
a great question. I think it's because this specific
cohort absorbed more collective shockwaves than
almost any other group in modern human history.
They were the bridge. They really were. They
took the hits of rapid industrialization, they
processed the collective trauma of modern warfare,
and through their radical art, their shifting
politics, and their sheer stubborn survival,
they completely forged the modern world we live
in today. This raises an important question,
something for you to mull over after we wrap
up today. The origin of their name and the way
they are often discussed focuses heavily on their
disoriented wandering post -war spirit. Right.
The very label lost generation implies a tragedy,
a group of people who simply fell off the designated
path. But what if being lost isn't a tragic endpoint
at all? That's interesting. What if violently
losing the rigid conservative map of the 19th
century was the absolute prerequisite for discovering
everything that came next? Like they had to lose
it to find the new one. Exactly. Without having
their worldview shattered, perhaps we don't get
the revolutionary breakthroughs in modern art.
The massive leaps in women's independence or
the completely new global structures that defined
the 20th century. Yeah. when an entire generation
feels completely lost, they are actually just
taking the very first terrifying steps toward
drawing a brand new map for the rest of us. A
brand new map forged from the ashes. I absolutely
love that perspective. Thank you so much for
joining us on this deep dive into the resilient,
chaotic, and profoundly impactful lives of the
lost generation. Keep questioning the maps you've
been handed, keep exploring the history that
shapes you, and we will catch you on the next
deep dive.