Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System Paperback – August 12, 1962

For those who criticize this book for being dated - it was first published in 1960. For its time it was a groundbreaking and important book covering the issues of youth. This is an important book for understanding the 1960s and early 1970s and the issues that drove that generation. Many of the problems Goodman writes about have never adequately been addressed and still gnaw at us today. Any author who can maintain his relevance in terms of coming to terms with his own time and still have some relevance half a century later, I think, has done an outstanding job.

This teenager user manual is still relevant to help them navigate teenagerhood in our insane culture, more absurd than ever.

Great old book!

Good book

Excellent product and seller. Highly recommended.

never finished it.

Oddly enough, I have been telling people for years how much I loved the ideas I encountered in this book at college. When I reread it now, I simply can't believe I wasn't screaming about the author's attitude towards women. It is definitely a time capsule experience of an unawakened sensibility.

I read Growing Up Absurd in 1967, a few months after I got out of the army, having served my two years as an active duty draftee. I was working as a shipper-dispatcher in a large bakery: I unloaded baked goods from large trucks and distributed them among much smaller trucks for delivery to homes and stores. At the time, that kind of job paid enough to raise a family in which the other spouse worked at her discretion. Working class had not yet devolved into working poor. I drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and ate chocolate eclairs with the truck drivers. The work got done, but there were no time-and-motion study industrial engineers gauging my efficiency. The job was not the sort that you took home. As an occupational bridge between the army and a state university, I thought it was all pretty good. The job made a simple but solid sort of sense, It seemed useful. After reading Paul Goodman's book, I began to wonder why I was aspiring to anything of higher status and income, the kind of work that demanded one or more university degrees.

In retrospect, however, it's good that I was determined to be upwardly mobile. The kind of job I had in 1967 may or may not still exist, but it certainly does not pay the bills which accumulate when raising a family. Working class and working poor have, indeed, become coterminous. This is not something that Goodman foresaw, but in the '60's neither did anyone else except an occasional Marxist who didn't think Keynesian fiscal policy would work well forever.

Even in the '60's, however, and with regard to the hardy and conventional working class, Goodman raised pertinent, and entirely new to me, questions such as "Why would anyone find satisfaction in working as a mechanic repairing trucks that delivered the New York Times?" I was still sufficiently naive that I thought the New York Times was a class act, disseminating truth and, occasionally, wisdom; keeping us free by keeping us informed. I couldn't imagine anything better than the interesting and manly work of a skilled mechanic laboring to assure that all the news fit to print was widely disseminated.

Goodman, however, introduced me to the banality of the world that the times maintained, and the crass materialism that provided rewards for continued, uncomplaining participation. Yes, Goodman respected what Veblen called the instinct of workmanship, but he also saw that it had been perverted to serve meaningless ends and to maintain the hegemony of the emptiness of expensive trinkets and fatuous titles. We lived in a comparatively affluent world, but one in which work was being degraded, generating alienation and normlessness, fostering a drab and desolate existence in which most of us learned that what we did paid the bills but otherwise was not worth doing.

Five decades later, Goodman's analysis is even more accurate and compelling. The world of work is shot through with even greater doses of meaninglessness. To add injury to injury, most "jobs of work" don't even pay the bills. Somehow we've been persuaded that the flood of women into the labor force to do the same grunt work as men, and typically at a much lower level of compensation, has been a giant step toward sexual equality.

The longshoreman, autodidact, and author Eric Hoffer, writing during the same era as Goodman, was fond of extolling the virtues of work as an end in itself. He described the cargo he helped move as "crap," but stil found fulfillment in work.

Goodman was a good deal more critical. He characterized the work that Hoffer valued as absurd. Goodman was right then, and he's even more on target now. Though some of the details, lingo, and images in Growing Up Absurd are dated, the book remains well worth reading. I'm retiring this year, and, looking back, with the possible exception of the time I spent in the bakery, the work I have done -- and there has been a lot of it -- has been absurd. It paid the bills, but at what cost? No surprise to Goodman that the arc of a working life would be replete with questions such as this.