The Maelstrom

The Insane, Corrosive Conditions of Online Adolescence

I love all those who are like heavy drops falling individually from the dark cloud that hangs over humanity: they herald the coming of the lightning, and as heralds they perish.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

We are all aware by now that this is a lonely age. Friendships feel shallow and superficial. Local communities have deteriorated. The promise of constant connection turned out to be a cruel trap. A generation with access to billions of people say they feel lonelier than pensioners.

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Freya India

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

-Neil Postman

A World Without Solid Footing

Jupiter contains more mass than every other solar body (barring the sun) in our solar system combined. It’s a gas giant, with an atmosphere of mainly hydrogen and helium (with traces of methane, ammonia, etc.).

The Galileo spacecraft made gravity assisted passes around the planet and its moons (Ganymede, Io, Europa, others) for years, and in 2003 it plunged into the planet’s atmosphere in a suicidal last grab for data. Although Jupiter is ~317x more massive than Earth, the initial atmospheric gravity is only 2.4x greater than it is on our planet’s surface, for Jupiter’s outer atmosphere is wispy and layered and dynamic, all clouds and gases.

That’s it. Jupiter is just a big (huge) ball of gas. As the Galileo probe entered the atmosphere and dove inward, toward the planet’s core, it detected steadily rising gravity and temperatures. The clouds became thicker and more substantial. The probe went offline after about 1 hour, but it could have continued plunging for weeks if it had survived. There is no sudden phase change in Jupiter’s atmosphere-it’s just a gradually increasing soup of gases, then thick gases, then soupy semi-liquids, then liquids, thick liquids, hyper-pressurized liquids, etc. Some scientists think that Jupiter has a solid core but it doesn’t really matter for our purposes-if there are heavy elements in the center of Jupiter the inward pressure keeps them molten, with estimated temperatures of 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

We think of planets as solid balls, with surfaces that are (theoretically) navigable, but Jupiter probably isn’t like that. It’s just a huge ball of gas, with pressure and temperature that gradually increases beyond imagining. Somehow, the composition of Jupiter makes me think about the online world which we’ve built and thrust upon adolescents in the developed world: the insubstantiality, the swirling, poisonous fumes, the lack of hard surface or firm footing.

We think of cultures as bundles of values and perspectives and practices, which are treated as consensus positions among distinct groups of people. These beliefs and habits anchor their members’ psychological places in the world, and they give them a sense of stability and unity. It is possible that the previously unimaginable digital tools that we have created (networks of communication, financial transaction, sexual stimulation, research, and advertisement of virtue and success) could be at least conditionally instrumental to young users, with proper guidance and supervision and with a solid and resilient culture to ground them. We used to have such a culture, with concepts of virtue, responsibility, sexual propriety, and achievement. All of those concepts are gone now, at least across large swathes of America. They’ve been replaced by a kind of miasmic series of reflexes: believe the things that make you appear to be nice to others (empathy, tolerance, inclusivity, normalization, destigmatization), do the things that make you feel good or which serve your plans and goals (growth mindset, self-actualization, self-care, prioritize yourself), and avoid negativity or challenge or discomfort (good vibes only, no invalidation).

If you’re an adult I encourage you to really look around at the society which you inhabit. How much of your mental picture is based on memories, decades-old habits of thought, youthful training? How many of those lessons and experiences have subsequently disappeared, and are no longer available for young people today? The contemporary reality for young people in one of immersion in the world(s) of social media, which is not a world that you probably have much access to. Doesn’t it seem strange that corporations and influencers and activists have privileged, algorithmically boosted access to the young people of today and tomorrow? It seems strange to me.

Rehab Girl

I came to Florida for rehab, many years ago. Rehab gave me my initial interest in clinical psychology. It involved months of intensive group therapy and 12-step meetings and re-examinations of assumptions. For the first time in my life, I had time to sit, and pause, and consider the society I was participating in, which is a rare luxury these days. In the course of my treatment, I met a young woman (who’s in her early 30’s by now) who had pronounced borderline traits-insecure identity, anxious attachment styles, impulsivity to the point of self-harm, persistent and egregious attention seeking. I stayed in touch with her and gave her rides from time to time, and when the woke moral panic of 2020 kicked off (remember that period? Many people would prefer that we all forget it) I was ‘ostracized’ by her. I was already writing about culture and politics, and this happened at the behest of her online friends (I put ostracized in quotations, for while I had a sturdy and vital in-person social network, she was adrift and reliant upon daily Facebook posts to sustain her sense of drama and connection).

