TRANSCRIPT
Why are so many young people so sad nowadays? Earlier this morning, I read an article saying a very high percentage of teenagers, girls especially, but a lot of boys too, are very sad. They report feeling sad and hopeless. Remember what the article said in terms of numbers? Maybe like 50 percent even.
And I was thinking about this. I actually observed this, but I was thinking, where does it come from? The article didn’t really get into it, probably because the answers are too painful, are too critical of our society, of the way that we operate now. I don’t know if this is true around the world. I think it may be in some places, but in some places maybe less than here in the United States.
But it makes sense to me why so many young people would be so sad, and I’m going to explore a few of the different reasons. One that’s probably pretty obvious is economic. We live in a time of economic decline. As much as, oh, we can see all this grandness around and fancy buildings and fancy cars and everyone owning fancy devices and fancy this and that’s, it’s a time of economic decline. There’s less job opportunity. Jobs are worse. A lot of people don’t have jobs. They go to school, they study all this stuff, and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. That in and of itself, I think, is hopeless for a lot of people.
Or even if they do get a job that they wanted, it doesn’t pay very well. Jobs pay less and less and less every generation. I feel for young people who are 30, 40 years younger than me. It’s like, what is their future economically, financially? And I think of my parents’ generation, 30 years before me, much, much easier to make a living. And my grandparents’ generation before that, it’s like one person, the father, could work often, and he could work and not even all that hard sometimes, and could bring in enough to support his wife and his children, etc., etc.
And nowadays, it’s like sometimes with couples, young couples, even two of them together aren’t enough to support an independent life. It’s hard economically. So that’s just one. I want to put that out there first. But I think it goes deeper than just economics.
I think also a big thing is that young people, consciously or unconsciously—and I talk to a lot of young people who very consciously do see this—but I talked to some young people who don’t see it as well, but I think they still feel it—that our world is in terrible trouble. It’s not going in a good direction in a lot of ways. It’s like young people, I think about them, like, and I think they think about it too intuitively. They just feel it and know it’s like, what is the future of their planet in 50 or 60 or 70 years when they’re likely still going to be alive?
It’s like, it’s not nice when you start extrapolating on what’s already happened and where it’s going in the future. I think it takes a lot of denial to think that it’s really going in a good direction, right? I think pretty obviously it’s going in an ugly direction in terms of pollution and poisoning. And oh, I don’t even know about nuclear stuff—what’s going to happen there in terms of just like nuclear disasters, not even nuclear wars, but ugly wars and species going extinct all over the place and wildlife and wild areas of the world shrinking down.
I just think we’ve got a real major problem, and I think a lot of older people are kind of okay with the exploitation of the world that has been happening since time immemorial. Because exploitation by humans of the natural world just makes it easier for humans to have a more comfortable life. Actually, really a more comfortable life. You can take more from the world and give back less and just use it, take advantage of it, exploit the natural world. The problem is there are consequences to that exploitation, and the consequences are becoming more visible now than ever.
And I think young people, they see it, they feel it, they know what—you know, they can watch enough television, they have enough access to the internet to know what the world was, what the world could be and should be, and what the world isn’t and how it’s becoming less and less good as time goes on. So that’s another part. It’s just literally a not a nice future facing them in a planetary environmental way.
And then there’s a third thing, and I think I’ll close with this last idea. It’s the idea of trauma, unresolved trauma. I think humans as a species have always carried trauma forever. I mean, effectively forever. Let’s go back 50, 100, a thousand generations—trauma, trauma, trauma. But I think what’s happened for most of human history is that we’ve been more focused on survival, more focused on staying in the tribe. And it’s often the tribe, our families, that are traumatizing us.
And for history, most of long history, even prehistory, I think what people did is they didn’t put any energy into trying to solve their traumas. Instead, they just pushed them down and moved forward with their lives, tried to find pleasure, tried to find comfort, tried to make babies, get married, do whatever you have to do to procreate, gain food for yourself. But there wasn’t the extra energy to healing the childhood traumas, to looking at them, to facing them. Actually, there was probably a massive amount of negative pressure in terms of even looking at those traumas. Often traumas happen right within the family, and when a person’s family is all they have, it’s basically very socially dangerous to look at those traumas, let alone to try to feel all the pain around them, to grieve them, to heal them, to call out one’s traumatizers.
