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1 in 3 Americans feel lonely every week and 1 in 5 feel lonely every day. Less than half of households are headed by married couples and the marriage rate hovers at 16.7. 63% of single people are not looking for a relationship and the majority of Gen Z didn’t date as teenagers.
Romance, relationships and sex that are disappearing, If you want to understand teenagers escaping into an upside down world of pronouns, identifying as the opposite sex, as asexual or anything except a normal healthy relationship, the collapse of those relationships is the place to start. “I choose me” is the narcissistic gateway to ‘self-marriages’ and online rabbit holes.
But it’s not just opposite sex relationships that are collapsing. Family is on the chopping block. 1 in 4 Americans are estranged from a close family member. Gen Z is the generation least likely, by far, to have a close relationship with their grandparents. Or to socialize in general. People of all ages interact with the world through social media. And social media is inherently lonely.
What replaces relationships for the social meda savvy is an endless search for self-actualization. The constant virtue signaling, the reflexive shift in flags and banners, is a testament to a life lived online even when it’s acted out in public. Moral panics have become childishly easy to set up and detonate while knowing that today’s crisis will be forgotten tomorrow. Black Lives Matter and DEI give way to Gaza which gives way to illegal aliens which will give way to something else. Political activism is every bit as transitory as pop music. Greta Thunberg isn’t abandoning a cause when turning from environmentalism to Hamas.
Attention is the cause. The issue isn’t the issue, the issue is the revolution may be true on the macro, but in the micro, the issue isn’t the issue, the issue is attention. Lonely people need attention and the more attention they get, the less lonely they feel. Parroting back a slogan, learning a TikTok dance and joining a crusade is still lonely, but it feels more communal. And more importantly it fills the void that is currently occupied by the expectation of nothingness.
Fewer members of Gen Z look forward to marriage, children, a career or life getting better. What’s left is someone to blame. Movements, extremism, angry words and hate.
The Left innately understands this. It politicises and then tears apart human relationships, between men and women, between parents and children, and between larger families, to undermine rival social ties and to create the unhappiness that makes for terrorism. What began with shattering economic relationships, pitting businessmen and workers against each other, escalated to deconstructing and then pulling apart all human relationships as power structures.
What do you do when you have no one and no hope? You click, swipe and then march.
Screen time is everywhere. Its pale light shines from giant 75 inch flat screens dominating living rooms at night and from 5 to 7 inch handheld phones. Media and social media pervade everything but neither are really real. Gen Z excels at social media literacy much as earlier generations did at media literacy. But that literacy comes at the price of investing media and social media with personal identity and making media and social media a part of your life.
Social media for young girls is an experiment in adapting themselves to a society that really exists only online. Rather than adapting themselves to the traditions and truths of their family, they adapt to the much more vivid and rapid social media feed. And when it tells them to mutilate themselves and become transgender, that’s just one more transformation among many.
With nothing to look forward to, the bravado of self-destruction becomes their anthem.
The Left pretends to be progressive, but its substantive message is doom. The oceans are rising, inequality, racism and every social ill are somehow worse than ever. Nothing ever really gets better. Its recruitment strategy is to convince the next generation that everything is not only terrible, but the worst its ever been, and that there’s no hope for the future except them.
We are always the ones we are waiting for. Narcissism is the superpower. The world won’t ever really get any better. That’s the bygone message of the sixties. But what can get better is your self-esteem. Center your feelings. Focus on you. And see the world as a uniquely traumatic experience that you survive with TikTok dances and self-care self-involvement.
What sort of people does that message appeal to? Deeply unhappy people.
And that is what the Left is in the business of making. Every one of its revolutions has left people more isolated, divided, cut off, resentful and lonely than ever. They are taught to bond only over politics and through politics. To see themselves as members of tribes. To distrust anyone who doesn’t share their politics. And to identify entirely through politics.
The problem with that is politics, especially of their kind, is horribly miserable. Making it the center of your life is a formula for being miserable, angry, unhappy, resentful and fearful.
Those are the qualities you tend to see in the latest leftist rally against something.
BLM, No Kings, Save Gaza, Save Iran, Save the Whales, Stop the War, Stop ICE, Trans Lives Matter and Drag Queens Now. The emotions are the same no matter the cause. And the people who used to go to these things are becoming burned out from the unhappiness of rally culture.
The Left has made them miserable and it teaches them to turn that misery outward, but all that does is make them more miserable. The more the Left talks about “joy”, the more it reveals that as a commodity that it utterly lacks. The Left is many things, but happy is certainly not one of them. What the Left does is manufacture, commodify and weaponize misery for power.
The Left is designed to fail. Its policies are designed to fail. And its quest for joy through power is doomed to fail. All it can ever do is produce misery, failure and resentment over them.
The worse the failure, the more the resentment and the worse the unhappiness.
