Nihilist Youth

What caused Doomer teenagers?

The teenager has been in bed for ten days and will not rise. She will not eat or wash. The parents call the doctor, who then confirms there is no illness beyond the ongoing depression that has plagued the teenager for over a year. The doctor explains that all that can be done is to increase the teenager’s existing anti-depressant dosage and keep up the CBT sessions. There is also a new NHS self-esteem app that might help.

The doctor leaves and the father comes to his daughter’s bedside and asks if she will eat some supper with him and her mother. Why? She says. Why should I eat?

Why eat, the father replies, surprised. Well, so you can keep up your strength.

Why should I do that?

So, you can be well again?

Why would I want to be well?

So you can go back to school and finish your exams?

Why would I do that?

Well, so that you can get to college.

And a long chain of whys unfolds. Why graduate? Why get a job? On and on it goes, with the teenager asking why at every turn. Why have a job, a house? Why have a relationship? Children?

The father and mother have heard their teenage daughter say things like this before - why should we bring children into this terrible world. And they know this belief is tied to ‘the climate apocalypse’ that many in their teenage daughter’s generation (on the cusp between Generation Z and Generation A) believe in so passionately. But the why questioning goes beyond simple issues about ecology or politics. The Why- why-why spirals down until it hits the bottom.

Why should we keep breeding? The daughter asks. Why should humans survive when our planet is going to be destroyed by the sun, anyway? No, I will not eat your stupid soup. Why do anything when it’s all going to end in the Heat Death of the Universe?

Why? And the father has no answer.

The parents worry about this - this fixation on the terminal fate of the universe that seems to undermine all her daughter’s action in the present. Why this concern with cosmology? They are unaware that their daughter has fallen into a popular trend within her generation, that her daughter has been “black-pilled”, that she is an online ‘doomer’ and has been rapidly consuming YouTube videos and podcasts through the gateway of “optimistic nihilism” into potted posts on Nietszche, E.M Cioran, Schopenhauer, Peter Wessel Zapffe and cosmic nihilism proper and then deep down into the antinatalism of David Benatar and Ligotti. She has even started to openly call herself a nihilist.

Why do you keep trying to force me to be like you? Why do I have to wash and eat and exercise and all that stupid shit?

And then it comes, the question both her parents fear and that they’ve looked for answers to on parent’s online help-forums. Why are human’s alive anyway? Why does our stupid pointless species exist?

The parents have tried to answer this before. The reply ‘well we’re just alive, that’s all, but isn’t that Ok?’ resulted in scorn. So did ‘the point of life is to enjoy life’. And so did ‘we don’t know why were alive, but hey, at least we’re in this together.’

How can they answer differently when they have no belief system to speak from? As 2^nd generation atheists, they can hardly tell their child that God has a purpose for them all. Neither can they say that they believe in a great teleological project in which humans evolve into superbeings that finally answer all questions, because they don’t believe that science is the answer, either. They don’t believe in Humanism or transhumanism or universal equality or even in the concept of ‘universal truth’. These classic postmodern relativist parents don’t know why they or the human species are alive, and this is the weak spot and great un-answered ‘why’ that always makes their daughter furious.

If you don’t even know what the point of life is? Why the hell did you even give birth to me in the first place? she snaps.

And her parents have no answer for that either.

I didn’t ask to be born. Did you? Why should humans keep on living? What’s the point?

Then the father makes the big mistake.

You… you are the reason we’re alive, he says, we love you. So much.

No, the daughter bites back, that’s not fair. That’s pathetic, that just passing your pointlessness onto the next generation. No! I won’t be your justification, don’t put that on me. You’re so empty with your stupid meaningless house and your pathetic pointless jobs and all your trivial worries and silly little lives. Just fuck off and leave me alone.

She shouts this at them, and the intensity of the anger proves to the parents that this is not the low of depression but some force that is much more virulent.

There’s no fucking point to anything, the daughter yells as they closer her bedroom door behind them as they leave. And they worry, because they know that her generation are suffering more than the Boomers, GenXers, and millennial generations before them, with depression, with nervous disorders and anxiety, that they are prescribed more psycho-pharmaceutical medications than any previous generation in history, but the drugs and the therapy aren’t helping. Maybe the drug dependency is even making it worse. They know that ‘the meaning crisis’ and ‘meaninglessness crisis’ and the ‘loneliness epidemic’ were all diagnosed by the psychologists and intellectuals just as their child was entering her teens. They maybe have a sense that the postmodern liberal mindset of tolerating everyone else’s beliefs and making sure you have no beliefs that challenge anyone else’s has perhaps led to this vacuum where the young crave something, anything to believe in but have been told since kindergarten that all belief systems and grand narratives are ‘problematic’.

Have they demolished any foundation their child could have stood on?

The parents worry because her daughter’s negative fury sounds like it could lead to lashing out at others and to self-harm, maybe scarring or drug taking, like that poor boy at school who ended up in hospital. It’s all so pointless, is their teenager’s refrain, why do you even care?

