We were having dinner with some friends a few weeks ago, and after a long period of joking, bantering conversation, we got a little more serious. We were thinking about why it feels so difficult—especially for young people—to do things these days. The sense of boredom, the addiction and overdose crisis, the selectivity of universities and jobs, the red tape around starting a business. Why is our country so rich, and yet it seems like it hasn’t bought us a sense of ease or satisfaction? Maybe even the opposite?

And one of our friends offered an answer: “saturation.” “What do you mean?” one of us said. I mean, he explained, decades ago, a lot fewer people had a college degree. The country was more empty—a little less fully settled. So much that is now done had not been done yet—maybe the horizons of our minds were bigger, and there was more room, physically and mentally, to strike out, to just up and do something, to give it a go.

Maybe it isn’t quite possible to recapture that moment simply by, say, deregulating and slashing red tape. Maybe our country is something like mature or grown up in a collective sense, and these social problems and discontents—this malaise, you might say—is inherent in a highly developed country reaching a sort of midlife crisis.

I think I’m elaborating on what our friend probably meant, but I think that’s the right direction.

It makes me think of a book review I wrote years ago. I wrote this, reviewing a book on the history of fast food. It’s the Colonel Sanders bit in particular—a long series of jobs and gigs and self-started businesses, beginning with lying about his age to join the Army, including a riverboat, etc. etc.—that really sticks in my memory:

Reading about Sanders and his string of odd jobs on boats and trains and his many ups and downs as he slowly perfected his iconic chicken recipe, one almost feels that it took place in a different country. That whole milieu—a freewheeling, chaotic, entrepreneurial era made possible by the sting of poverty and the absence of a social safety net—is a figment of a vanished economic and cultural era. Chandler describes Sanders’ career as tracing “America’s adolescence.” Perhaps countries, like people, go through phases of life, and one consequence of America growing up is that we no longer tolerate the chaos and lack of regulation that made these classic American stories possible. The Colonel’s jerry-rigged pressure cooker wouldn’t last long during a modern restaurant inspection, and perhaps that is for the better. (The tension between affluence and lively, productive chaos has also been noted by urban engineer Charles Marohn.)

There was another major development in midcentury America that pummeled hard work and business sense: the Interstate Highway System, which wiped out many scrappy, independent roadside businesses along the old state and U.S. highways. The post-Interstate motel and restaurant chains were not the first generation of auto-oriented businesses but at least the second, and from this point on those industries would become increasingly concentrated and corporatized. The first publicly traded fast-food companies emerged in the mid-1960s, right in tandem with the construction of the Interstates. The distinction between franchises and chains has increasingly become a distinction without a difference, allowing corporations to portray themselves as an incubator for entrepreneurs while not really being so.

It just doesn’t feel like you can do that today. It feels like we’ve grown the number of rungs on the ladder—added higher rungs—but at the same time, sawed off the ones at the bottom. That we’ve become so successful we’ve forgotten the process that actually goes into that outcome. That we’re so affluent we think we can buy the right to shortcut the work that got us here...