That’s not the evidence of the research center study, though. The mental health numbers above come from federal government agencies, which the center cites in order to set up its attachment of these emotional pains to another factor, a cause rarely considered by public officials in charge of data collection and population surveys.
Here is how the center and its staff, led by George Barna, put it: “Barna and his colleagues suggest that addressing those conditions may not require counseling, hospitalization, drugs, or other common remedies. The research instead indicates that those are often symptoms of an unhealthy worldview.”
That’s the assumption, that there’s a close relationship between a person’s general worldview and a person’s emotional state. A 20-year-old who thinks the world is a cruel habitat, that the world doesn’t care about individual human beings, that people are selfish and life is hard—that young adult will feel the effects of that pessimism. He is likely to embrace a nihilism about the world that will recoil upon him and bring him down, that will include him in the negative judgment. If he thinks that climate change will bring devastation to the earth in the next 30 years, he will likely lose hope and wonder what to do with his life. If he doesn’t trust other people, he can’t form solid and affirming relationships. Emotional agonies are inevitable.
- Seven out of 10 individuals under 40 who responded to the center’s questionnaires stated that they lacked “a sense of purpose and meaning in life.”
- Only 13 percent of Generation Z and 22 percent of millennials believed that “absolute moral truth exists and is an objective reality.”
The belief that life has no purpose slides smoothly into “I have no purpose.” To think that moral truth is a relative or subjective thing only is to deny oneself a reliable foundation of judgment and conviction. Young Americans are fractious and fragile, and who can avoid that condition in a world so utterly careless and capricious?
The daily experience of average 16-year-olds only reinforces the negative worldview they bear. The videos they watch, the music they hear, the texts and photos that flood their phones, the movies and TV shows they favor—it’s a wave of entertainment that shows people behaving badly with no moral accounting. These media allow for no transcendence and no organized worship, no prayer or devotion. They are the bricks of youth culture, which doesn’t revere the past or envision a happy future. No deep meanings and profound truths. The producers of it purvey shallow ideas and emotional chaos. We have handed the rising generations an environment hostile to their souls.
The mental problems of 21st-century youth are real. Our methods of treating them are pharmacological and therapeutic, wholly individualized. These procedures are often incomplete.
We should add to the mix the exploration of a wayward youth’s worldview, and the modification of it should that worldview prove discouraging and depressing.
What a teen assumes about human existence at large affects daily mood and will, the head and the heart. It’s a warning to parents. Give your children a stable moral habitat. Teach them that there is a meaningful past and a hopeful future. If they rebel against your vision, so be it, but you will make that rebellion itself meaningful by presenting to them something meaningful to oppose.
The depression and anxiety, in some cases at least (a not insignificant portion, I believe), are sane responses to bad influences and cynical perceptions. Youth culture is itself unhealthy, and Americans coming of age need to be cured of it.