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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.