At some point, she changed her name and created a new profile and friend requested me, and I accepted, without a word. She was profoundly mentally ill, and in a healthier society she would’ve found herself in a comforting structure of rules and expectations into which she could learn and grow. She would ‘find herself'‘-not in the postmodern sense of doing whatever it is you really want to do and justifying it using pop psychology lingo, but in the deeper and truer sense of discovering your place in a social hierarchy and trying to fulfill your duties and develop your relationships and talents to their maximal extent (which are usually much greater than people imagine). ‘Finding yourself’ is a socially constrained and communitarian notion, not an individualistic one, but she didn’t know that, and I doubt anyone had ever tried to tell her. They don’t know it either.

In the interim she had declared herself non-binary (shocker), then gender fluid, then trans (“I don’t want to be with Tom Selleck-I want to BE him”), to the rapturous acclaim of her online friends, a cohort of similarly lost and mentally ill children and naifs and sadists and perverts. People on the left will claim that trans people don’t get special validation… and then they’ll offer special validation when someone ‘comes out.’ They will claim that adolescents (this individual was well into her 20’s, but consider a hypothetical 14-year old girl) won’t declare themselves trans just for peer group approval or lavish praise. Teenage girls? Won’t be swayed by the gushing praise of dozens of close friends and romantic interests? And won’t be dissuaded from turning back by a similar, converse level or disapproval if they change their mind? Is anyone really claiming this?! Many do, at least implicitly. Gender ideology is a religion.

But she wasn’t a gender ideologue, I don’t think… not really. She was just confused and had trouble defining herself without the constant input and validation of others. People like that are exhausting to be around (she was immature and “extra” as the kids say) and so her people tended to be people online. She was not well-liked. I only saw her on Facebook and Instagram, but I know that she had Snapchat and TikTok (etc.). God knows what she did on those platforms, or how much, but she posted long and manic missives on Facebook every day. She got into ‘sex work’ (which she proudly advertised to all of her followers, including-presumably-high school friends and family). This mostly consisted of her sending photos of her feet (or other parts) to men for money (at least that’s all I knew about, for that’s what she proclaimed to the world). She would start a GoFundMe every few months for some crisis or trauma. She moved around and would post about her ‘sobriety’ (we met in drug rehab, after all) every 3-6 months, but she never seemed to accumulate much time. All of her updates were something like: hey y’all, I’m in Richmond and found some really rad dudes to crash with. Been 4 months without benzos and have hella rebound anxiety but I know I’m strong. I could really use your love and support. Here’s my CashApp if you want to help. I got a job at a pet store and I’m feeling rlly positive. Catch you later…

Two months later another update would pop up on my timeline, with a 12,000-word manifesto about how one of her roommates was a narcissist and tried to SA (sexually assault… online lingo) her and she needed therapy. It would link to her GoFundMe. When I say I saw this cycle play out a dozen times before she fell off my map (I have no idea what happened to her, but I stopped checking Facebook) I’m not exaggerating.

My rehab acquaintance was a symptom of a lifestyle which is only now-10 years after its accelerated contagion-becoming recognized for what it is: a new form of mental illness. The dynamics are familiar and recognizable by now. She was the first example I knew of what I later found out was a distinct type: the nihilistic, too-online young person, locked into compulsive engagement and often harmful behaviors on his or her smartphone. Calling this an epidemic understates the problem. If this issue was visible to the adult world, it would probably be our biggest priority.

Caught in the Maelstrom

(Kids)

Imagine it. You’re descending in the swirling, noxious clouds of Jupiter. The pressure is crushing but getting worse. Vast red ammonia-rich cloud banks emerge from the decks below and as soon as they appear on the horizon, they envelop you. Darkness, heat, stinging gas and particulates being flung against your face at hundreds of miles per hour.

