The Future’s So Bright?
The kids aren’t alright.
Young Americans, especially those labeled as being part of ‘Gen Z’ (born between 1995 and 2010, give or take a year), are in the throes of a mental health crisis. Self-reported depression and anxiety have spiked, suicidality has increased significantly, and a larger portion of these young people, as compared to older generations, have had interactions with mental health practitioners. Both statistics and anecdotal evidence from clinicians prove this point. Causes have varied widely, from the easily understood to the more socially complex. On the former front, the government reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic have wreaked havoc on youth mental health. Lockdowns, remote schooling, social alienation, and masking have all interrupted the regular life cycle of the American adolescent and have caused serious, documented harm to vast portions of Gen Z (and many others). On the more complex side of the ledger, ubiquitous social media and smartphone technology have arguably made major negative impacts. The constant quest for social approval, ease of presenting a false portrait of perfection, and algorithmic manipulation of emotions all play a part in exerting a malign influence on American youth.
Another, more contentious, potential cause for Gen Z’s mental breakdown is a relatively new phenomenon: climate anxiety. A major survey conducted by Nature shows that nearly 60% of Gen Z across the world is either ‘extremely worried’ or ‘very worried’ about climate change; a full 45% of those surveyed said that this anxiety impacts their daily lives in a negative manner. This is highly concerning – and not only because the level of anxiety is not at all commensurate with the level of threat, regardless of what radical activists claim. It is primarily concerning because it is breeding a nihilistic attitude among young people, exacerbating their existing mental health issues. A puff piece supporting this nihilism was published recently in Fortune (archive link here), and reader, it made me mad.
The article – titled ‘Gen Z’s antiwork mentality has a lot to do with the ‘world crumbling’ around them’ – profiled a series of young adults who are distraught about the state of the climate and the future of humanity, and have consequently checked out of regular adult life. The piece praises this antiwork movement as a reasonable response to a life which is supposedly inevitably defined by financial disaster, the omnipresent specter of mass murder, and, most pressingly, the ongoing ecological catastrophe. These deranging delusions around climate change and the downfall of humanity are endorsed and promoted by media and purported ‘experts’. Their positioning on these issues is radical and has helped convince a generation of Americans (including some influential Congresspeople) that without extreme political action, the world itself will end.
Expectedly, this constant narrative of permanent crisis has created an epidemic of nihilism among American youth. Why care about today when tomorrow is so bleak? These passages from the Fortune piece are particularly representative of this general idea:
… it’s climate change that’s the final nail in the coffin for some young employees who are already questioning the value of their jobs. Worse than expected global warming and rising sea levels have painted a dismal picture of the future, leaving some young workers to view corporate work with more apathy and less ambition. …
When much of the Earth is facing one climate crisis or another (fire, flood, famine), it pushes the nine-to-five further into perspective. “It’s hard to stress too much over work as we can see the world crumbling in front of us,” Kpenkaan says. “Emails or even TikTok numbers seem pretty small compared to all the climate news we receive on a daily basis.”
The nihilism inherent in the last sentence is especially direct; the idea that there is no point in the mundanity of daily existence because of some impending doom is a staple of nihilistic thinking. What does life matter if it isn’t defined by happiness or success? As thousands of years of human philosophy and theology teach, still quite a lot! (The problem may be aggravated when you are making meaning mainly via emails or “even TikTok numbers.” Just a thought.)
This civilizational nihilism has led Gen Z’ers to avoid saving, planning for the future, or even pushing to achieve personal goals. Ironically enough, those actions will only exacerbate future mental health issues and create real problems that are impactful on a personal level, unlike small changes in global surface temperatures. One person quoted in the Fortune story says that “It feels weird to be going into my job every day knowing that the looming future—or lack of a future—is just completely out of my control.” Another states that “Having that promise of longevity, it’s just not something that our generation got. At every single turn, we saw how our lives could be either incomplete or cut short.”
This destructive, nihilistic mindset is not only part and parcel of the broader anti-civilization ideology behind the radical climate cult, but it is also incredibly historically uninformed. The Gen Z’ers – particularly the American ones referenced in the Fortune piece – who subscribe to this sentiment woefully misunderstand their position as compared to earlier generations. People who are alive today, anywhere in the world, are some of the most privileged and lucky people who have ever had the fortune of existing on this planet. Global prosperity (measured by GDP) has exploded exponentially over the past 300 years, moving from a global norm of subsistence living to a world in which items previously seen as luxuries are nearly universally accessible. That trend of productive growth has continued through the 20th century, with standards of living rising consistently over the period and not abating in the 21st century thus far. Human lifespans have risen commensurately, as the average human today lives almost twice as long as his ancestors in the late 18th century.
The amazing living situation of Americans today is taken for granted, as far too many people – especially in younger generations – have no idea as to how good they have it. The plaintive cries about an uncertain future and the potential for early death are laughable when compared to those same factors even 50 years ago. In 1970, serial killings were not uncommon, stagflation was destroying the economy, America was involved in an unpopular war in which people were drafted unwillingly, and we lived in the constant shadow of nuclear Armageddon. Sounds a lot more uncertain than potential temperature increases of 2°C over the course of a hundred years!
