We used to call it existentialism - based on the loss of a belief system e.g. initially religion - that was dogmatic and answered no real questions (or faked the answers as salvation and heavenly rapture) - until science came along with a better explanation of the universe and its workings.
Science, however, has shown the universe as not caring about a species that thinks it is the be-all and end -all of the evolutionary process. So again, we have lost the feeling of salvation and importance that science was to provide.
In fact, science now says Homo sapiens is also subject to the Darwinian model and the species will also eventually be extinct.
It is the denial of death that is the cause of today's angst - along with the eventual satiation of a consumer society - focusing on the abstract notions of status and consumption as the sources of satisfaction - instead of the humanism that needs to be present for us to accept existence and mortality.
I totally agree, the denial of death and enforced optimism. We've been hiding from 'the nihilism problem' though since the 1920s (it was big and in the open from 1850-1910). Existentialism employed a cheat with Sartre's "invent your own values' - which involves a cheapening and banalisation of what meaning and value is. Consumer society is all just distraction from the void, and addiction. Have you read Zapffe?
I have not read Zapffe but I just did a quick and cursory review - basically agreeing with his concepts of over self-reflection and use of defense mechanisms (not sure about some of his 'Norwegian Noir' social beliefs).
I have a bias towards psychological explanations - the social, child and abnormal psych theories I studied in school to explain why society functions the way it does in North America.
A sort of social philosophy of anthropology is needed to explain the modern totems of existence which have been created to represent the truths of today.
I have met many ‘raised Catholic/Christian’ parents who are raising their kids ‘nothing’- the idea being ‘the kids can choose’. What they fail to realise is that they (the parents) are standing on the foundation of their faith (whether they acknowledge it or not)- it’s the sea they swim in. This crisis you allude to (in my opinion) is going to accelerate with this (as you mention in the article) the 2nd generation of non believers as they mature. I cannot help but think of the SOMA in Brave New World. Everyone medicated out of their minds. The fact is that parents somehow got the notion that ‘spiritual’ health was not a thing. In the same way that physical health is. They treated their progeny like little adults who could ‘figure it out’. We wouldn’t let a toddler plot meal plans- they need guidance and someone to prepare the meals. ‘Spirituality’ is no different. It doesn’t mean when the child grows to adult they cannot deviate from the cuisine they were raised in but that up to that point they are given enough for their bones and muscles to grow and thrive.
Society clearly took a wrong turn if a lack of purpose overcomes natural survival instinct to this degree. Did our prehistoric ancestors need myths and philosophies to endure their hardships? A healthy animal does whatever it takes to live, including killing other creatures; it needs no rationale, no justification for its existence.
Do you understand yourself? Do you understand what you're condemning? Do you understand that, when you reduce nihilism to "doomerism", conflating it with despair and depression, treating these scarecrow labels as interchangeable, you're also dumbing down the definition of nihilism itself? Do you understand the concepts you're flattening? Do you understand that those accused of nihilism are rarely, if ever, committed philosophical nihilists, but exhausted people using the most relatable vocabulary for their alienation? (ICYMI, "What Is Nihilism?": https://substack.com/@tomkaye1987/note/c-237789883.)
Language is power. Words are weapons. Labels are never neutral. It's easy to reframe teenage depression as an intellectual contagion rather than a rational response to depressing environments. It's easy to stage nihilistic despair as a viral pandemic, a quasi-religious strand of memetic possession that spreads via algorithms, postmodern parenting, climate anxiety and the collapse of inherited belief systems -- harmless while kept theoretical, safe and manageable at a distance, theatrical from the outside until the ones who come down with all the symptoms ask the final, forbidden, adults-only question:
"WHY?"