Imagine it. You didn’t choose to come into this world, but you’re here. You’re a 13-year-old girl, in the United States, anno Domini 2025. The future is a frightening mist of uncertainty, the past is full of happy memories (which are painful, somehow) and embarrassments and regrets (also painful). Insecurity and longing for status are your most familiar sensations. Almost everything you think you know about your society is a convenient narrative, spun by strangers. Your world is classes and extracurriculars and friends and teachers… and your phone. All day long you ingest this bizarre and noisome material: long speeches about gender identity; brief screeds about racism in America now and genocides before-full of anger and misunderstood facts and statistics, with all nuance and context deleted; images (so many images-thousands per day!) of better, cooler, skinner, prettier women; time-wasting games and suggestive messages from boys and venomous online pressure from girls. There’s an entire invisible (to adults) galaxy of slights and jokes and video clips and unrelenting cruelties. Your attention wanders, constantly. Your mood plummets into despair, anxiety (from what? it’s never clear), joy and longing… back again. You feel sure that your nation is bad and that happiness is somehow tied to beauty and good grades and money and status. After all, those are the targets you’ve seen your parents and every other adult (except for the poor… but you don’t know any of them, and they’re not doing well either) chase all your life. You feel, deep down, that your culture is bad and wrong somehow, and that your parents are oblivious and powerless in this new world. Perhaps every teenager over the past 100 years has had these feelings about their parents from time to time but in your case it’s justified. They let you wander through a landscape of sickness, without guidance or supervision, day after day.

If you’re a poor teenager the conditions are similar but worse, in every sense. Your online activities are full of explicit content, crimes, money, sex, and nihilism. Education and respectability aren’t so much discouraged as annihilated-they simply no longer exist, conceptually, here. Your family is more harried and strained and the risks that lie around you on all sides are much more serious and densely planted. The adults in your life also don’t intervene though. They leave you to your phone. Both rich and poor parents and guardians have that in common. The evening chats and school assemblies and health class lectures are quickly overwhelmed by the torrent of digital ooze that you wade through. If any of those adults really cared they would probably act. They do care. They just don’t understand. They’re running the software of 40 years ago in a world that’s no longer suited to it. They will be the last firmly rooted generation in this country. After them, the deluge. The signs are already here.

(Adults)

I’m very much struck by the lack of curiosity among adults as to the state of youth culture today. Consider it: there’s a vast and ever-changing constellation of personalities, concepts, and content forms that are subject only to the constraints of the market (exciting/addicting/sensational/explicit/transgressive) and to the most minimal legal requirements. I rarely hear an adult put themselves in the shoes of a contemporary young person. It’s as if selfishness has corroded even our intergenerational ties. Let the teens do whatever they’re doing… as long as they go to class. Rarely among adults do I hear the open question: how would you have consumed content, if the modern digital landscape was open to you, every waking minute, during your childhood years?

Girls-insecurity and eating disorders

Boys-pornography

Girls-gender confusion & veganism & radical anti-parent, anti-tradition content designed to turn a young person against every adult in their life (and, indeed, against the entire adult world)

Boys-resentful ideological content about women and society (some of which is partially true, and never addressed by schools or parents)

Girls-endless makeup tutorials

Boys-gaming addictions and highly antisocial ‘prank’ channels

Girls-peer bullying

Boys-narcissists and predators

Girls-suicide

Boys-suicide

I don’t even consume any of this content… yet I bump up against it constantly (probably due to my own social science research projects). If you’re an adult I want you to self-reflect: when was the last time you considered the effects of this avalanche of pathology on kids’ minds? have you encountered the statistics regarding eating disorders and adolescent depression and teen suicide and shook your head sadly… and gone on with your life? Why is no one talking about this?

I honestly think that parents don’t want to know (and teachers are completely impotent in this regard). They want to know if their kids are in trouble, of course, but they don’t want to know what their kids are exposed to. They already do know: they’re exposed to everything. They’re exposed to everything in the world, and they might be looking at it at any given time and you will almost certainly never know, and you permit this situation because you feel powerless and uncertain.

