Degeneracy is a Symptom - Henry Fudge
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Degeneracy is a Symptom<br>On Conspicuous Despair, the Ponzi stage of being alive, and why your grandparents are wrong about you.
Henry Fudge<br>May 19, 2026
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The Inventory
A young woman in Manchester pays her rent through OnlyFans. She is twenty-four, has a 2:1 in English from a respectable university, and earns more in a quiet month than her father did as a deputy headmaster. She finds the work tedious rather than traumatic, which is, in its own way, the worst part.<br>A young man in Bolton has not left his bedroom, except for cigarettes and the occasional GP appointment, in fourteen months. He plays a game on his phone in which he opens digital boxes that may or may not contain rare digital cards. He spent £340 on this game last month. He does not consider himself a gambler.<br>A thirty-one-year-old software engineer in Zürich, on a salary that would have bought his parents a four-bedroom house, lives in a shared flat with two strangers and takes a small amount of cocaine on Friday evenings. He is saving, in theory, for a deposit. He has been saving, in theory, for a deposit for eight years. The deposit required has, over the same period, risen faster than his savings.<br>A woman in Tokyo, thirty-seven, single, working as a department-store cosmetics consultant, has chosen (the word is doing some work here) not to marry and not to have children. She lives with her mother. Her mother lives with her mother. None of the three women own the flat they share.<br>A man in Shenzhen has decided to lie down. Tang ping, they call it. He works the minimum hours required to feed himself, refuses promotions, refuses to date, refuses to acquire anything. The state has identified him, and the several million who think as he does, as a threat to social harmony. He has identified the state as a threat to his time.<br>A teenager in Ohio has lost $11,000 on sports betting in eight months. He is nineteen. He has not yet lost more than this because he has not yet had more than this. He will, soon enough, have more, and then he will lose more. He believes, with the unfalsifiable conviction of the truly devout, that his system is almost working.<br>You have noticed these people. Everyone has noticed these people. They are the texture of contemporary life. They have, collectively, become the favourite subject of a particular kind of newspaper column, the kind that asks, in a tone of bewildered sorrow, or studied outrage, or sometimes both at once: what has happened to us?<br>The answer, dear reader, is mathematics.
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A Brief Defence of the Word “Degeneracy”
I am going to use the word “degeneracy” throughout this essay, and I should explain why, because the word has a history, most of it unflattering and some of it murderous, and a reasonable person might prefer I use something else.<br>I am using it because it is the word the other side uses. It is the word your aunt uses when she shares the Telegraph column on Facebook. It is the word the silver-haired commentator uses on GB News between segments on the cost of fuel and the wickedness of cyclists. It is the word that floats, untethered to any particular speaker, around every dinner party at which someone over fifty-five surveys the world and finds it wanting.<br>The word is doing real work in our culture. It is the word that links, under a single moral category, every behaviour I described in the inventory above. The OnlyFans worker, the gacha addict, the cocaine-fuelled software engineer, the celibate office worker, the lying-flat refusenik, the teenage gambler. The word groups them. The word explains them. The word implicitly assigns them blame, and implicitly absolves the speaker of the obligation to look any further.<br>The word is wrong. But it is not stupid. It is grasping at a real pattern. Something is happening, something is unmistakably happening, and a person who has lived long enough to remember the world before the something can be forgiven for reaching for a word, any word, to name it.<br>My argument is that they have the pattern right and the cause wrong. My argument is that the behaviours they group together as “degeneracy” are indeed linked, and indeed share a common cause, and the common cause is not, as they suppose, a moral failure of the young, or the death of God, or the rise of TikTok, or the decline of marriage, or the welfare state, or the schools, or feminism, or the internet, or any of the other usual culprits.<br>The common cause is that the productive game stopped paying, and the people in question have correctly noticed.
This essay is about why. It is also, secondarily, about why the people who are most appalled by the behaviour are also, structurally, the people who caused it, and why their appalled-ness is itself a load-bearing element of the system that produced what appals them.<br>I am calling the phenomenon Conspicuous Despair, with apologies to Thorstein Veblen, who is not in a position to...