Disconnected Youth

Investigating connection(or lack thereof) in hopes of replicating it.

Lost in Translation (2003)

The Architecture of Happiness 

Milwaukee is colored with hues of bronze, copper, and steel. Hints of industry wrap every corner—steel bars reinforce walls and roofs and chiseled stones decorate the corners of towering structures. October red creeps up the pale stones and bricks complimenting the brassy city scape. Stained and faded browns, tans, and rusts sprinkle breadcrumbs leading back through Milwaukee's 177 year history. It's easy to climb the marble and cast-iron stairs at the Railway Exchange building on Wisconsin Avenue and imagine the footsteps that similarly trotted up and down them when it was built in 1901. The 12 story building now carries small business offices, firms, and studios, but once was the  headquarters of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway Exchange in the early 1900’s—the stomping grounds for Midwest corporate executives at the time.

The pandemic disrupted public space. Working together, learning together, eating together were no longer an option, and post-pandemic, still haven't fully come back in style.

Buildings remain empty, and many of us have retreated to our own individual caves, playing pretend that we're together via screens. In reality, we turn our cameras off when we’re having a bad hair day and blame it on bad connections. The mute button masks the chaos of our households while basses click through slides about Q1 goals. This creates a pseudo-presence, where we have an unnatural control over the way we show up, stopping us from truly interacting with the space . Much of the feeling of being face to face just doesn’t translate through pixels. Our understanding of each other is confined to the boundaries of our Zoom icons, and the pieces of ourselves that weasel their way into our backgrounds. Beyond the four-sided frame are: dress shirts styled with sweatpants, coffee spilled on the desk, toes tucked into slippers, amongst other misplaced pieces of our lives. This lack of a shared environment creates a hazy, unsure energy—unable to mesh 10+ settings into one cohesive zone. 

Buildings hold us, they field our experiences and interactions that take place within them. In that they control our mood, our character, how we’re able to connect or conduct business. Whether for school, work, or leisure we are vulnerable to our environments. The way they are built and organized in structure, color, texture, and geometry are extremely impactful on how we operate in them. These structures speak to us, they invite us in, or make us feel distant; they are scattered, or unified; they are kind, or unwelcoming. 

Think about the houses on your block. Knowing nothing about the people in them, would you be friends with that house made human? The colors of the shutters, style of the walkway, shade of the grass, carvings in the front door all communicate something to you about the values and character of the people inside. 

In Alain De Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness, De Botton evaluates architectural styles and how the human psyche manifests into their forms.

“We are, for better or for worse, different people in different places—and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.” 

A lack of time in shared space, or too much time spent in poorly designed space sets the tone for how we live our lives—either devoid of true connection or stuck in boxes that don’t promote it.

You may have noticed how American cities have started to all look the same—a lot of that is due to the popular building style of the 5-over-1 building. You’ve seen them—the boxy midrise buildings that are popping up in cities everywhere, with a trendy retail destination on the ground floor. They’ve become a symbol of gentrification. Pushing out working-class people to make room for a Starbucks and overpriced studios for out-of-town young corporate professionals. These stale designs steal character from once vibrant, bustling cities and numb them with concrete slabs and beige accents.

Never mind the lives that are uprooted to accommodate corporate growth, and the diversity stolen from communities in the name of racist real-estate politics, and the green spaces plowed over—at least, there’s a Starbucks. The smooth, freshly paved roads, rows of newly planted Oak trees, and sophisticated black and white sans-serif signage that hangs over our heads all signal development. But this development is never to accommodate the lives of existing residents, but rather to appeal to a new group of residents, leaving the old with no place to go. We become so distracted by gadgets and fads that we miss the muffled cries of people as close as a few blocks away. 

 Milwaukee is known for its harsh redlining which still segregates the city’s neighborhoods today even though housing discrimination was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In 1938, Neighborhoods were ranked on a color-coded map. In order, the colors green, blue, yellow, and red represented increasing risk and decreasing desirability. The supposed best areas, green and blue were given codes A and B. These neighborhoods were the most visually and structurally appealing and composed of exclusively white residents. Yellow and red, C and D zones, were ranked low because they were seen as declining areas with unstable tenants, or had Black people living there at all. These maps played a major role in the lending and investment practices of banks during the 1930s. Banks would not lend to borrowers in predominantly Black areas, contributing to the further decline of infrastructure in these communities. Also, white borrowers were prioritized, regardless of their financial status. Diversity was seen as a sore on society, Blackness a problem to be eliminated.  The questions arise: How do we connect in places that were built in hopes of removing us? How do we live in homes that were never constructed for us? How do we love our neighbors when exclusion is written all over the blueprint for our cities?

