The Nihilist Parents' Guide

How Generation X parents passed the Crisis of Meaning onto our kids

A lot of kids today seem to be calling themselves nihilists and this is more than a little troubling as this used to be how I described myself when I was their age. Thinking about consequences over decades, these days I’m of the conviction that a philosophy that tells you that everything is foundationless may not be the best base for building a life.

I was immersed in the fashionable milieu of Gen X nihilists in the 90s with the Young British Artists movement, the nascent queer/hedonist culture and the industrial music scene. To paraphrase Marlon Brando in The Wild One, if someone asked me and my peers what we stood against, we would have replied ‘what have you got?’

After a decade of playing out the hip version of Nietzsche’s negation-of-all-values, somehow, the impossible happened: I and quite a few others in my group passed from being cynical promoters of rebellious nothingness, to becoming semi-functional parents. How the hell did we do it, and did we did we fail and pass something malignant onto our kids, is my question now. Have we in fact bequeathed our kids the nothingness problem that we fled from, by the act of having children?

At an event I did this year, the journalist and social critic Suzanne Moore encapsulated the issue of the ‘Generation X nihilist parent’ in an image. She said that twenty years ago, she saw a young mother holding a newborn baby, while wearing an old Punk T-shirt that carried a slogan from the famous Sex Pistols lyric: NO FUTURE.

This image has been troubling me since, making me ask, did we generation X parents actually teach our kids that their world is doomed? Is this why so many of Gen Z identify with doomer culture today? Did we attempt to raise our kids with fashionable negation, with no beliefs at all and hurt them as a result? And could this be why now, our generation Z kids, appear to be lost and depressed, currently reporting the highest incidence of both mental illness (42%) and mental health prescription medicines usage in History (62%). It would seem that this is connected to ‘the meaninglessness epidemic’ that they report to be suffering from.

There are also those other Gen Z kids, who are rebelling against the ‘negation of all values’ we instilled in them and who are running off to commit themselves to ‘big beliefs’, of the religious and political varieties.

Is all this our fault as nihilist parents?

It might very well be the case. When we started out as amateur mothers and fathers, in the late 90s and early 2000s, we had no guides on how to be parents or alt parents. We mostly rejected everything our mothers and fathers stood for and tried to pass onto us. There was no ‘Dr.Spock’ parenting guidebook for anti-parents, no ‘Toddler Taming’ for iconoclasts. No book called ‘Child Rearing and Nothingness’. So, what did we actually ‘teach’ our kids?

Consider this semi-comic scenario, drawn from reality.

A child asks, why do I have to go to school? And the genuinely nihilist parent could and probably should reply, “you’re right kid, education is pointless. It creates meaningless and oppressive social hierarchies and ultimately all human life is without purpose anyway.”

To most of the child’s questions the nihilist parent replies with their conviction that there are no answers, values or standards, everything is just arbitrary social constructs. So, they can’t say this is right, this is wrong, do this, don’t do that.

Teenagers might think that’s cool, little kids find it destabilising. If you smash the ground people stand on, then how can a toddler learn how to walk?

Then there’s the confrontation between nihilism and the standard daily issues at school: studying, friends, competitiveness, jealousy, the in-crowd and the out. There’s the issue of car-pools for driving cars to school, even though you, as a nihilist parent, don’t ‘believe in cars’, or think the planet can or should be saved from ‘omissions. Then there’s the issue of school uniforms, when you don’t believe any authority is legitimate, but you also don’t want your child to be isolated.

So, the nihilist parent is endlessly compromising and putting out fires around issues they don’t believe in, as incidents keep happening to their child that is ill-adapted to a world in which there are these annoying people, like the parents of your children’s friends, who are naïve and stupid enough to actually “believe in things”.

Every situation demands choices be made. Religious lessons in school, yes or no? Sex education in class, for or against? And at what age? Gender neutral bathrooms? Vegetarian school meals? Class grades and fashionable sneakers that all kids must copy-purchase or face ostracisation and the clash of values that is sleepovers with regular ‘normie’ families. The nihilist parent doesn’t buy into ballet classes and teenie discos and spelling bees and Positivity Parent Training and No Child Left Behind policies and all the social constructs that they ramify – but they go along with them anyway. Reluctantly and with a sigh, since ‘none of this really matters’.