Is their daughter experiencing suicidal ideation? Is she at risk?

Downstairs away from their daughter, with the door half ajar just in case, in hushed tones the parents ask each other what they have done wrong and what they can try to do to fix it.

The father says, maybe she’s right. When she asks why are we alive and what do we believe in - I have no answer at all for her. Nothing. Do you? Maybe we passed that onto her, and this is our fault.

He recalls that in his youth, he and the mother were obsessed with nihilistic subcultures, with the Sex Pistols and their slogan No Future, with bands like Nine Inch Nails who sang ‘God is dead and no-one cares’, with the fuck-everything taboo breaking nihilism of the Young British Artists (YBA) like Tracy Emin, Damien Hurst and Sara Lucas. Back then it had seemed rebellious, anti-establishment, and though he’d never outright called himself a nihilist or studied the 170 year old philosophy, for sure, believing in nothing and trashing those who claimed to ‘believe in things’ had been a way of life. Punk, Grunge, industrial music, anti-fashion, postmodern, deconstructive, anti-everything, smash all social constructs, stop the world - I want to get off.

But then, as they became parents, this had morphed into the liberal mindset of pluralism and toleration, the knee-jerk child rearing technique of always cutting a child off when they were about to express a strong opinion, to make sure they appreciated that the opinions of everyone in the world were all equally valid and that we shouldn’t, ever, hold any ideas or values, or say any words that might cause discomfort or offence to anyone else. Wasn’t there some creeping anti-foundationalism at work there, some nihilism masquerading as openness? People from other cultures got too hold onto their religious and political beliefs, yes we supported them in that, but we, sitting reluctantly at the top of the Western pile, couldn’t ever hold any of our own, would never dream of forcing any of our values on anyone else, instead we had to deconstruct our own culture, piece by piece, taking down our institutions brick by brick, spreading tolerance instead and making sure that we had no values or beliefs of our own. Wasn’t there a contradiction at the heart of that? Hasn’t that made all cultural and philosophical meanings equal over the last thirty years, and when all meanings are equal aren’t they actually equally meaninglessness?

It pains the father to face it – what if they’d done this to their daughter by accident. Passed along their own lack of values in the name of progress, but instead instilled a destructive hatred of all values. What if they’ve raised a kid with a hole where some foundation should have been and now she has fallen into it. What if they’ve failed as parents and hurt their daughter? It makes him panic to think of it. What if she’s suffering from these unintended consequences that we hadn’t seen coming?

And what if the eco-activism we encouraged in our child went too far? She often rants about how evil and pointless our species is. In our attempts to wake-up the sleeping consumer-masses, over the last decade, by using the strategy of warning about an impending eco-apocalypse, did we frighten our child into numbness and retreat. Into flight, fright, then freeze? Is this why she says, ‘what’s the point, this world is fucked, there’s no future.’

And the same with all our talk of the ‘overpopulation of the planet-problem’ that our boomer parents passed onto us. Is that why our daughter says, ‘there’s no point in even thinking about ever having a family, or a home, it’s all selfish and pointless’ ?

Even though every day now we see the populations of modern countries actually declining and our boomer parents with their panicked apocalyptic warnings were wrong. Yes, the whole Population Bomb thing was just an erroneous projection from the 1970s, maybe the numbers had even been exaggerated for political reasons. Nothing, after all, causes laws and regulation to be passed more effectively, than putting the fear of armageddon into people. Should we maybe tell our daughter that, actually it’s all going to be OK, the overpopulation apocalypse is now cancelled, the world isn’t ending after all. Maybe that would get her to stop saying that she wishes she’d never been born, and that we were vile and stupid to bring another hungry mouth onto this pointless planet. Should we maybe explain that sometimes, people like us who believe in progress - because that is the most vague and open-ended possible thing to believe in - try to scare the population out of complacency with the use of doomsday projections, but that the last thing we ever wanted was to scare our own daughter out of wanting to be alive. No, we never wanted for our child to think that everywhere she looks there is only doom. That human life, including her own, is evil and futile.

Why is she in such pain? The mother cries, why? Why? It’s not just teenage rebellion, is it? We were never like this. What did we do wrong?

As upstairs their daughter, looking for answers to her big why, logs back onto her laptop and clicks on another trending video that tells her and the 17 million other kids who have already clicked LIKE, that the universe is without any meaning or purpose and our planet will soon die. That our species is a cosmic joke, a biological accident without any reason to exist, and given all the pointless suffering we experience the best thing for our meaningless human species would be to cease breeding and to quietly go extinct.

No need to kill yourself, the video jokes, just laugh at it all, and make sure to have fun until the end of your pointless life.

Because of the algorithms, the video ends with a link to another top video by a trending vlogger called: Don’t believe in Anything - Don’t Do anything - Opt out.

One of the top comments by someone her age says ‘Nihilism is cool’, another says, ‘I gave up on school and all relationships - going it alone in this pointless world can be pretty liberating’.

Ewan Morrison’s novel, For Emma, explores the dilemma of the nihilist parent. You can find it here.