I saw a pictures of a Useful Idiot carrying a stupid sign reading DEFUND THE POLICE FUND THE PEOPLE and the Left adores these Useful Idiots to
Misery loves company. Misery is the left’s best friend. If only everyone was as miserable and hateful as they are…….
Destruction of human beings almost completed.
Very insightful. I saw similar processes in the SF Bay Area starting from the 1960s on.
To expand a little, first they marketed psychedelics and Communist propaganda as leading to Utopia, but really it made a lot of people crazy. Then, maybe in the 1980s, I noticed they were using drugs to bring out their negative feelings. I remember one lady told me that the only thing that kept her going was hate.
Fred Neil nailed it 60 years ago.
Note that this song was covered by bands on both sides of the Atlantic….which is PROOF that it hit home.
On a positive note, leftists are procreating less than ever before. We’re leaving through a demographic bulge of cat ladies who love Hamas, people who’ve been mutilated by “gender affirming care”, ayatollahs with genocidal nuclear ambitions and climate activists who are invariably products of pampered first world privilege. Just try to imagine the disparate elements of the Left surviving an afternoon together at a seminar, much less building a durable coalition.
Cat ladies love their fur babies. All the love for children they don’t have projected on their fur babies.
Yes, but could it be a blessing that they are NOT reproducing? That their crazy blood line ends with them?
Watch out. They know that people of faith tend to have more children, and they want to confiscate yours.
Interesting thought.
Being socially ostracized in the 9th grade will never leave them. They will have tattoos and nose rings forever. So what?
Repeal the 19th Amendment and it all goes away. I know, you don’t have the guts to bring it up at home. How could I expect you to get off the couch and save the country? Quit whining!
Excellent article. Thank you,
We tend to look back at the ideas of the 18th Century Enlightenment as quaint and irrelevant in today’s postmodern world.
The prevailing aim of that former period was happiness, essentially flourishment.
How did one achieve happiness? How did one flourish?
It was believed the formula for both was moral and intellectual growth, avoidance of vice, and Stoic responses to events beyond one’s control.
The corpus of human thought, even tracing back to the classical world of Greece and Rome, was also deemed relevant.
So early modern man of the Enlightenment walked with both Newton and Aristotle, spoke with them, considered them both dear friends, and contemplated their many musings.
Quest for knowledge led to discovery of truth.
Today, in our postmodern world, many believe there is neither truth nor moral absolutes. Yet take note of the irony and absurdity in all that: Postmodernism holds there is neither truth nor moral absolutes, a conclusion insisted upon by its adherents, absolutely.
Postmodernism is also influenced by Nihilism and indeed Marxism, the latter (Marxism) is based upon the idea that there exist oppressors and the oppressed–always.
The former (Nihilism) is but a rejection of divinely inspired truths.
No truth becomes the new truth. No God becomes the new god.
Given this philosophical pivot, it is little wonder truth is no longer recognized, and God has been lost. There is also no more happiness among many, but perhaps only fleeting and meaningless hedonistic pleasure.
For many today, there is no longer meaning in life.
For many today, human relationships no longer come by friends and family, but by a small device one stares at in the palm of one’s hand, even when transiting a treacherous busy street during rush hour.
I have no social media accounts at all. I could never see any value in them for myself. I dumped Facebook 15 years ago because it seemed nothing more than a source of narcissistic supply for millions, and no one on there was anything but mean to me.
I’ve commented on articles on line, but I’ve never had a social media account. Agree with narcissism assessment, plus ALL that info out there just makes it easier for someone to steal your ID.
I recently attended a graduation celebration for a newly-minted fortyish PhD recipient, where the joy in the room was palpable. Young professionals made a spectacle of themselves on the dancefloor, grooving to the band’s Conga drum-driven “Go-Go” beat popularized by the likes of Washington, D.C.’s Chuck Brown in the 1970s. Young children frolicked and senior citizens beamed. This event confirmed my optimism about America’s future. And I don’t say this just because I was invited to give a prayer of benediction and thanksgiving to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the source of all blessings.
This is good to hear. May the Christophiic PhD find tenure in her future.
The majority of Gen Z did not date as teenagers? That’s really sad. It’s one thing to have tried, and have it not work out. It’s quite another to never even have tried. There is a great line from one of the characters in Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology”–“To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, but life without meaning…is the torture of restlessness and vague desire. It is a boat, longing for the sea, and yet…afraid.”
The best solution I’ve found comes from the late great Mel Brooks. “The best way to fight evil is to laugh at it.” The over-dramatic piety of the Left is a rich source for imaginative ridicule. Make the most of it. You’ll feel better.
The commentary track for the 1995 DVD 20th anniversary release of “Blazing Saddles” had Mel Brooks lamenting that the film could not find distribution at that time (95). Here it is now 30 years after thaT.
Patriotism disappears during times of Anarchy.
We humans are not meant to inhabit media. Even television is /was too addictive. Too easy . But since almost everyone has this media sickness we can’t realize this.
Truth is the ONLY THING that will stabilize the chaotic mind!