On and on it goes with every single issue involved in a world full of parents, kids and authorities who aren’t nihilists - and let’s face it your kid, with their hunger for learning and experience, isn’t someone who believes that life has no intrinsic meaning, purpose, or value; that no objective morality exists or that the entire universe is devoid of all value and will ultimately end in nothingness.

They like stuff, they want stuff, they hate stuff. When they cry you feel pain inside your own body.

The nihilist parent eventually learns that they have to appear to care about this horribly pointless existence that they have been forced to live within. They have to fake it till they make it, for the sake of the child.

Depressive fatalism really won’t do on school sports day. There can be no question of “it doesn’t matter if you don’t win the race, because winning and losing are pointless in the grand scheme of thing in which our species not only loses but is wiped out by the expansion of the sun”. There has to be feigned enthusiasm and faked cheering at the sidelines. Such strategies become the nihilist parent’s camouflage and survival mode. “Oh, you won a medal, wow”. “Oh, you all did, because the teachers believe in equity, right, I see. Excellent.”

Two nihilist parents fighting over how not to bring up their child is also pretty standard among my generation of Nietzsche, Camus, Zapffe and Cioran readers. A battle of negations without a positive plan. Divorce is just as meaningless as marriage, so why bother? Let’s stay together because splitting up is also pointless and the universe will end in Heat Death anyway.

Nihilists live like this, endlessly negating everything around themselves, the education system, the law, pop culture, the belief in success that fuels the economy, the belief in ‘progress’ - and let’s face it, after a few decades of negating everything apart from the need for oxygen, nihilists are already pretty exhausted before their kids even get pushed out of a womb.

Your child may even detect that you’ve held normie parents in something like condescending contempt for years, mocking their Barbie pinks and Do Good car stickers. That there is something about the role of being a parent that you fundamentally reject, due to it historic religious and political baggage.

And then of course is the child’s dawning realisation – “you don’t believe in anything at all do you mum?” “Do you dad?”

How do you reply to that?

Fabricate something you passionately believe in so as not to give the game away and not demoralise the kid?

Recycling plastics perhaps? A feigned passion for women’s soccer? A professed faith in the emancipatory power of pop-music, even though you sense that over three decades its passions feel increasingly done-before, hormonal and hollow.

Then suddenly, one day, there is the big moral dilemma.

Say, your child is being bullied at school.

Unlike the Catholic parent or the involved Socialist slash Feminist parent on the PTA, the nihilist parent really doesn’t know what to do. They can’t act on their convictions as they don’t have any. The nihilist parent can’t stand up and say, “bullying is evil and must be stopped right now”. They can’t fall back on the Christian ‘turn the other cheek’ principle as advice to their bullied child. Neither can they endorse the vengeful eschatology of the Christian Day of Judgment in which those who bullied your kid will really get what’s coming to them, with tortures that include having their burned skin striped from their screaming bodies, for all eternity.

Nihilist parents can’t tell the kid to fight back or enrol them in judo classes, as doing so would mean endorsing Darwinian 'survival of the fittest,' dominance hierarchies, or worse, a 'right-wing' belief that prioritises their family DNA over that of others.

Neither can the nihilist parent report the bully to the school, because that would only legitimate the authority of teachers, police, social work depts and the whole network of social governance etc. Most of all they can’t be true to their nihilist convictions and tell the child, as Cioran and Zapffe would have advised, that bullies don’t matter, because they will be dead soon enough, and so will we all and none of it matters. (Actually that’s not 100% right - as both nihilists were antinatalists who advocated never having any children and letting the species die out.)

The bullying problem continues without a solution. How about moving the kid to another school to another school, or homeschooling? But here again do nihilists really want to be stuck at home teaching a kid reading skills, maths, geography, grammar, science and many other things that they don’t believe there is a future in, and can’t find any energy for. Why, so their kid can one day have a career? Who believes in careers?