Specifics

There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic”, apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.” In other words, your own imaginary ‘X’, with infinite “simulated fictional characters”. You, alone, in a vast social network of AI bots.

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Freya India

, We Live in Imaginary Worlds

• Mentally ill teenagers are told that gender is very important, that identity is a kind of deeper truth, lying beneath the layers of confusion and socialization, and that if they can just uncover it they will blossom and rise like the phoenix. The implicit message here is that CHANGING or modifying your current gender is the way to happiness (and the way to win status, approval, praise, admiration, validation, sympathy… things that simply never influence the decisions of adolescents, according to many educators and policymakers).

Every single time trans-identified girls and women spell out what it means to be a “man,” they reveal more than they intend:

When I think of growing up into a man, I think of being in a body that doesn't distress me so much, being perceived as male, fatherhood, and more freedom to just be, I guess.

A mix of heartbreaking and fantastical motivations, in other words.

I feel really fortunate that at this point in my life I have some guy friends who are beautiful examples of wholesome masculinity. They are loving parents and community members who live peaceful, thoughtful lives.

It hasn't always been this way. I had a lot of fears surrounding transition because of my long experiences with terrible and abusive men.

Another commenter writes:

Masculinity to me is more like armor

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Eliza Mondegreen

, My body is a temple and I will decorate it to feel at home

• There’s an entire HUGE bloc (millions and millions of creators) who essentially offer anti-mental healthcare: focus on your emotions, validate yourself, cut people off, don’t settle, prioritize yourself, protect yourself from discomfort. None of this advice is generally good or useful… but it’s popular. And ‘popular’ is all that matters in this world.

TransMascStories presents a variety of resources to guide young women who are questioning their gender. Arthur Rockwell, a trans-identified YouTuber… says that she thinks of transition as “not too different from any other major life choice. (...) I went to the college I did because I researched a bunch of options and I thought that ultimately that college I chose would make me the most happy; a transition doesn’t need to be any different.” Then there’s Dara Hoffman-Fox’s guide to You and Your Gender Identity. (It appears that Hoffman-Fox has been on her own ‘gender journey’—like many female gender clinicians, she started out as a self-effacing ally and morphed into a self-celebrating “queer, nonbinary” counselor.)

…

Finally, TMS shares a link to a “scientific process for a complicated question”: how to figure out if you’re really trans. The author calls himself Zoe, identifies as a woman and a lesbian, and describes himself as a professor of technical writing, which I find somewhat hard to believe. He also thinks you should know about his mental health diagnoses:

I’m also the recipient of a lovely smattering of mental health diagnoses, the most prominent of which is C-PTSD. I’ve got a significant history of trauma, which I’ve done a lot of work on over the decades. I’m good now. Really good. Promise. That said, because of that history, I talk about these issues with some frequency, because I think that talking about them makes it easier for other people to talk about their own hurts—and, more importantly, get help for them.

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Eliza Mondegreen

, “If, when, and how you transition is a choice. Being trans is not.”

• Tupulmancy and gender fluidity and neurodivergence and limerence: all terms that adults mostly don’t understand, but teens do. Has there ever been a situation in which the youth were allowed to go off and form an entire fetid culture, influenced only by corporations and influencers and activists who want to use their anger and insecurity as kindling for profit or for political change? This situation turns the entire function of a ‘culture’ on its head.

  Incidentally, the generation which instigated (more than any other) the erosion of norms and values in the West experienced a very similar (but much less private and much less invasive) kind of phenomenon with the 60’s counterculture. Most participants came back from that experiment and even learned from it… but they weren’t children. And they were unable to reconstruct the standards and certainties of their parents. They bequeathed a world of ambiguity and shallow status-consciousness to their children, who are now suffering under that legacy.

The TikTank… Report also found that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.” Additionally, “compulsive usage also interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”

• Young women online advertise status by being picky, misandrist, narcissistic, self-absorbed online… and boys see this content and use it to form their vision of feminity.

In the Digital Wellbeing Document, Defendants admit that “offering effects that perpetuate a narrow beauty norm . .. ha[s] the potential to negatively impact the wellbeing of our community.”