Teens don't despair because they discover nihilism. They discover nihilism because despair has already penetrated their bodies. The vast majority of young people don't arrive at hopelessness by doom-scrolling Nietzsche, Cioran, Benatar or by panic-bingeing postmodern pessimism and skepticism, but by repeatedly subjecting their nerves (and identities) to ordinary, basic-bitch reality. Philosophy is applied retroactively, if at all, to preexisting wounds. Wounds that can't afford rent, can't secure a decent job, and barely manage to sustain the intimacy required for stable relationships. Wounds that also watch the adults-in-charge recede into debt, scarcity, social disconnection, homelessness and the growing suspicion that life isn't worth living anymore. Philosophy comes after the wound, both as post-mortem narration and as post-ironic aesthetic. Plenty of people can feign indifference, acting nonchalant, but teenagers aren't that emotionally anesthetized yet. Even when they're checked out, they're locked in: even when they bed-rot, they bargain with meaning, listening for proof that society wants them back, that participation is rewarded, that the adults intend to keep their promises without bankrupting their inner lives with a social contract that must be -- but isn't worth -- resuscitating. The teenage nihilist isn't indifferent to this at all; she's furious that her capacity for hope has been hollowed out, furious that so much psychological blood is extracted from a generation already running on fumes and still expected to smile through the emotional extraction, the economic bloodletting, before adulthood even begins. A genuinely indifferent person doesn't rage at her parents, obsess over morality, reproduction, extinction, injustice or meaninglessness. She doesn't spiral through existential video essays, searching for practical answers, and she doesn't accuse, ache, or demand justification for not killing herself. Her rage, if real, if righteous, reveals an overwhelming attachment that barely registers with (the caricature of) the modern "doomer" as a detached nihilist who can sleep without asking "why?" and gaze into the abyss unflinchingly. What is a "doomer" if not an injured idealist who discovered that the world negotiates poorly with human expectations, the pain of which persists precisely because meaning still matters to them? Her complaint, her concern is not that the universe lacks inherent meaning. It's that HER universe lacks it. Her complaint is not that cosmic meaninglessness is sucky, but that her lived world, her psyche, is in a deeply intimate, grief-saturated state of implosion. She isn't promoting nihilism, as the charge goes, because she hasn't yet discovered absurdism, or Zapffe. She's suffering from failure, from failed embodiment, failed initiation, failed attachment -- from a failed life, a failed future. The why-spiral isn't caused by having scrolled or read too much Sartre and Nietzsche, but by looking, sincerely, at a civilization that struggles to justify its own existence to those who feel -- and, by and large, are -- materially, somatically, romantically, spiritually, biologically, socially, and economically left out or on their way out. The problem isn't even that young people pop the inconvenient why-question. The core issue is that institutions increasingly reply-to-all with more branding campaigns, more pills, more therapyspeak and more moralistic finger-wagging instead of material and cultural incentives to participate meaningfully in society. That distinction matters, and it matters because it's accurate. What exactly, then, is your gripe with nihilists?
When struggling young men speak online, they aren't lamenting the absence of cosmic meaning, either. They aren't curled over Schopenhauer, asking whether the noumenal world possesses intrinsic teleology, delving into esoteric philosophy, reading extensive philosophical tracts. Their concerns are painfully ordinary, too, as in, "I can't find a job. I can't afford to go out. I'm invisible. I'm replaceable. I wish I had friends. I'm unlovable. I haven't had sex in years. I feel humiliated. Society hates me. My parents hate me. I hate myself." These are existential crises of meaning, each rooted in concrete, material experiences. To equate this with nihilism is a misreading so pervasive that it completely obscures what goes on in the hearts and minds of young men (and women), which is the problem, fundamentally. If young people were as indifferent as advertised, we would hear almost nothing from them. No manifestos, no car rants, no Substack monologues or obsessive panic over climate collapse, inequality, loneliness, looks-maxxing, identity, corruption and the future of Western civilization itself. Of course, once their despair is reframed as mere nihilism, institutions no longer have to engage seriously with the material conditions that produce it. Once despair is pathologized -- the need for which IS the pathology -- YOU no longer need to HELP the subjects most affected by it. Wages, housing, and educational debt vanish from the discussion. So, too, romantic alienation, social fragmentation, the end of trust and economic precarity. Now, you can aestheticize despair into an intellectual-contagion story. Now, the teenager becomes a vessel for entropy and the parents become representatives of a civilization that "deconstructed itself to death". Now, you can perform a sleight-of-hand that quietly replaces lived reality with an abstract villain, wrapped in a cautionary fable about dangerous thoughts, persuasive only in the way that horror films are persuasive.