So, what do nihilist parents do? Even when confronted with the bullied child problem, they are so accustomed to the dissociative state of contemplating nothingness that they tend to do nothing - they merely philosophise, sigh, pour a drink, smoke a secret spliff and avoid a confrontation with the horribly compromising nature of ‘the real’. But still their eight-year-old child is weeping before them with a bruised cheek, and a broken tooth asking for help in preventing that big kid at school from pushing them into walls and spitting in their face again tomorrow. And the next day.

And then the child develops symptoms, anxiety, avoidant behaviours, learned helplessness, depression, revenge fantasies. A bullied child whose parents do nothing, can be a fast track to mental illness, self-harm and anti-social behaviour. Such a child could collapse inwards or lash out.

This dilemma causes the nihilist parent great pain. They feel their child’s fear and tears within their own chests. The empty ache of it.

They can no longer just pick up the child and hold them and tell them that the world is a terrible place and that all of the values people force on us are unfair.

They can’t postpone action, like they’ve done all their lives, because postponing will only allow the bullying to continue. And here the problem for the nihilist parent becomes painfully clear. If you don’t buy into the world and are simply reactive and putting out fires as they arise, then you are really just waiting around for the fires to erupt and by then it’s always too late because your kid has already got burned. And this will keep happening.

Your child is crying.

Just do something. Act now.

But how can you ‘do something’ when you believe in nothing?

It's at points like this that the nihilist parent realises, in their bones that nihilism is wrong. Not just morally wrong but fundamentally flawed as a philosophy for living beings.

There is care and there is unstoppable empathy for a little person with your DNA who is suffering. There are viruses and bullies and gangs that hurt your child and a stance has to be taken to make the pain stop. There is love, you feel it in your marrow, so therefore this must mean love has value. And if there are values, that means they must be protected, so that means there also must be justice.

Thinking it through, not one single nihilist philosopher in history ever had a child.

There’s no other way around it, it’s like having a whirling black hole and a baby in the same room - one of them has to go. You have to give up on this philosophy that you nurtured for so long as a sign of your rebellion against the world, or your kid suffers.

So, piece by piece you work backwards. From nothingness, in reverse, you start to build up temporary, testable belief structures, just so your kid can survive day by day. And it feels good to act in the world, and it feels painful, and maybe the avoidance of pain has been what fed your nihilism all along. You’ve been taking refuge in dissociative states of reality negation because the world hurts too much. Maybe all the nihilists in history have hiding from the pain of living?

Your child is injured due to violence, and the whole world stops. You would give your life to make things right again. As a parent, that’s the day when nihilism dies for you.

And the final test, after bullying and sickness and exam failures and injuries and all the other ordeals of childhood, is that one day your child asks you – “Why did you have me?” “What’s the point of life?”

And you’d better have an answer for your kid, that is not – “all life is meaningless, and the universe will end one day and all of it will have meant nothing, but don’t worry, we’re in this together.” You may have to lie to protect your kid from the truth.

I recall an old nihilist friend of mine scorned me when I got married and I told her I was going to have a family, “what the hell are you doing?” she sneered, “you don’t believe in any of that shit, and it won’t last - you’re just desperately trying to cling onto something, and if you have kids, you’ll just end up fucking them up.”

Yes, we came from this background in which nihilism was the norm and we also hid from its consequences. Looking back, the icons of our generation were people who grappled with nihilism and lost – Kurt Cobain, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chester Bennington, Alexander McQueen, Sinead O Connor and the one author that our generation loved more than all others David Foster Wallace. All these nihilist artists ended up committing suicide or dying from substance abuse. A study by the UK national Office of statistics has shown that it’s not only artists but people born in the 1960s and 70s stand out as the generation most likely to die by suicide or drug poisoning. These, in any other generation would have been our role models.

We Gen X nihilists have made it hard for our kids by having to defeat nihilism while we’ve been learning parenting by busking it ‘on the job’. They’re having to live through our amateurishness coupled with the fallout from our generation’s flight from meaninglessness. The nihilist subculture we were raised within and that we struggled to shake off is now, unfortunately, the foundation of their culture. It’s as if Generation X were the theory of nihilism and our Generation Z kids are the experiment in putting the theory into daily practice. Could our kids survive their parents lack of values?

