Dear Adults: Your Intellectual Pessimism is Killing Kids
How much are you willing to contribute to the hopelessness of teenagers?
Like many kids, I spent a great deal of my childhood afraid.
Not existentially afraid, mind you. Just normal afraid. Afraid of the kinds of things kids tend to be afraid of. The dark. Monsters. Strangers. The cornfield scene from E.T.
I had a vivid imagination. And like most kids, I mostly harnessed that imagination to terrify myself for no reason. That’s childhood.
So, to soothe my fears, I came up with a personal rule: If mom and dad aren’t scared, then I have no reason to be scared.
To eight-year-old me, my parents were the two smartest people on the planet. If something were actually dangerous, if there were monsters in the closet, well then certainly they would know about it. They would be freaked out.
But they weren’t. So I had no reason to be.
Kids today are also afraid.
But they’re not afraid of monsters or the dark. They’re afraid that the world they’ve been born into is a fundamentally hopeless place. They’re afraid that they were born just after society’s peak, that it’s all downhill from here. They worry that their opinions, their ambitions, their goals for the future are all meaningless in the face of society’s unstoppable decay.
And when they look to the adults, the intellectual smarties like us who write and talk about the state of the world, what do they see?
They see that we’re just as afraid as they are.
They see our pessimism, our negativity about the state of the world. And if they don’t see it directly, they sense it — like a child senses that her parents’ were arguing just before they came into the room.
But mostly they don’t have to sense it. Because us Smart Grown-Ups are falling all over ourselves to write about it and connect with each other over our shared misery and pessimism.
This is not an essay on whether the world is objectively awful or beautiful, in crisis or at the cusp of utopia. This is not an essay arguing that hey, things aren’t really so bad, folks!
Maybe you genuinely do believe the world is a harrowing hellscape, an expanding nightmare from which there’s no escape. Maybe you really believe things are terrible. And maybe you’re right!
It’s possible to be right and still be wrong.
Depression among young people has been rising, and which group has experienced the most appalling jump?
Liberal young women, followed closely by liberal young men.
Is this because liberalism causes misery?
I hope not. I’m as liberal as they come.
But liberal young people become liberal young people because they look up to liberal old people. Grown-ups like you and me. It’s not the liberalism they’re inheriting that’s making them depressed. It’s the liberal pessimism.
In a 2022 survey, 53% of women who identify as “very liberal” agreed with the statement: “Women in the United States have no hope for success because of sexism.”
Think about that. They’re not agreeing with the statement that sexism exists, or that sexism is a problem. More than 1 in 2 liberal women believe that no woman in the U.S. has any hope for success.
That’s the message we intellectual progressives are sending to our young people, young people who are committing suicide at such a rate that it’s now become the second most common cause of death in their age group.
And us? The grown-ups? We have begun to adopt shared pessimism as a badge of membership in the intellectual club. We’re tuned-in. We’re aware. We get it. We read progressive think pieces. We hate Trump and everything he stands for, and dammit we won’t be tricked into underestimating evil again. We see the trends, we read the tea leaves.
And we talk about it constantly.
Claim the sky is falling long enough, and eventually it will. And then you’ll be a prophet.
My wife and I have two young children, and so many of our friends and acquaintances are also parents of young kids. The result is that remarkably often, a conversation will turn toward gender identity in schools —namely, concerns about whether gender-affirming language and ideas are going to confuse or damage our kids. Has progressivism gone too far?
I try my best to stay out of these conversations. But eventually, someone inevitably asks me for my thoughts. And my reply is always the same:
I’m on the side of kids not killing themselves.
Study after study has shown that gender affirming care reduces suicide rates among trans youth. This is in a community in which 82% of individuals have considered killing themselves, and 40% have actually tried to do it.
If I’m in a room full of kids and you tell me nearly half of them are going to try to kill themselves, there is no room for politics or intellectualism or what-about-ism in that room. I’m on the side of literally anything that might reduce that figure.
I’m sure many of you reading this feel the same.
So if we care about young people the way we claim, if we’re as progressive and loving and open as we say we are, then we have no choice but optimism.
Because the real crisis we’re facing, the one that will make all the other crises truly unbeatable, is hopelessness. We are contributing to that hopelessness among our youth — the only ones who stand a chance of saving us all from the messes we’ve made.
They deserve our hope. They need our hope. They need to know we’re not afraid of what’s under the bed.
I don’t know if the world is doomed or not. I just don’t want kids to kill themselves.
So I choose optimism. Because to add even one drop to the bucket of despair is unacceptable to me.
What about you?
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I'm on your side. I have four children/stepchildren, all of whom have young families. I don't think any of them go around proclaiming doom and gloom - and mostly they don’t let the more sordid aspects of the world intrude on their lives. But, from what I can observe, they pay attention to their children. They don’t hover or cocoon, just attend, which allows them to have a heads-up when things appear to be going off track or changing in unexpected ways. They also check with others (us, friends, school teachers etc) to test their take on what might be happening. So I am pretty confident they will be well placed respond in ways I think will work for their kids. No guarantees in this world, but I think the odds are on their side.
If I may offer my two cents, and maybe that's all its worth, there is a great deal of pressure to conform. To think right, to be right, to fit in. Of course it's always been like this. But we're reaching toxic levels.