Adolescents today have it harder than our ancestors of yore.
In terms of the relative physical safety of humanity, we're living in some of the best times in history. The vast majority of humans now do not have to worry about daily life threats. We no longer live in the woods, wondering where clean water and food is going to come from. We no longer have to worry about astronomical infant mortality rates and our families dying regularly of diseases we can treat simply today. Hell, globally we have four times the number of obese and overweight people than those who are underweight.1
Modern medicine and living conditions are truly a marvel.
Where the current and upcoming generations have it harder than our ancestors lay in the evolving afflictions of the mind.
We as a society have failed at least the last three generations. What we’ve failed to do is to adapt to the needs of modern human beings while ignoring important guideposts of the past. We’ve thrust upon people huge responsibilities to ever increasingly younger children. We're still providing education largely in the formats of the previous two centuries while crushing them with the expectations and technology of the twenty-first century. We’ve failed to collectively analyze and change the way we're doing things, and when we have implemented changes, they've been slow to materialize and impotent to stop the free fall of declining mental health.
Let's specifically look at the last few decades of American society. What we've done is decry how we've been lagging behind other countries in the STEM fields, experienced more and more mass shootings, witnessed grand cultural stagnation, fought a war on drugs (but not the drug companies); the list goes on. While these were and still are true concerns, these are merely symptoms rather than the underlying causes of a decaying nation.
Even worse, some implementation of changes have taken us farther from the intended path; promoting STEM fields instead pushed people too far academically and forced many students into professions and existential crises they never wanted. Running active shooter drills in schools did nothing to stop them and only served to scare generations of children by merely existing, and fighting a war on drugs cost us billions of dollars with the only prize being more overdoses and a jam-packed prison system of non-violent offenders.
Instead of figuring out the actual root causes of what was going on, what we did instead was force upon younger and younger people existential-dread-inducing questions such as "what do you want to do for the rest of your life” and “how do we stop humanity from catastrophe” while they’re still figuring out finger-painting.
Combine these questions with mountains of homework, exams, and eternal threats of “you’ll amount to nothing if you don’t go to college”, all while being raised in terminally online echo chambers, and we’ve created a perfect storm of apathy and disengagement with the world as it stands today.
What do you imagine might happen when you teach generations of kids to essentially abandon their childhoods and try to achieve things even fully developed adults can barely do? Not only have we thrust these existential questions upon children, but we also haven’t taught them how to answer them. We haven’t taught them values to stand on and how to explore their unique personalities. And when most people predictably fail these Sisyphean tasks by the time they’re eighteen years old, we wonder “what’s wrong with our children?!”, throw anti-depressants at them, and blame everything but ourselves.
Remember, the vast majority of human history was occupied by thoughts of imminent survival and not these existential questions. It wasn’t that long ago that if your parents were farmers, you were likely going to be a farmer too just like the previous ten generations of your family. And most people wouldn’t have thought twice about it. We all tended to live in small groups of people, getting to know each other intimately, and building communities. You’d date and marry someone you met in your circle or by the recommendations of people who actually knew the both of you. This isn’t an essay opining the days of old; rather this is to show how new modern concepts like chasing your dreams are when applied to the public at large. In ancient times, these questions were usually posited and pursued by royalty who enjoyed similar excesses of the present-day West.
What we’re doing today is categorically unprecedented by evolutionary standards in how quickly society has changed in the last hundred-and-fifty years. These changes are difficult and take an enormous amount of time to take hold and make room for. We’re going at this via trial and error and we’re seeing the immense growing pains of our progress. What’s a hundred-and-fifty years in the face of of hundreds of thousands of years of human development?2
Then, throw in existential crisis after existential crisis, with a dash of having every piece of information available to us all the time anywhere, and we have a breeding ground for more people than ever deciding it isn’t worth pursuing the present and future. These can be seen in teens and young adults increasingly opting out of life through suicidal ideation, skyrocketing mental illness rates, not bringing kids into the world, and overall not mentally maturing as quickly as previous generations.