And for those of us who had kids, there is the nagging danger that the child will work out that the only reason we brought them into the world was because we were struggling to find any meaning purpose or motivation for ourselves and after all the option ran out, making a child seemed like the only available option. Which of course, is a terrible burden on a child as it means we dumped our lack meaning and purpose onto them expecting them to carry the weight of their lost adult parents on their shoulders. We made them our secret reason to live. Not only that, but we spat them into existence without any kind of plan for how we would bring them up, so this is a double burden on them.

Still, what’s done is done, and maybe it is not so bad that there may be some kind of natural impulse to seek life’s meaning in having children; we were certainly not the first generation to act on that.

Parenting, pushed me to make my final break with nihilism, as it has done for almost every comparable parent I know. From the initial step into parenthood, radiating outwards, it follows that the things that effect the lives of your child all matter – food, play, education, friends, safety, risk, learning. And from this, purpose and meaning keep radiating out; there have to be structures put in place within society that nurture and uphold these things, so social meaning develops, and soon you’re fighting for things in the name of values and standards. The drop of water that fell into your life keeps radiating out in circles, and soon everything matters. It has to.

You cannot tell your own child ‘your life is meaningless and doesn’t matter’ not least of all because it cannot possibly be true.

We know now that humans need meaning and purpose to be healthy. A growing body of evidence across multiple disciplines suggests that a lack of perceived meaning in life contributes to mental illness and anxiety. A 2015 clinical study by J. García-Alandete used "Purpose in Life Tests" to demonstrate a strong link between a sense of meaning and psychological well-being. Conversely, the study found a higher incidence of suicide among those who struggled to find purpose. As García-Alandete writes, "Meaning in life buffers the association between risk factors for suicide and hopelessness."

Since the 1950s, existential therapists like Irvin Yalom proved that lacking purpose causes deep psychological distress; a claim supported by Jerome Bruner’s research on narrative psychology. Today, therapies like Dan McAdams’ "narrative identity" theory show we structure our lives through stories, using them to create coherence and purpose.

We can know all this but here’s the lingering and underlying problem: as a former nihilist, you will lack a life-narrative to pass on to your children. You understand they need a belief structure for good mental health, yet how do you bridge the gap between negation and belief? Do you give up on making-it-up as you go along, and commit to one big belief system yourself? Force yourself to finally believe for their sake? Kierkegaard’s "leap of faith" isn’t a simple act of pretending. If you leap towards a belief that is based in self-deception you’ll fall into the chasm and won’t make it to the other side. So how do you cross the gap without falling? How do you build core, lasting meaning when you’ve spent decades dismantling it?

You first have to shake off the old body armour of nihilism, the stock answers and default settings that once gave you cred. Then you just have to go with your gut feeling – maternal feeling, paternal. What is the point of life - your child will ask you? And they mean your life and their own. And the answer is right there if you let yourself feel it - its this feeling between you and your child, from chest to chest, from eye to eye, that force of connection as strong as gravity, as strong as any force we find in physics. And so that too must be true, and therefore truth exists. And this feeling you sense, is beautiful. Truth and beauty therefore exist. You see, you agree, and before you know it, you have already stepped away from nihilism, and are looking for answers, all the big ones.

Yes, we Gen X parents are doing everything backwards, we should have worked out a picture of the world and a belief system before having children. We shouldn’t have thrown them into the nothingness we were trying to escape from. We might experience guilt over this, if so, we should feel it deeply, apologise and share this sense of failure with our kids, not hide it. Not double down.

Yes, we may have destablised our kids by undermining the ground they should have stood on and grown upon, but we are with them now in the wreckage, and we urgently need to build something solid together, for their sake, for ours and also for the kids they too will be having in not so many years time.

Ewan Morrison’s new novel For Emma is now available as an audiobook as a paperback in the UK and as a hardback in the USA.