Every human being has a "why-moment". The internet, for all its flaws, fills the gap with a democratically rare moment: millions of ordinary people, for the first time in history, can now publicly narrate dissatisfaction as they're being slapped in the face with it, in real-time, every day. Many observers clearly resent this; what clearly unsettles the cast of commentators is not the existence of despair as such, but how in-their-face it is. Previously invisible people now share the mic with those who aren't used to sharing, and their response has been eye-opening: a flood of quarantine labels -- for "social" distancing -- that continues to dismiss -- "diagnose" -- how the young's material and psychological integration is tragically failing across the West. "Nihilism!", the accusation roars. The young person is recast, merely contaminated with "bad ideas", as if speaking honestly about exhaustion is a sign of personal failure and nothing else. Every human being has a breaking point, and it's not remotely nihilistic to break in plain sight, to lose energy and hope and become bitter after believing so many promises that keep failing contact with reality as it mercilessly batters our bodies. When trust encounters non-stop betrayal, embodied skepticism is a normal, natural, response. When economic promises are constantly broken, when institutions lose all credibility, when wars are endlessly justified under false pretenses, communities are atomized, religions weakened, labor is precarious, education is financialized, social mobility is negative, public discourse is performative and politics is spectacle; when human beings are sold as brands, unable to pay rent or make ends meet, are romantically invisible, algorithmically exiled, in debt, undereducated, pitted against the opposite sex, against parenthood, against community values, delaying maturity or extending adolescence at the mercy of influencers and artificial aspiration economies, and all of it unfolds against a backdrop of stagnation and chronic ecological dread -- they aren't victims of abstract, metaphysical crises but of real-world clashes between their nervous systems and dehumanizing environments that no longer cater to the most simple, ordinary of human needs, including, most fundamentally, the need for subjective meaning. A system proves itself when it touches the body. Everything else is rhetoric and rehearsal. Any civilization can yap-maxx about resilience, progress, mental health, empowerment, inclusivity, purpose and hope, but if increasing numbers of teenage men and women can't justify participation in society, can't imagine stable futures and won't form families as a result, failing to locate themselves meaningfully within that social order, their crisis is far less philosophical than it is infrastructural.
Successful men, too, often dismiss unsuccessful ones through an unconscious survivorship bias. "I struggled just like you", they'll say. "Work harder. Grind faster. Be productive!" Women dismiss these men because they rarely register until they become disruptive or "problematic". Institutions dismiss them because institutions are designed to reward compliance -- socially sanctioned cowardice -- over prolonged public grievance. "Think positive. Touch grass. Seek therapy. You're too cynical. Stop spreading nihilism!" Yappity, yap, yap. If it's that easy to dismiss ANYONE because of how unsuccessful they are, compassion was always a conditional performance of indifference. The satiated never believe the hungry -- but how quickly they give away their game when caring isn't sharing.
What happens when a man keeps calm and carries on and nothing comes of it except more exhaustion? Eventually, hope corrodes and, eventually, that man becomes bitter, withdraws and despairs and wakes up -- and goes back to bed -- with depression in his chest. That's what embodied failure looks like from the inside: a psychological response to an unresolved existential condition. The label re-appears: "nihilist!", which is a tale as old as language itself, of course. Why, indeed, undertake the difficult task of empathizing when you can assign cold, impersonal, barely understood labels to neutralize what you cannot or will not confront with or within your own chest?
None of these slogans address the actual complaint or concern. None of them restore dignity, stability, belonging, intimacy, or purpose, and none of them answer the youth's most pressing "whys". The most revealing fact is not that the young are speaking so openly about alienation, but that so many supposedly curious and open-minded elders only manage to respond with irritation and prefab opinions. The young, however wounded, still care enough to rage, question, confess, argue, spiral, narrate, protest, with the willingness to be proven wrong and adapt. The opposite side responds with engagement only to police their language and nudge them back into obedience or toward an "acceptable" form of despair, as if despair requires moderation or even explanation. One side is desperately howling, ridden with guilt and shame, while the other keeps reaching for a mute button disguised as moral concern, and this is the most important lesson of all, long internalized by the under-30s: they have to care about themselves, like no one else, because no one else does. Welcome to the jungle.