How about, for fun, we go even further back? Maybe add another 100 years or so? In 1870, America was coming out of a Civil War which crippled our nation and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans (mostly around the age that Gen Z is now), the Ku Klux Klan (actual white supremacists) was regularly terrorizing and lynching African-Americans across the South, children often died of totally curable or preventable diseases, and the factories of the big cities were essentially deathtraps for the adults and children who worked in them. The future didn’t exactly look bright for those people, but they soldiered on and built the world which would continue to progress under their offspring.
What would’ve happened if the people of 1970, 1870, or any other challenging period in human history had the same nihilistic outlook as Gen Z’ers do today? First of all, most of us wouldn’t exist. Secondly, none of the technologies and ideas which have produced the incredible blessings of modern life would be around. The continued belief in the future of humanity, despite horrific headwinds and serious civilizational problems, is necessary for human progress. Without that hopeful, forward movement, we will miss out on the innovations that will build the amazing world which our progeny will inhabit.
Scientists working in the nuclear fusion experiment chamber.
Interestingly enough, a glimpse of that wonderful potential future came just a few days ago. American scientists announced that they had a breakthrough in the long quest for nuclear fusion, creating a fusion reaction which generated net energy. Fusion, the combination of two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom through the introduction of heat energy, is the process which powers our Sun. If controlled and harnessed, it has the potential for almost-unlimited energy generation with few or no byproducts, using readily-available natural elements. Scientists have been attempting to create a stable fusion process for decades, but the recent breakthrough is truly a step beyond previous successes. Earlier experiments were able to generate a fusion reaction, but it took more energy to create and control this reaction than the reaction itself produced. Now, we have achieved net energy gain – more energy was produced by the fusion process than was consumed by it. This is essentially proof of concept for the next truly world-changing innovation.
Nuclear fusion, if successful and widespread, would solve the ‘climate crisis’ Gen Z is so worried about. It would power our modern society easily, allowing us to escape some of the constraints which have held science and technology back. Unlimited clean energy would allow us to permanently escape the Earth, colonizing the planets of our solar system and potentially reaching new systems entirely. The sci-fi worlds seen on the silver screen would be our reality. Horizons previously seen as unreachable would be within reach. Developments which we cannot even imagine would be possible.
But all of this relies on the continued human mindset of progress and investment in a future we may never ourselves live to realize. The nihilism which seems to have consumed so many in Gen Z is anathema to this forward-looking sentiment. The juxtaposition of the intense climate anxiety and antiwork ideology explored in the Fortune article with the positively groundbreaking future potential of nuclear fusion is jarring. We live in glorious times, and have the ability to guarantee even better lives for our children. None of that is possible, however, without work and the belief that such work serves a purpose larger than ourselves. Losing that essential spark of humanity to a dour depression stoked by media, academia, and politicians would be a true catastrophe for the species.
The future is bright, but we must believe that ourselves before we can make it reality.
Thank you for this on-the-nose parody of a grumpy old conservative from any generation complaining about the yutes of their day.Report
Which as usual obscures the responsibility of that grumpy old generation in getting those crises kicked offReport
Hell, it basically denies that there are even actual crises worth being upset about, except for the crises of the existence of a climate cult and anti-work nihilism among the yutes that cult has caused. It really is a very good parody. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was writing in earnestness.Report
One thing (among many) that I liked about Maribou’s brief tenure as site moderator is that she would shut down this sort of useless content-free snark in direct response to a post. It discourages current & future contributors and generates no worthwhile discussion.
I guess these rules don’t apply anymore, and CJ will surely come along and snark at me for being the next hall monitor, but it doesn’t seem too much to ask for people to remember that the site has an ideologically-diverse community and to maybe just not comment at all if they have nothing productive to say.Report
As I see it, there are three ways to respond to a post this bad:
1) Ignore it, but I already read it, so too late.
2) Respond to it seriously, in which case I’ve just wasted even more time on an utterly worthless piece of writing.
3) Snark, which requires the amount of effort the post has earned, while expressing pretty clearly what I think of it.
Now, I do not believe that as an occasional commenter, anything I say or do will have much influence on this site, but if somehow I have contributed at all to the discouragement of this writer or other writers like him in posting more absolutely worthless content, then I feel like I have done the site a service.Report
There’s also “write the one you wish were written”.
“Fusion power will finally allow us to get close enough to free energy that we can finally have that classless society that I’ve been talking about. Imagine a culture without want!”Report
There is not a post I wish was written. I mean, someone has already written here about fusion; there’s a ton on climate change out there, and even if someone were to write about it here, I wouldn’t be the one to write about it; the dictionary already has a definition of nihilism; and there is much literature, academic and non, on the material and mental conditions of today’s young’uns. And my comment was the post I would want written about the OP’s breed of conservatism.Report
“They’re just remaking stuff that was done better in the past!” is a sentiment that I can 100% get on board with.
