The Worldly Pain Of Young Americans

Commentary by Mark Bauerlein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A survey by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University reported findings that won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. Among Millennials and members of Generation Z, fully one-in-three individuals suffer from some kind of mental disorder. Anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts afflict them, and the mental problems frequently manifest in physical symptoms.

That’s not the evidence of the Research Center study, though. The mental health numbers above come from federal government agencies, which the Center cites in order to set up its attachment of these emotional pains to another factor, a cause rarely considered by public officials in charge of data collection and population surveys. Here is how the Center and its staff led by George Barna put it:

“… Barna and his colleagues suggest that addressing those conditions may not require counseling, hospitalization, drugs, or other common remedies.

“The research instead indicates that those are often symptoms of an unhealthy worldview …”

That’s the assumption, a close relationship between a person’s general worldview and a person’s emotional state. A 20-year-old who thinks the world is a cruel habitat, that the world doesn’t care about individual human beings, that people are selfish and life is hard… that 20-year-old will feel the effects of that pessimism. He embraces a nihilism about the world that will recoil upon him and bring him down, that will include him in the negative judgment. If he thinks that climate change will bring devastation to the earth in the next 30 years, he loses hope and wonders what to do with his life. If he doesn’t trust other people, he can’t form solid and affirming relationships. Emotional agonies are inevitable.

Data that the Center has gathered add support to the assumption. Consider these results:

• Seven out of ten individuals under 40 years of age who responded to Center questionnaires stated that they “lack a sense of purpose and meaning in life.”
• Only 13 percent of Generation Z and 22 percent of Millennials believe that “absolute moral truth exists and is an objective reality.”

Given those dispiriting beliefs, we shouldn’t shake our heads at the malaise and panic of the young. In former times, thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger described such regrettable attitudes in terms that combined the philosophical and the psychological, for instance, “ontological insecurity” and “metaphysical discomfort,” which they understood as peculiarly modern diseases. Those traits are still with us, Barna et al. insist, and they run in two directions, outward and inward. That life has no purpose slides smoothly into “I have no purpose.” To think that moral truth is a relative or subjective thing only is to deny oneself a reliable foundation of judgment and conviction. Young Americans are fractious and fragile, and who can avoid that condition in a world so utterly careless and capricious.

The daily experience of average 16-year-olds only reinforces the negative worldview they bear. The videos they watch, the music they hear, the texts and photos that flood their phones, the movies and TV shows they favor—it’s a wave of entertainment that shows people behaving badly with no moral accounting. These media allow for no transcendence and no organized worship, no prayer or devotion. They are the bricks of youth culture, which doesn’t revere the past or envision a happy future. No deep meanings and profound truths. The producers of it purvey shallow ideas and emotional chaos. We have handed the rising generations an environment hostile to their souls.

The mental problems of 21st-century youth are real. Our methods of treating them are pharmacological and therapeutic, wholly individualized. These procedures are often incomplete.

We should add to the mix the exploration of a wayward youth’s worldview, and the modification of it should that worldview prove discouraging and depressing.

What a teen assumes about human existence at large affects daily mood and will, the head and the heart. It’s a warning to parents. Give your children a stable moral habitat. Teach them a meaningful past and a hopeful future. If they rebel against your vision, so be it, but you will make that rebellion itself meaningful by presenting to them something meaningful to oppose.

The depression and anxiety, in some cases at least (a not insignificant portion, I believe), are a sane response to bad influences and cynical perceptions. Youth culture is itself unhealthy, and Americans coming-of-age need to be cured of it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.