Any "why" worth its weight in "hows" arrives after repeated friction with reality, and under these conditions, skepticism is inevitable. What's scandalous is not that young people chose to embody their skepticism, but that anyone expected their unconditional faith to survive under them. You can glorify the old meaning structures ad nauseam, but not how they collapse under their own putrid contradictions. "Postmodernist!", the accusation flies. As if postmodernism emerged because the West's fashionable intellectuals became overnight relativists. As if certainty itself hasn't repeatedly failed to produce certainty in the young AND old. Younger generations inherited skepticism: what else were they supposed to inherit?
Endless deconstruction eventually consumes itself: that much is true. A civilization can't survive a permanent state of irony, dissolved in therapeutic water and epistemic acid. Human beings -- human bodies -- still require orientation, attachment, continuity, ritual, responsibility, sex, money, food and reasons to endure suffering, but those reasons can't be demanded into existence, nor can they be outsourced to therapists, gurus, self-esteem apps and more TEDx-style lectures about resilience, mindfulness and self-optimization. Young people aren't asking for abstract answers nearly as often as they're asking for a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, and an offer, that can't be easily refused, or refuted, to fully re-enter society. What are we waiting for? If, in the meantime, society produces another "meaning crisis", let's not accuse nihilism -- again -- of a crime it didn't commit. Meaninglessness isn't inherently tied to nihilism so much as the growing recognition that the system no longer believes in ITSELF to justify the sacrifices it keeps demanding of everyone. When institutions lose confidence in their own story, younger generations notice, immediately.
"Smartphones!", the knee-jerk chorus cries.
Even that isn't the pressure point we're instructed to mistake for the problem. Is a single device, based on 60-year-old technology, the hidden reason behind alienation, debt, precarity, humiliation, loneliness and institutional distrust? Really? This obsession with screens -- and, more recently, with "AI" -- functions as another decoy, a red herring. (See: https://substack.com/@tomkaye1987/note/c-102450660.) It's much easier to blame the delivery system than to confront the conditions being delivered. It certainly offers powerful X-ray vision into contemporary moral priorities: then again, when was the last time you've seen anyone over 50 -- hell, over 40 -- honestly sit with and listen to the young? After watering down so much of what nihilism is and pretending to be confused, virtue-peacocking in front of their respective bases, which have to include none-too-closeted opportunists curating their own moral portfolios, can we act at all surprised that the young are tired of playing stupid games for equally stupid prizes? There's a massive cultural embargo, if not political blockade, preventing honest discussion about their psychological, social, and economic realities, and the internet is, for good or ill, the missing link, the virtual third place that amplifies their post-loyal confessions. Until their personal circumstances improve, teens will continue to voice their discontent and we will continue to hear from them as they age into a deferred, existentially suspended version of adulthood. Morale will improve only when their morale improves and, until then, the empathic asymmetry between young and old -- driven by the latter's compulsive need to compete for, as opposed to connect through, the mic -- will remain, too.
Is it wounded romanticism? Despair? Ennui? You can call it nihilism. You can call it whatever the hell you want. The labels, at this point, barely matter. What matters is that one side keeps sharing its wounds, vulnerably exposing them to public scrutiny, while the other keeps renaming them and editing their words to protect itself from accountability, legitimizing the very system, by omission, that produces those words and wounds. Language is power. Words are weapons. What matters is that one side is testing the waters, half-drowning and half-afloat, sad that it can't escape them, while the other is all too happy to remind them which way they flow, only to insist the current is all but imaginary. Only one side is refusing to listen. Only one of us is lying. And the young can, thankfully, still tell the difference.
I wonder if "Nihilist" is the exact term for it since it is not like these people don't believe in anything but more so that they don't believe in anything 'strongly' enough. They don't devote themselves to any principle, cause or organization. They are adrift. Their problem is not primarily about ideas or thoughts, those things are the results of a certain mode of social existence.