Personally, I think that this sort of thing is going to be the downfall of society.Report
Good to know.Report
In the spirit of this article: why complain about the state of the conversation when we live in an era of Ignore functionality?Report
If people didn’t comment unless they had something productive to say, it would be awfully quiet around here. And you wouldn’t need a self-appointed Hall Monitor.Report
[Writing 300 comments into an argument with Jaybird about whether he believes something he has not said but that some feel was implied by a two sentence comment he wrote three days ago, in response to a post with 302 total comments.] This is the discourse that encourages ever better writers to write here!Report
Just ask Elon to buy the site, and he’ll straighten things out.Report
Yeah, I recall an almost word for word version of this in the early 70’s. And again in the 80s. And every couple years after that.
But the grumpy old man schtick is really just a pretext, a jumping off point to the real point which is yet another climate denialist screed.
Reading such a thing in 2022 is itself almost an exercise in nostalgia, back to a time when climate denialists had a respectable seat in the national conversation.Report
You might think they don’t have a respectable seat in the national conversation, but they do. They’ve rebranded themselves, so that they fully believe in the reality of climate change; they just question its catastrophic effects and the urgency of action. These people have the ears of incredibly powerful people, and they’re showing up all over the conservative media. Take, for example, this books. Its author is buddy buddy with many powerful people in both the fossil fuel industry and both state and federal governments in the U.S. (as well as powerful conservative politicians in Europe), and he is a full-flung denialist who gets around that fact by assuring us he believes wholeheartedly in anthropogenic global warming but doesn’t believe in any of its consequences (in his books and interviews, he even suggests that for much of the world climate change will be a very good thing), and argues that the solution is even more of what’s causing it.Report
The older I get, the harder it is for me to distinguish between faith and hope. A people either has both or neither, because you can’t really hope in anything long-term without belief in a telos.Report
You raise an interesting question, which needn’t be married to the subject matter of the OP:
I’m not sure I agree. I have hope, for instance, that things like racism and sexism can be pushed back in social influence, over the course of time and with sustained effort, debate, and moral commitment. Telelogically, we’d use words like “defeated” rather than “pushed back” or “minimized,” and those phrases do come easily where more moderated, nuanced terms feel less natural to write or speak. But the truth is, I lack hope that these things can be defeated. My real hope is for there to be, over the course of time, marginal and incremental improvements that are probably hard to measure but nevertheless real.
And I guess philosophically faith and hope are probably alloyed in some way. If “faith” is the belief in the reality of a given thing “X” despite the absence of evidence to support any belief in X, “hope” may well be the belief that “X,” while not yet extant, one day will be. These are, I think, emotional rather than rational states of mind. It’s different than “The sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning.” We have very good reasons to anticipate that it will, so that sort of thing would fall outside my definition of the word “faith,” even though the mechanics of the English language are such that it feels natural to say “I have faith that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning.” “Confidence” might be a more accurate word.
Maybe I’m making that more complicated or precise than it needs to be.
Seems polite to circle back to the OP. We could take a teleological view of fusion power, I guess: the attainment of sufficient technology that fusion can be sustained in an energy-positive, controlled, and mass-scalable way. One may have or lack hope that such technology will be developed in the future, but as I’ve defined that word, it’s a belief that exists in the absence of supporting evidence.Report
I don’t think this is completely a digression. Having grown up in a more Christian era, and being told every day that it was 10 seconds until nuclear midnight, I don’t buy the notion that the pressure of climate change is messing with modern kids’ minds. It seems more likely that they don’t have a belief system to fortify them.
It sounds like your telos is materialistic, but you have one.
I lean toward Dominican theology, so I see faith and hope as rational rather than emotional. To be honest, your sentence to the contrary took me a while to figure out, it’s such a foreign concept. I think the problem is hidden in your definition of faith. I’d change it from “absence of evidence” to “absence of proof”, because there’s no shortage of or disregard for evidence in matters of faith.Report
I can accept “proof” rather than “evidence.”Report
It’s true that young people aren’t doing all the things us Olds wish they would. But it’s not just climate change that is responsible for that. Or, more precisely, the doom-and-gloom that surrounds reporting of climate change. Alsotoo, us Olds ought to know better than to believe that large-scale clean and cheap fusion power is right around the corner. It’s been about twenty years away for our entire lifetimes, and the fusion optimists still say it’s at least twenty years away.
It’s not right around the corner, and as was discussed here briefly but thoroughly last week, it’s probably a lot more than twenty years away. Recent technology news is no excuse for continuing to defer making painfully hard economic and policy choices to protect our environment. (Which, as long as I’m belng plain-spoken about it, we aren’t going to do — democracies are really bad at making decisions like that and autocracies are also really bad at making decisions like that, albeit for different reasons than democracies.)Report
I’m not sure that’s the right characterization either. We just passed the biggest investment in clean energy in the country’s history. There’s also a lot of reason to believe that as long as trajectories remain the way they are going we stand a good chance of dodging the worst case scenarios. The challenge is keeping the foot on the gas, and helping, but also pushing, developing countries to avoid the dirtiest eras of industrialization.Report
I hope you’re right. I just don’t share your optimism that things like the spending bill are either a) sufficiently impactful and/or b) par for the course. Maybe I’m just in a sour mood today.
But as I say, I’d be pleased if you turn out to be righter than me.Report