And who can blame them?
Why participate in a society that continually fails you, blames you for the mess that’s being made, and then does everything in its power to prevent you from making needed changes?
These existential concerns remind me of what Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl shares in his book Man's Search for Meaning (1946)3. In this, he discusses what he calls the existential vacuum. He describes this as “…the feeling of total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives [young people during this time]. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves...” Viktor takes this even further, emphasis mine in bold:
At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development in as much as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing.
No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
…
The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress. And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time.
…
Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them (p. 99-100).
Sound familiar?
As humankind becomes more automated in their labor and safety requirements, people's existential needs are going to become even greater parts of the equation in the pursuit for happiness. We’re so physically safe as a species that we now have time to talk about intersections of the human condition that went undreamt of even fifty years ago. As humans acquire more free time and become increasingly isolated through technology (which has ironically also increased stress along with boredom), we haven’t figured out what to do with it all, especially the developmentally vulnerable population of adolescents.
And if you’re sitting there saying “that’s bullshit, I don’t have free time anymore!”, I encourage you to look at your average screen time per day on your phone.
Go on, I’ll wait.
See what I mean? And this is just your phone screen time. Humans are averaging almost 6.5 hours a day on the internet, with time spent on social media accounting for about 2.5 hours of the total. Some far outpace this, and the numbers are worse for adolescents. While certainly some of this time is healthy and helpful, such as communicating with loved ones, much needed entertainment, and for job requirements, it can also be easily dominated by content consumption that hijacks our dopamine and serotonin receptors rather than for any meaningful production of the mind.
The fear of boredom, ever increasing demands on our time to alleviate that boredom from our friendly neighborhood corporations, exponential information density in our communications, and existential crises with no obvious (or quick) solutions dominate the modern landscape. Worse, people don’t even realize they have far more time than they think to build fully authentic lives and emotionally process the world around them. When you can build an authentic life and emotionally process the world, then you are better able to do the most important thing: take action.4
This is an incredibly nuanced concern that many countries around the world are facing and with different causes and effects. A good start in turning this around is recognizing that as the goal posts continue to move for humanity's development, we must be increasingly more agile in changing to modern developmental needs. As society moves up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, what we're moving towards is more self-actualization rather than worrying about the same things we used to even just thirty years ago5.
Communities and governments around the world must wake up to the reality of modern society so far; technology is far outpacing our ability to empirically understand its effects on humanity in real time.6
The generations growing up in the world can’t wait for research papers to be published over the next ten years and for the slow policy decision making process to figure out where to go next. We must be willing to act on our experiences and intuitions as human beings right now, in addition to continuing needed research. At least three straight generations have struggled to adapt to modern society and some signs are pointing to similar and accelerating failures in the upcoming ones.
We must develop more modern ways of teaching and change expectations of societies that are adapting to this new paradigm. We need to meet people where they’re at in order to help them get to where we as a society want them to be; happy, authentic people that don’t have to work themselves to the bone anymore in order to put food on their table, can reasonably pursue their dreams, and ones that are allowed to actually be children and teenagers rather than walking mini-adults.
We need to create more mentally resilient people by providing them with the proper mental and physical tools to do so. And that starts, again, right now.
Two passages come to mind, both from The Book of Joy; in this first passage, the Dalai Lama speaks of how long of a view we must take in order to move forward,
When we look at our world with a longer time frame, say, of a hundred years, we can then envision a world that is very different. A better, kinder, a more equitable, more joyful world. But we must start the process of that change now, not wait for some ideal time. The ideal time is now.
Then, Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks about how we can start to impact change in the world,
As an old man, I can say: start where you are, and realize that you are not meant on your own to resolve all of these massive problems. Do what you can…remember you are not alone, and you do not need to finish the work. It takes time…it helps no one if you sacrifice your joy because others are suffering. We people who care must be attractive, must be filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, that helping and being generous are not a burden, they are a joy. Give the world your love, your service, your healing, but you can also give it your joy. This, too, is a great gift.