We used to call it existentialism - based on the loss of a belief system e.g. initially religion - that was dogmatic and answered no real questions (or faked the answers as salvation and heavenly rapture) - until science came along with a better explanation of the universe and its workings.
Science, however, has shown the universe as not caring about a species that thinks it is the be-all and end -all of the evolutionary process. So again, we have lost the feeling of salvation and importance that science was to provide.
In fact, science now says Homo sapiens is also subject to the Darwinian model and the species will also eventually be extinct.
It is the denial of death that is the cause of today's angst - along with the eventual satiation of a consumer society - focusing on the abstract notions of status and consumption as the sources of satisfaction - instead of the humanism that needs to be present for us to accept existence and mortality.
I totally agree, the denial of death and enforced optimism. We've been hiding from 'the nihilism problem' though since the 1920s (it was big and in the open from 1850-1910). Existentialism employed a cheat with Sartre's "invent your own values' - which involves a cheapening and banalisation of what meaning and value is. Consumer society is all just distraction from the void, and addiction. Have you read Zapffe?
I have not read Zapffe but I just did a quick and cursory review - basically agreeing with his concepts of over self-reflection and use of defense mechanisms (not sure about some of his 'Norwegian Noir' social beliefs).
I have a bias towards psychological explanations - the social, child and abnormal psych theories I studied in school to explain why society functions the way it does in North America.
A sort of social philosophy of anthropology is needed to explain the modern totems of existence which have been created to represent the truths of today.
I have met many ‘raised Catholic/Christian’ parents who are raising their kids ‘nothing’- the idea being ‘the kids can choose’. What they fail to realise is that they (the parents) are standing on the foundation of their faith (whether they acknowledge it or not)- it’s the sea they swim in. This crisis you allude to (in my opinion) is going to accelerate with this (as you mention in the article) the 2nd generation of non believers as they mature. I cannot help but think of the SOMA in Brave New World. Everyone medicated out of their minds. The fact is that parents somehow got the notion that ‘spiritual’ health was not a thing. In the same way that physical health is. They treated their progeny like little adults who could ‘figure it out’. We wouldn’t let a toddler plot meal plans- they need guidance and someone to prepare the meals. ‘Spirituality’ is no different. It doesn’t mean when the child grows to adult they cannot deviate from the cuisine they were raised in but that up to that point they are given enough for their bones and muscles to grow and thrive.
Society clearly took a wrong turn if a lack of purpose overcomes natural survival instinct to this degree. Did our prehistoric ancestors need myths and philosophies to endure their hardships? A healthy animal does whatever it takes to live, including killing other creatures; it needs no rationale, no justification for its existence.
Do you understand yourself? Do you understand what you're condemning? Do you understand that, when you reduce nihilism to "doomerism", conflating it with despair and depression, treating these scarecrow labels as interchangeable, you're also dumbing down the definition of nihilism itself? Do you understand the concepts you're flattening? Do you understand that those accused of nihilism are rarely, if ever, committed philosophical nihilists, but exhausted people using the most relatable vocabulary for their alienation? (ICYMI, "What Is Nihilism?": https://substack.com/@tomkaye1987/note/c-237789883.)
Language is power. Words are weapons. Labels are never neutral. It's easy to reframe teenage depression as an intellectual contagion rather than a rational response to depressing environments. It's easy to stage nihilistic despair as a viral pandemic, a quasi-religious strand of memetic possession that spreads via algorithms, postmodern parenting, climate anxiety and the collapse of inherited belief systems -- harmless while kept theoretical, safe and manageable at a distance, theatrical from the outside until the ones who come down with all the symptoms ask the final, forbidden, adults-only question:
"WHY?"