Probably for most of history, it was virtually impossible for people to deal with their traumas. So instead, the way that they quote dealt with their traumas was passing them on to others. Do unto others what was done to me. Do unto the people over whom I wield power that which the people who wielded power over me once did to me. And that’s, I think, how people lived their lives probably for most of history, most people in the world. And I think a lot of people in the world still very much live this way.
But I think the times, they are a changing on a psychological level. And I think it’s probably connected to young people also realizing that they’ve kind of been screwed by the previous generations, by their parents and grandparents’ generation. They’ve been left with little or nothing, or much, much less—not enough to have a good life. And instead, what they have been given is more knowledge, more access to an inner world.
And I think what’s been happening with some people, it’s more conscious than with others, but I think with a lot of young people, it’s spreading across the youthful generations that there’s some acceptance of looking within. There’s some acceptance of being knowledgeable about one’s own painful history, the knowledge of who one’s parents really are and what they really did to one, the unhealthy things that parents and other powerful role models did once upon a time.
And I think young people are starting to deal with this more and more and more. I think I was a young person 30 years ago who was on the cutting edge of dealing with this. I think I was, you know, if 30 years ago when I was 21, it was like I didn’t even know anyone else who was doing it. I think now when you deal with young people who are 21 or younger than that even, it’s a much higher percent of young people who are starting to look within, deal with their history—much higher than one percent, maybe 20 or 30 or 40 percent.
And I think the reason so many young people are so sad, even feel so hopeless, is that they’re getting in touch with their real buried feelings—the feelings that our species has put off for hundreds and thousands of years and hundreds and thousands of generations. And there’s no way to look at this stuff and to feel it without feeling pain, feeling horrible. And I think a lot of young people are feeling the torment that they felt just a few short years earlier when they didn’t have the ability to stop their traumatizers and stop the neglect.
The violations and the hurt and the rejections. And I think they’re also feeling their hopelessness. The hopelessness of the little child in this troubled, confused family system. And I think what compounds their sadness and hopelessness is their parents. Often, they are rarely actually coming along for the ride. Their parents, the people who are supposed to love them the most, the other adult role models in their life, are not being supportive of their journey. They don’t even understand it. Actually, they are mostly profoundly in denial. Their parents are actually my generation, the same ones that were not supporting me, my peers, 30 years ago when I was starting to open up and say, “Oh my God, this is going to save my life. It’s hell. It’s painful. I sometimes feel hopeless and rotten and sad and depressed.”
And most of my peers, almost all of them, are like, “Why are you even looking at that? You’re supposed to move on.” And I think more and more young people are not wanting to just bury it and move on. They’re talking about it, and my peers’ parents’ generation are saying, “Move on! Shut it down!” Or even are angry at them, are rejecting them for it. And they feel even more alienated as a result.
So what’s the solution? Well, for those first two areas I talked about, I don’t actually know what the solution is. I don’t know what the economic solution is, and I don’t know what the solution to this horrible environmental crisis we’re in is. But the solution for facing those traumas, facing the pain and the horror, bringing them up, I say go for it. I don’t know any other way to grow as a person. I don’t know any other way to find satisfaction, deep satisfaction in life, other than really knowing the truth of oneself, uncovering the truth of oneself under all the buried trauma, under all the denied trauma, under the trauma that so often the family system caused.
And the trauma, looking at the trauma that has been deemed illegal and even immoral by the family. So I think in that way, young people who are sad and hopeless because of this, consciously because of this or unconsciously because they’re starting to put the pieces together, I think all the sadness and hopelessness in a way is on the right track. I think a lot of people may not survive it. I think it’s too horrible to make sense of it. But I think more and more will.
And I think as another generation comes and grows into being, and the young people now, the teenagers and people in their 20s now, become the next generation, they will be more and more supportive of the next generation, give them more insight, more support, and more hope. And when I think about the future of humanity, this is actually the only hope that I have.
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