This land that we live on is much older, and much holier than the maps drawn for it. We live on rock shaped by water, mud, and divine vision— a vision much older than the zig-zag lines scribbled by supremacists. We are all supposed to be here, so why do our cities pretend as though we are not?

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The Loneliness Epidemic & Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet

When you walk into Milwaukee Public Market you find a bulletin board. Every inch is covered in flyers, business cards, and infographics.

“Hiring now!”

“We are Open!”

“Join Today!”

Galleries, barbers, parties, support groups, churches.

Opportunities to gather seem to be at every corner, but people still struggle to connect. 

Even before the pandemic, surveys showed that upwards of 50% of Americans said they were lonely. Post-pandemic, U.S. Census Bureau surveys showed that Americans have been spending less time with friends and more time alone since before the pandemic. Recently US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murphy called attention to loneliness as a public health crisis. Loneliness harms us as individuals and as a society. Instead of an active, lively society, the isolation of loneliness leaves public spaces desolate and dreary, further causing people to disengage with them.

It's not that there's nowhere to go, it just feels like it. As a kid, the requirements of school and the activities tied to our enrollment always kept us social. There was always a locker neighbor, an open seat next to someone on the bus, a spot at the lunch bench, a pod of four desks smooshed together. These environments promoted connection by proximity paired with consistency. In adulthood, there are far more factors that can interrupt this recipe for connection, namely: time, money, and energy.  What happened to us? Is it all because of age, because of time, because of responsibility, because of money? A lot of it is because of the internet. 

Technology has made it more convenient than ever to reach people. The days of sending pigeons, writing letters, and waiting by the landline are beyond us. In a matter of seconds, we can connect with friends and strangers alike with texts, Facetimes, DMs, and no-context memes. We’re conditioned to the convenience of our new digital lifestyles, so much so, that even in recognizing the strength of more traditional forms—sitting across the table, ripping open a letter, planning a trip—we just can't say no to the instant gratification of the buzz of a notification.

I want to start my critique of today's tech world by acknowledging that we've never had this level of access to the present and past events of our universe, or the ability to foresee the future, and connect with people we do and don't know, all happening at the speed and frequency that we experience now. No one should be expected to know how to deal with this constant stream of information, we all need to hold more grace for one another as we take our first steps into our digital world, it's fully unprecedented. First, we need to widen our definition of what technology is. It's not limited to AI, automated systems, the internet, and iPhone’s. Technology is “the application of conceptual knowledge for achieving practical goals”. Language is technology; writing is technology, and in fact, in the 5th Century BCE, Greek philosopher Scorates condemned the practice of writing insisting that it would destroy people's memory and weaken their minds. This goes to show that the current generation will always in some way believe the next is on the brink of destruction. Early technologies like language and writing did not hold back society, but brought us to the advanced position we sit now, where great minds are able to create systems that can think, create, and maybe even feel for us—systems that they cannot even fully comprehend yet. So, the sentiment that many of us hold that social media and modern technology will be our downfall is somewhat valid, but not even close to the first time. The Y2K problem, the 2012 phenomenon, and most recently the COVID-19 Pandemic—humanity is highly susceptible to mass panic when big change is looming.

We’ve found a way to create community online, whether or not these online communities are comparably better or worse than starting in person may vary person to person, but what it has done is change our definition of what community is. Community doesn't have to be limited to the people you see and interact with on a day to day basis, it can be anyone, from anywhere, to any degree of closeness.

I saw a TikTok a few months ago where a girl said she was tired of seeing content from NYC and LA influencers and would much rather “see what a bitch in Wisconsin” was up to. This open call got responses, the bitches in Wisconsin showed up and showcased their lives for people to interact with. This is only one small example of how social media has created a landscape where people can easily find and be found. It's one of the only places most people will truly get a small taste of what the vastness of this world is like. 