Teens don't despair because they discover nihilism. They discover nihilism because despair has already penetrated their bodies. The vast majority of young people don't arrive at hopelessness by doom-scrolling Nietzsche, Cioran, Benatar or by panic-bingeing postmodern pessimism and skepticism, but by repeatedly subjecting their nerves (and identities) to ordinary, basic-bitch reality. Philosophy is applied retroactively, if at all, to preexisting wounds. Wounds that can't afford rent, can't secure a decent job, and barely manage to sustain the intimacy required for stable relationships. Wounds that also watch the adults-in-charge recede into debt, scarcity, social disconnection, homelessness and the growing suspicion that life isn't worth living anymore. Philosophy comes after the wound, both as post-mortem narration and as post-ironic aesthetic. Plenty of people can feign indifference, acting nonchalant, but teenagers aren't that emotionally anesthetized yet. Even when they're checked out, they're locked in: even when they bed-rot, they bargain with meaning, listening for proof that society wants them back, that participation is rewarded, that the adults intend to keep their promises without bankrupting their inner lives with a social contract that must be -- but isn't worth -- resuscitating. The teenage nihilist isn't indifferent to this at all; she's furious that her capacity for hope has been hollowed out, furious that so much psychological blood is extracted from a generation already running on fumes and still expected to smile through the emotional extraction, the economic bloodletting, before adulthood even begins. A genuinely indifferent person doesn't rage at her parents, obsess over morality, reproduction, extinction, injustice or meaninglessness. She doesn't spiral through existential video essays, searching for practical answers, and she doesn't accuse, ache, or demand justification for not killing herself. Her rage, if real, if righteous, reveals an overwhelming attachment that barely registers with (the caricature of) the modern "doomer" as a detached nihilist who can sleep without asking "why?" and gaze into the abyss unflinchingly. What is a "doomer" if not an injured idealist who discovered that the world negotiates poorly with human expectations, the pain of which persists precisely because meaning still matters to them? Her complaint, her concern is not that the universe lacks inherent meaning. It's that HER universe lacks it. Her complaint is not that cosmic meaninglessness is sucky, but that her lived world, her psyche, is in a deeply intimate, grief-saturated state of implosion. She isn't promoting nihilism, as the charge goes, because she hasn't yet discovered absurdism, or Zapffe. She's suffering from failure, from failed embodiment, failed initiation, failed attachment -- from a failed life, a failed future. The why-spiral isn't caused by having scrolled or read too much Sartre and Nietzsche, but by looking, sincerely, at a civilization that struggles to justify its own existence to those who feel -- and, by and large, are -- materially, somatically, romantically, spiritually, biologically, socially, and economically left out or on their way out. The problem isn't even that young people pop the inconvenient why-question. The core issue is that institutions increasingly reply-to-all with more branding campaigns, more pills, more therapyspeak and more moralistic finger-wagging instead of material and cultural incentives to participate meaningfully in society. That distinction matters, and it matters because it's accurate. What exactly, then, is your gripe with nihilists?
When struggling young men speak online, they aren't lamenting the absence of cosmic meaning, either. They aren't curled over Schopenhauer, asking whether the noumenal world possesses intrinsic teleology, delving into esoteric philosophy, reading extensive philosophical tracts. Their concerns are painfully ordinary, too, as in, "I can't find a job. I can't afford to go out. I'm invisible. I'm replaceable. I wish I had friends. I'm unlovable. I haven't had sex in years. I feel humiliated. Society hates me. My parents hate me. I hate myself." These are existential crises of meaning, each rooted in concrete, material experiences. To equate this with nihilism is a misreading so pervasive that it completely obscures what goes on in the hearts and minds of young men (and women), which is the problem, fundamentally. If young people were as indifferent as advertised, we would hear almost nothing from them. No manifestos, no car rants, no Substack monologues or obsessive panic over climate collapse, inequality, loneliness, looks-maxxing, identity, corruption and the future of Western civilization itself. Of course, once their despair is reframed as mere nihilism, institutions no longer have to engage seriously with the material conditions that produce it. Once despair is pathologized -- the need for which IS the pathology -- YOU no longer need to HELP the subjects most affected by it. Wages, housing, and educational debt vanish from the discussion. So, too, romantic alienation, social fragmentation, the end of trust and economic precarity. Now, you can aestheticize despair into an intellectual-contagion story. Now, the teenager becomes a vessel for entropy and the parents become representatives of a civilization that "deconstructed itself to death". Now, you can perform a sleight-of-hand that quietly replaces lived reality with an abstract villain, wrapped in a cautionary fable about dangerous thoughts, persuasive only in the way that horror films are persuasive.
What a relief!