-TikTok Internal Memo

Let’s start with the young women who transform their faces. You know the ones: they have their lips injected, noses chiseled, skin blurred with Botox, and cheeks pumped with filler, each funneling their previously unique features into the same Instagram Face.

It often happens slowly. First, they fill their lips. Next, they need to even it out with a nose job. Then botox; then a brow lift; and it goes on.

Then one day they wake up and realize they have rearranged their entire face for Instagram. They don’t recognize their reflection. Or even like it. I’ve seen this happen a lot lately: influencers are dissolving their fillers, reversing surgeries, realizing they were beautiful before. Molly-Mae Hague, for example, a reality TV influencer here in the UK, recently admitted to having no idea how she ended up destroying her face: “I literally looked like a different person. When I look back at pictures now, I’m terrified of myself. I’m like, ‘Who was that girl?’ I don’t know what happened.”

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Freya India

, What the Algorithm Does to Young Girls

• Young men have formed a coalition of MGTOW/red pill influencers who label women as shallow, grasping, and predatory. This group is different from and opposed to incels (something that the bureaucratic superstructure seems determined to misunderstand; look at the recent furor around Adolescence) but it is not psychologically healthy for teen boys to be saturated with this message. The message is: ignore women until you’re rich and strong and high-status, and only engage with them when you’re the dominant partner in those interactions. Avoid emotions, intimacy, and commitment with women because they will suck you dry or ruin your reputation or betray you. Girls see this content and use it to form their vision of masculinity.

Men, as noted, commit suicide more often than women. The reasons for this have been widely discussed. Men tend to use more violent means, more violently. Men are not as good at describing feelings of unhappiness, shame, or loss of status. If they do not reproduce, it is not as unusual as women who do not. The male separatist movement, Men Going their Own Way, frequently cite a statistic that claims that 60 percent of men historically did not have children, as a result of dying in war or because of the injustice of sexual selection. From this point of view, women are “worth” more to the universe and, consequently, to “society,” insofar as such a thing exists

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Nina Power

• Young women are told that any amount of fatness can be good/healthy/beautiful and that people who are fat just need to practice “self-love.” They rant against “fatphobia” and “systemic oppression.” Do you find this ridiculous? Do you imagine that there are not entire, busy communities of people who claim that obesity doesn’t increase the risk of heart disease or that fat people make less only because of discrimination or that choosing not to date fat people is, in itself, bigotry? There absolutely are. Now imagine 1,000 more crazy ideas, of every flavor. Each has its own advocates and its own communities, and a massive, unprotected audience of children to proselytize to.

• On the other side of the equation, many young women are driven to starvation, purging, cosmetic enhancement, body dysmorphia. We all know someone who’s been affected… even if you don’t know who it is.

Where are the adults?

Vulnerable users who engage with pro-ana and pro-mia content may find themselves trapped in echo chambers where disordered cognitions and behaviors are normalized and reinforced, as can be seen in Figure 2. Nodes (dots) represent users and edges (lines connecting the dots) link users who retweet each other. Users are colored by the community they belong to, automatically identified using “community detection method.” Users in communities 0, 7, 8, 9 frequently retweet one another, forming a dense echo chamber with few external links. The bulk of these users self-identify as part of the pro-anorexia community and they glorify anorexia in their posts. This dynamic mirrors online radicalization in other contexts: just as extremist groups groom individuals by isolating them from countervailing perspectives, pro-ED communities use shared language, insider knowledge, and emotional reinforcement to deepen commitment to harmful behaviors and delay recovery.

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Kristina Lerman

• All kids are told that “self-love” is a kind of universal right. EVERYONE should love themselves, they are told, regardless of their actions or life choices. If you don’t love yourself, the messaging goes, then do. Love yourself! Love yourself more… unto infinity. Ignore self-improvement or realistic appraisals. Ignore reality.

In one experiment, Defendants’ employees created test accounts and observed their descent into negative filter bubbles. One employee wrote, “After following several ‘painhub’ and ‘sadnotes’ accounts, it took me 20 mins to drop into ‘negative’ filter bubble. The intensive density of negative content makes me lower down mood and increase my sadness feelings though I am in a high spirit in my recent life.” Another employee observed, “there are a lot of videos mentioning suicide,” including one asking, “If you could kill yourself without hurting anybody would you?”