Humans have shown for countless millennia the internal resolve to create better futures for ourselves, and the propensity to create influential and joyful leaders such as the two men above (and countless women). I’m hopeful we can find a way forward. The hardest part of this change is that someone will have to bite the bullet and make sacrifices, whether it be wide swaths of individuals or whole generations in order to make needed, drastic paradigm shifts in thinking.7
Changes must be made or else we will continue to lose generation after generation of people until nothing’s left.
The good news is, this appears to be already changing.
Over on Ted Gioia’s Substack, where he thoughtfully writes about music, culture, and myriad other topics, he wrote a State of the Culture speech to shine a light onto culture’s present day darkness to see where we are and where we might be going.
There, he writes about a flourishing alternative culture of present and upcoming people and where they are spending their time online. For those that are not choosing to opt out, the stats are pretty revealing; the upcoming generations are changing the game, only under the radar. Underneath the mainstream media noise, the underground is percolating and germinating just like it always does.8
These voices for change are already here, and we must cultivate the channels to hear them and what they have to say, because they’re saying a lot. It’s time for the world to listen or get steamrolled out of relevance.
Like the prevailing culture norms just before previous cultural upheavals, the old guard will do everything in their power to fight the oncoming change. What history tells us, though, is you cannot stop the inexorable tide of the hourglass.
While the global overweight/obese far outnumber the underweight, with massive implications, they pale in comparison to the underweight when it comes to deaths. Around 4.7 million people die premature deaths related to obesity compared to around 9 million from hunger. Hunger is still very much a problem and we could very easily end this. Mostly, wealthy countries choose to ignore it on a political level.
To put it clearly, I believe the past hundred-and-fifty years of human progress is very largely a good thing for most people; these are just some of the unintended consequences of what’s happened.
Frankl is an absolute badass; he founded a theory of psychotherapy called logotherapy, which many clinicians of the past and present would classify as being under the umbrella of existentialism. I highly recommend this book, whether you’re a practicing clinician or someone searching for meaning.
One of the reasons it’s so hard for many to take action today is from the dopaminergic hijacking of our minds through the myriad ways we can immediately distract ourselves. Dopamine is the neurochemical that, in part, modulates drive, desire, and motivation; what do you think might happen if it’s all being released in a continuous, everyday long drip? Certainly not meaningful action to change what’s happening. Like Aldous Huxley posited in A Brave New World (1932) and later in Brave New World Revisited (1958), there is a possible dystopia where people won’t have to rule through fear; they can dominate through pleasure and propaganda. Huxley even managed to capture the essence of what was in store for us in the 21st century:
As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.
Chuck Klosterman’s insightful book, The Nineties (2022), highlights how different people processed the world even just thirty years ago, “There was, in 1993, a greater willingness to view reality as something that was only happening to oneself. History was an individual experience” (p. 75). Now, it’s very hard to express your experience of history as not being intertwined with your fellow human. This is, without a doubt, a wonderful thing. The only problem is, now this intertwinement is being expressed as the timeless “us versus them” rather than “us versus the problems”.
This is at the crux of my concerns over ethical AI development; we can’t even agree on how to regulate social media, let alone the infinitely more complex AI realm. The hubris of humanity truly knows no bounds at times.
See: student loan debt; some people that already paid theirs are refusing to budge on reform for future generations because “I had to do it, so do they”; oil executives transitioning to greener energy and losing profits for the greater good; wealthy elite all over the world sacrificing portions of their interminable wealth to put towards initiating and sustaining these changes; tech monopolies to release their hold on people’s mental states, etc. And history says, if they don’t, the general public will eventually speak for them.
One of these alternative spaces is in the metal musical genre; I talk about it at length in a previous article of mine.