Cont'd below 👇🏻:
Every human being has a "why-moment". The internet, for all its flaws, fills the gap with a democratically rare moment: millions of ordinary people, for the first time in history, can now publicly narrate dissatisfaction as they're being slapped in the face with it, in real-time, every day. Many observers clearly resent this; what clearly unsettles the cast of commentators is not the existence of despair as such, but how in-their-face it is. Previously invisible people now share the mic with those who aren't used to sharing, and their response has been eye-opening: a flood of quarantine labels -- for "social" distancing -- that continues to dismiss -- "diagnose" -- how the young's material and psychological integration is tragically failing across the West. "Nihilism!", the accusation roars. The young person is recast, merely contaminated with "bad ideas", as if speaking honestly about exhaustion is a sign of personal failure and nothing else. Every human being has a breaking point, and it's not remotely nihilistic to break in plain sight, to lose energy and hope and become bitter after believing so many promises that keep failing contact with reality as it mercilessly batters our bodies. When trust encounters non-stop betrayal, embodied skepticism is a normal, natural, response. When economic promises are constantly broken, when institutions lose all credibility, when wars are endlessly justified under false pretenses, communities are atomized, religions weakened, labor is precarious, education is financialized, social mobility is negative, public discourse is performative and politics is spectacle; when human beings are sold as brands, unable to pay rent or make ends meet, are romantically invisible, algorithmically exiled, in debt, undereducated, pitted against the opposite sex, against parenthood, against community values, delaying maturity or extending adolescence at the mercy of influencers and artificial aspiration economies, and all of it unfolds against a backdrop of stagnation and chronic ecological dread -- they aren't victims of abstract, metaphysical crises but of real-world clashes between their nervous systems and dehumanizing environments that no longer cater to the most simple, ordinary of human needs, including, most fundamentally, the need for subjective meaning. A system proves itself when it touches the body. Everything else is rhetoric and rehearsal. Any civilization can yap-maxx about resilience, progress, mental health, empowerment, inclusivity, purpose and hope, but if increasing numbers of teenage men and women can't justify participation in society, can't imagine stable futures and won't form families as a result, failing to locate themselves meaningfully within that social order, their crisis is far less philosophical than it is infrastructural.
Successful men, too, often dismiss unsuccessful ones through an unconscious survivorship bias. "I struggled just like you", they'll say. "Work harder. Grind faster. Be productive!" Women dismiss these men because they rarely register until they become disruptive or "problematic". Institutions dismiss them because institutions are designed to reward compliance -- socially sanctioned cowardice -- over prolonged public grievance. "Think positive. Touch grass. Seek therapy. You're too cynical. Stop spreading nihilism!" Yappity, yap, yap. If it's that easy to dismiss ANYONE because of how unsuccessful they are, compassion was always a conditional performance of indifference. The satiated never believe the hungry -- but how quickly they give away their game when caring isn't sharing.
What happens when a man keeps calm and carries on and nothing comes of it except more exhaustion? Eventually, hope corrodes and, eventually, that man becomes bitter, withdraws and despairs and wakes up -- and goes back to bed -- with depression in his chest. That's what embodied failure looks like from the inside: a psychological response to an unresolved existential condition. The label re-appears: "nihilist!", which is a tale as old as language itself, of course. Why, indeed, undertake the difficult task of empathizing when you can assign cold, impersonal, barely understood labels to neutralize what you cannot or will not confront with or within your own chest?
None of these slogans address the actual complaint or concern. None of them restore dignity, stability, belonging, intimacy, or purpose, and none of them answer the youth's most pressing "whys". The most revealing fact is not that the young are speaking so openly about alienation, but that so many supposedly curious and open-minded elders only manage to respond with irritation and prefab opinions. The young, however wounded, still care enough to rage, question, confess, argue, spiral, narrate, protest, with the willingness to be proven wrong and adapt. The opposite side responds with engagement only to police their language and nudge them back into obedience or toward an "acceptable" form of despair, as if despair requires moderation or even explanation. One side is desperately howling, ridden with guilt and shame, while the other keeps reaching for a mute button disguised as moral concern, and this is the most important lesson of all, long internalized by the under-30s: they have to care about themselves, like no one else, because no one else does. Welcome to the jungle.