-TikTok Internal Memo

• Young men and women are intensely, unprecedentedly isolated from one another. Girls have become MUCH more progressive over the past decade (a consequence of female status games and weaponized empathy and groupthink, probably) and that trend has pulled them away from boys (who now seem to be slightly more conservative, perhaps as a reaction). 10-20% of attractive young people are having more and earlier sex than ever. Nearly everyone else is having none. Perhaps this is a good thing for high schoolers… but for college aged men and women, and for college graduates? The loneliness and sense of uneasy discombobulation is EVERYWHERE. Just ask.

• OnlyFans is exploding, and while kids might not be participating in it (although thousands certainly are) they know of it, and they have easy access to most of the material. Every 13-year-old girl knows of about a dozen women who make millions of dollars per year creating adult content, and every one of these girls could list them by name. Go ahead and ask them. They could probably even tell you some of their recent sets (100 men in a day? “Non-traditional” sex?) or they would if they weren’t too embarrassed. Every boy is familiar with this data as well, of course, and the market demand for homemade pornography has only instigated the gender conflict: girls are seen as sexually exploitative and inherently disloyal. If you don’t know what “hoeflation” is, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Boys band together to resist the succubal allure of these women (tempting, dangerous) and develop scabs of resentment towards them and towards the world.

Internally, TikTok knows the rate at which certain categories of content leak through its moderation processes, including: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content; 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation” content; 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” content; 30.36% of “leading minors off platform”; 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”; and “100% of “Fetishizing Minors.”

-TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

• Every video of extreme violence and school shootings and public murders and gory beatings is available, restitched and reshared endlessly (tens of millions of times per day). A boy who’s lonely and rejected and growing angry can feed his anger (which is a much more satisfying emotion than hurt) with violent fantasies. If they’re Muslim, they can create a religious context for their fantasy. If they’re unsuccessful with women (which they all are) they can veer towards Elliott Rogers and Alex Minassian. Do you know who these people are? I bet your 13-year-old does. Most kids won’t murder anyone, of course. They’ll simply watch the content, and their neurology will shift, slightly.

Leaving aside the shocking aspects (sex and murder and hatred), there’s a vast and populated landscape of people who stream on YouTube or Twitch or TikTok or Instagram and make good money doing it. Many, many young people now spend more time with these people than they do in the company of their ‘friends’ and the problem gets worse every day. Or is it a problem? I’m honestly not sure. We don’t seem to be treating it like a problem.

There’s a sameness to all of these developments. These are all fantasy worlds, created on the framework of some ideological or fanciful vision of reality, which can rope young people into their vision and sour their happiness and relationships for years. They all generate money and engagement and (unproductive) political/emotional energy. The people making this content don’t care about the viewers, for they’re often true believers (or sociopaths, or predators) themselves. The viewers’ parents might be concerned if they knew, but they don’t and they lack the resolve and the sense of moral certainty to find out (to turn off the spigot). The people who let absurdities capture their workplaces and governmental institutions because they were too cowardly to speak out and risk embarrassment or sanction are, in effect, the same people who have let malign actors capture the minds of their children, because they’re too cowardly to do the things that parents are duty-bound to do for their children.

This graph only shows the percent CHANGE-boys still outnumber girls more than 4:1 in terms of suicide in this country, but the trend is not good. All of these numbers have grown significantly worse in the past 4 years.

Of course, for most kids the effects of all of this will probably be marginal. But there are millions who will be drawn towards isolation and perversion and exploitation and mental illness and addiction and obsession and fanaticism and stagnation and compulsion and depression and…

How many millions of kids have plunged into gender confusion or eating disorders or leftist fantasies of violence or weird pretensions of mental illness, and been caught by their worried parents?

Now: how many of those kids still have their smartphones?

The Cultural Arc

Before I even finished elementary school, I had tracked a monster bear through the Pennsylvania woods with a spectacular dog at my side. I’d climbed a precipice to steal a falcon hatchling from its nest in upstate New York. I’d helped my older brother use his incredible brain to rescue some lost boys who’d gotten trapped in a cave in Utah.