The availability and easy access to what people are looking for has naturally led to fewer people rolling the dice on what public spaces could offer them. Sure you could meet the love of your life in the aisle of the library in between a stack of books, or in line at the cafe, but you could also, and with more guarantee, sign up for an account on a dating app, or slide into the DMs of someone you are already interested in.  Social media allows us to specifically target what we're looking for, in friends, shopping, information, skills, and anything else. We are less victims of social media and technology, but rather of convenience.

We live in a hyper-curated world, and our freedom to express has not eliminated the boxes we once felt like society forced us in, but created millions of small pockets for people to fall into, creating an echo chamber where the outside noise can't get in. Similarly, we neglect the spaces that used to be our only source of community. And when we do use them, say a coffee house or a concert venue, we are far more guarded than ever being in a place where the facts of a stranger are not laid out easily for us to pick apart like they are on an Instagram profile page. Wherever possible we try to categorize what seems familiar based on the online frames we’ve created.

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Signs of Life

My elementary school's playground was situated in the school's parking lot. Scattered between the yellow grid were basketball hoops, fading four square boxes and hopscotches. After a big snowfall, our school custodian, Mr. Paul would plow all the snow in the lot into one large giant mound in the back half of the parking lot up against the fence. We affectionately called this pile,“The Snow Hill”. It wasn’t just a hill of snow, it was the world we created with the hill as our landscape. Retrieving and delivering precious ice crystals, really just mounds of carved ice, creating forts and caverns to hide them in, we had roles and responsibilities—the snow hill was an ecosystem. Once the bell signaling the end of our 45 minute recess rang, we would return to our classrooms, kick off our soaked snow pants and boots and eagerly wait to revisit our politics the next day. We took a very real thing, a natural thing kneaded with imagination, and it became a cause for us to rally over.

I think this is how we keep our cities alive. 

Nature + imagination.

Learning to coexist with nature rather than tearing it down and replacing it with concrete. Intentionality designing public spaces to foster togetherness—integrating art, functionality, warmth, and closeness.

In our capitalist world, it's easy to forget there are pieces of life that aren't governed by or centered around labor. People go to school in hopes of securing a job. And then have to work their way up corporate ladders in hopes of securing jobs that will gradually permit them to have more “free” time, and more capital, which they will feed back into the machine, to ease their stress. Without a degree, many are left to work minimum wage jobs that require them to perform dehumanizing tasks, in hopes of again leveling up to a less dehumanizing role and a few extra dollars. 

The US labels young people aged 14-24 who are homeless, in foster care, involved in the justice system, or are neither employed nor enrolled in an educational institution as “disconnected youth.” According to statistics from the US Department of Agriculture, 17% or 6.7 million youth are disconnected. Why is it that people not contributing to the economy are labeled disconnected? Are people not more than their ownership and efforts to secure labor? In this view, markets are at the center of our lives and our proximity to them our value in society. This bleeds into where we feel “allowed” to make community. I mentioned earlier the education systems key role in many of our earliest connections, after that, it tends to be work. As a recent graduate, in the months leading up to the end of my college career, a main topic amongst me and my friends was about our fears surrounding adult friendships. Where to find them, how to nurture our existing relationships under the stress of work and survival. Our personal lives are so driven by markets that we can’t even fathom how to form connections outside of them.

This labor-centered mindset where life is sorted into categories or working and time not working we lose the value of the things that life is really about:

Quality time

The natural world

Taking care of ourselves and our community 

Data would suggest that God is missing from our culture—less people, mostly young people, than ever go to church or identify with organized religion. But God hasn’t gone anywhere, He still dwells here on Earth in each human being and every living thing. It's our blind eyes and skewed perspectives that stop us from experiencing God in the day-to-day. We put our flesh, its insatiable wants, needs, and manipulated reality, before our spirit.

My brother always says he’s a spiritual being having a human experience. This is exactly it, what makes a human is the spirit inside them, where body, mind, and soul meet—our eternal essence. We can’t neglect feeding our spirits by instead filling the void with promotions, luxury cars, designer goods, and 5-over-1 buildings. We were made for so much more.