Any "why" worth its weight in "hows" arrives after repeated friction with reality, and under these conditions, skepticism is inevitable. What's scandalous is not that young people chose to embody their skepticism, but that anyone expected their unconditional faith to survive under them. You can glorify the old meaning structures ad nauseam, but not how they collapse under their own putrid contradictions. "Postmodernist!", the accusation flies. As if postmodernism emerged because the West's fashionable intellectuals became overnight relativists. As if certainty itself hasn't repeatedly failed to produce certainty in the young AND old. Younger generations inherited skepticism: what else were they supposed to inherit?
Endless deconstruction eventually consumes itself: that much is true. A civilization can't survive a permanent state of irony, dissolved in therapeutic water and epistemic acid. Human beings -- human bodies -- still require orientation, attachment, continuity, ritual, responsibility, sex, money, food and reasons to endure suffering, but those reasons can't be demanded into existence, nor can they be outsourced to therapists, gurus, self-esteem apps and more TEDx-style lectures about resilience, mindfulness and self-optimization. Young people aren't asking for abstract answers nearly as often as they're asking for a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, and an offer, that can't be easily refused, or refuted, to fully re-enter society. What are we waiting for? If, in the meantime, society produces another "meaning crisis", let's not accuse nihilism -- again -- of a crime it didn't commit. Meaninglessness isn't inherently tied to nihilism so much as the growing recognition that the system no longer believes in ITSELF to justify the sacrifices it keeps demanding of everyone. When institutions lose confidence in their own story, younger generations notice, immediately.
"Smartphones!", the knee-jerk chorus cries.
Even that isn't the pressure point we're instructed to mistake for the problem. Is a single device, based on 60-year-old technology, the hidden reason behind alienation, debt, precarity, humiliation, loneliness and institutional distrust? Really? This obsession with screens -- and, more recently, with "AI" -- functions as another decoy, a red herring. (See: https://substack.com/@tomkaye1987/note/c-102450660.) It's much easier to blame the delivery system than to confront the conditions being delivered. It certainly offers powerful X-ray vision into contemporary moral priorities: then again, when was the last time you've seen anyone over 50 -- hell, over 40 -- honestly sit with and listen to the young? After watering down so much of what nihilism is and pretending to be confused, virtue-peacocking in front of their respective bases, which have to include none-too-closeted opportunists curating their own moral portfolios, can we act at all surprised that the young are tired of playing stupid games for equally stupid prizes? There's a massive cultural embargo, if not political blockade, preventing honest discussion about their psychological, social, and economic realities, and the internet is, for good or ill, the missing link, the virtual third place that amplifies their post-loyal confessions. Until their personal circumstances improve, teens will continue to voice their discontent and we will continue to hear from them as they age into a deferred, existentially suspended version of adulthood. Morale will improve only when their morale improves and, until then, the empathic asymmetry between young and old -- driven by the latter's compulsive need to compete for, as opposed to connect through, the mic -- will remain, too.
Is it wounded romanticism? Despair? Ennui? You can call it nihilism. You can call it whatever the hell you want. The labels, at this point, barely matter. What matters is that one side keeps sharing its wounds, vulnerably exposing them to public scrutiny, while the other keeps renaming them and editing their words to protect itself from accountability, legitimizing the very system, by omission, that produces those words and wounds. Language is power. Words are weapons. What matters is that one side is testing the waters, half-drowning and half-afloat, sad that it can't escape them, while the other is all too happy to remind them which way they flow, only to insist the current is all but imaginary. Only one side is refusing to listen. Only one of us is lying. And the young can, thankfully, still tell the difference.
What a relief.
That’s insightful. You obviously have something to say about this. I think I tend towards agreement. Sort it into an essay or two. I’ll read it.
I wonder if "Nihilist" is the exact term for it since it is not like these people don't believe in anything but more so that they don't believe in anything 'strongly' enough. They don't devote themselves to any principle, cause or organization. They are adrift. Their problem is not primarily about ideas or thoughts, those things are the results of a certain mode of social existence.