Of course, I didn’t do any of these things in reality. I experienced them all vicariously, through characters in my favorite books: Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald. I was lucky: In the ’70s, the young adult adventure novel was still widely read, and I loved these action-packed books.

Usually, they featured a boy who, through some calamitous or surprising event, was thrust into a harrowing situation. Shipwrecks and plane crashes were common, but a parent leaving home could also do the trick. The safe parameters of childhood dissolve.

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Larissa Phillips

When I was growing up life felt simpler. It usually does, for adults, I suppose. We played in sports leagues. We lived on army bases. During summer, we took swim lessons. In elementary school we would spend hours outside every day, wandering through and playing in the woods. As I grew older, the dark nihilism and uncertainty of adolescence exposed me (or caused me to eagerly expose myself) to pornography, extreme political content, marijuana, etc. (more or less in that order). Most people experience these emotions and explorations, to some extent, even if they’re not predisposed to compulsive behaviors. It’s a kind of larval stage of adulthood, full of anger and incipient longings and shame and confusion about the world and society. People who are at this age suddenly feel like adults. Suddenly, to them, adults seem rather fallible, brittle, childish. Deep down, though, teens crave boundaries and reassurance. Beneath their brash pretensions, they’re frightened of what the future might hold.

I didn’t have access to my vices or my dark influences constantly. My access was occasional at best. Thank God I am not growing up today. But some boy very much like me is, somewhere. The average teenager now is confronted with material which is 10x more alluring and addictive and destructive, at 100x the amount that I was.

There are now millions of kids who now live through their phone. Their unhappiness stunts their sense of wonder and drive, and it creates a kind of film over their eyes. The world seen through that film seems flat and dull and frightening and complicated and sinister, all at once.

Despite everything I’ve written, I don’t worry about these kids too much. I worry about the ones on the way. I worry about the single men in 15 years and the anxious girls and the broken families and the millions of children who will never be born into our sickly civilization. I worry about our country and the direction we’re travelling.

My local playground: all rubber and plastic and miniature forms (no swings or tetherball or respectable slides or rotating pieces! too dangerous). It sits empty 95% of the time… yet it’s still been closed off? Why? I have no idea. It matters little, though. The kids who might use it are uninterested in such paltry offerings and they’re moving into engagement with their own phones now. I wonder what they think of these curious monuments.

My childhood world sometimes seemed uncertain and complex, but most adults were married. Most couples had children. Most people weren’t on psychiatric medication and therapy was still an activity mostly reserved for rich urbanites and healing patients. Most children played outside. If indoors, they watched television (the tame and corny offerings of ‘90’s cable) or played video games. Gaming addiction and online pornography and gender dysphoria and polyamory and school shootings barely existed.

I think that adults have a picture of normalcy, formed from outdoor childhoods and sensible teachers and semi-predictable political trends and holidays and pensions and public standards of decorum and common sense. All of that is gone now, or it is going. Older people swept it away. In return for its loss, they offered this generation the equivalent of a hyperactive, omniscient, and user-friendly pocket dark web, available for auto-mesmerization whenever they wanted for as long as they wanted. Have you noticed that no one ever talks about the ‘dark web’ anymore? Everything is coming out into the open, and the kids are seeing it first. While you’re busy at work or playing golf or running your 5k (reassuring yourself with your outdated ideas of normalcy) your kids are wandering through the new landscape. Alone.

Soon there will be no childhood. There will just be a world of consumers, of different ages and preferences and income levels. Your memories of Christmas decorations and public-school holidays and soccer leagues will die, with you or with your children. They will go the way of the Roman civic religion, the Vestal Virgins and Lupercalia-strange relics of a distant past with no relevance to this brave new world.

Our Unhappy Future

What we have essentially done is to spin up a maelstrom of abstraction, uncertainty, false assurance, and desire, and then push adolescents into its center. We adults have stayed on the periphery, protected by our childhood values and lessons and by the lives we had already constructed. Adolescents don’t have those resources. Most teenagers are doing fine of course. But more are not doing fine than at any time, probably in human history.

Teen violence and suicide are only the most extreme symptoms of our condition-far more salient are rates of eating disorder and gender dysphoria and gaming addiction and social isolation.

This shocking fact should prompt the kind of urgent and overwhelming response reserved for the biggest catastrophes. Why is it not? Some of the answer probably lies in uncertainty, or ignorance, but equally salient is the fact that these questions are deeply uncomfortable for those who cherish the bureaucracy, or the ideas of modern progressivism. These grave and tragic problems have grown under the expansion of the bureaucracy and with the ascendancy of progressivism.

It’s not just the apps and platforms and message boards and weird ideas and explicit materials and cult-like dynamics and veiled predation and the propagandizing (each of which is doing at least marginal aggregate harm to the psyches of young people). Jonathan Haidt’s research is compelling: phones are psychologically harming teens, as a group. That is nearly undeniable at this point. Our problem is deeper, though.

The old certainties and traditions and norms have been completely annihilated, pulling the solid ground out from beneath the feet of the young. In its place has risen up therapy culture and social justice ideology and naked, mercenary selfishness, forming a kind of solipsistic framework that simply cannot support a society. For every question the answer has not just been changed but erased entirely, and labelled reactionary and faintly uncouth: how does one deal with anxiety? How does one decide to venture into intimacy with another? What is the purpose of life and love? What are some of the benefits of learning history and internalizing patriotism? How should we treat people, both similar and different from us? How can we judge worthy from unworthy people, for different relationships? What is the normal life plan of an adult within society? How much risk should one take on? Should a person work hard, and why? What are some of the benefits of persisting through challenge and discomfort?

Every perspective and every value system is to be given equal worth and value, in the context of the new, relativistic vision… except the one that anchored our civilization for centuries. THOSE ideas (merit, responsibility, discipline, marriage, family, community, stoicism, faith, the value of education, beauty) are to be regarded as ridiculous, even unethical (which shouldn’t be possible in a relativistic scheme). This isn’t a cultural change. It is anti-culture, and it has arrived at precisely the same moment when the young are beset by phantoms.

Teenagers will not grow up in the same world that I did. That is my worry. They won’t grow up in a world full of married parents and playful outdoor groups of kids and rowdy museum trips and deeply rooted sex roles and fables and religion and a satisfying sense of history. They won’t grow in a society in which a childhood without too much shame or anxiety or distraction are the norm. There will be: far more pets… and far less children; far more psychiatric medications… and far less hiking trips; far more gender dysphoria (there used to be almost none)… and far less outdoor sports leagues; far more political lessons… and far less good love stories and tales of adventure. There will be far more technology and convenience and digital connection and far less love and community and psychological health. That is the bargain we’ve made, and as birthrates continue to fall and populations continue to age and kids continue to fall into neurosis and suicidality we’re going to have to wake up at some point. All of us. If children were our first priority that would’ve happened a decade ago.

In every sense and across every social indicator the lives of children alive today will be more anxious, more lonely, more nihilistic, more fragility-laden, and less meaningful. LESS MEANINGFUL. Birthrates, marriage rates, friendship rates, the frequencies of people going out, having love affairs, getting drunk, exploring the world… all dropping every day.

The true benefit of culture is that it gives ready answers to common questions, so that people don’t have to act upon impulse or misjudgment. Culture bounds reality and it gives life meaning. I look around and I still see a world full of meaning and beauty. Many young people will not. As a culture we seem to be more or less okay with this. Many, many adults have recognized this condition, and have nevertheless chosen to focus on different topics, because those topics better accord with their personal class biases or their ideological values. They won’t deny that their program has no answer for these problems or that it very much seems to be making them worse, and rapidly. Rather, they will pivot towards other problems. Anti-culture doesn’t just derange the teenagers, you see. It leads adults into absurdity and addiction and pathological self-indulgence too. Unlike the children, though, they bear some culpability. They lived during what was possibly the greatest psychological crisis for the young in human history, and they did nothing. Worse-they contributed to it, and they tried to distract from its dynamics and its casualties. Maybe we all deserve the future that is on the way.

Thanks for reading.