If there’s a quippy statistic that sums up young people, it’s the following: The average high schooler today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.
Dr. Robert Leahy of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy NYC made the observation in 2008, which was prior to the mass dissemination of touchscreen phones and online social media. “We are getting more anxious every decade,” Leahy said, specifying an increasing lack of “social connectedness” as one of anxiety’s key drivers.
I, a sophomore in college, am in no way qualified to offer my own diagnosis of the trend. But perhaps I am qualified to paraphrase Leahy’s: Our country, and particularly its younger generations, is trapped in a crisis of meaning. And to contextualize Leahy’s argument, it’s important to note the recent sharp declines in regular church-going and local civic participation, and the push to replace them with mass political and social organizing, mostly in online spaces like Instagram, X, and TikTok.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, conservative theorist Edmund Burke writes, “man is by his constitution a religious animal.” He continues, “atheism is against, not only our reason but our instincts” and “[…] it cannot prevail long.” Translated, we naturally seek fulfillment and meaning in something greater than ourselves. Per Leahy’s observations, one might speculate we are especially called to search for meaning when we are at our most mentally vulnerable.
“Religion,” I should note, thus lends itself to a much broader definition than is commonly used. “Church” is not just that small white building around the block whose extensive decorations invite a chuckle each time you pass by. The “church” is also a student encampment that hinges physical entry on your spoken deposition to the commandments of Free Palestine.
Indeed, there is no such thing as an atheist if we instinctively search for meaning in an organized society that extols a transcendent end—if everyone looks upward when asked, “What is it all for?”
Let’s wind the clock back to 2020, a year that marked a seismic shift in progressive social activism. The COVID-19 pandemic codified a practice of taking to the streets with banners, bullhorns, and posters into the online cyberspace of likes, comments, and infographics. Social media had already become the go-to platform for social justice organizing following the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, but from 2019 to 2020 alone, digital activism in the form of online petitions shot up 200%. Following George Floyd, the slogan “defund the police” peaked in Google search frequency, alongside sharp spikes in public support for a policy agenda reflective of the demand.
It is important to note that concurrent with these upticks in online social advocacy were historic drops in overall life satisfaction, record-high rates of anxiety and depression, and an inflammation of an already volatile crisis of substance abuse.
To be clear, I’m not implying that increased participation in online activism is the primary culprit behind historically poor mental health. Instead, it’s the other way around.
It is true that the now years-old mental health crisis owes largely to prolonged lockdowns, which were the perfect crescendo for an already historically anxious, lonely, and depressed generation of teens. It is, however, appropriate to catch the suspiciously significant correlation between plummeting collective mental health and the push towards revolutionary political action. We become more inclined to destroy core institutions of society, such as the police, at the same time that our interpersonal connections deteriorate. This spike in online activism is yet another expression of an innate religious impulse, a desperation to find meaning in a world that social media and a pandemic forced into isolation and disarray.
Conservatives, including myself, will often lambast young people for being ill-informed on the same social issues for which they claim to have such passion. Correctly, we place the blame primarily on the ignorance factories of TikTok and Instagram. Certainly in the past year, the ongoing war in Israel has highlighted the extent of the absurdity the two platforms can co-produce.
We would be mistaken, however, in reading poor intentions or bad faith on the part of young, ignorant teens, because that falsely assumes their priority is actual political change. Rather, many teens are too busy scrambling for social validation, for assurance that they are on the right side of history. Their motivation to take to the virtual streets for social change is because of, not coincidental with, their social isolation.
Posting a black square during Black History Month. Pasting a link to a petition in your Instagram bio during Pride Month. Taking twenty seconds to briefly skim an infographic documenting the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza before reflexively reposting it on your personal story. All of these convey a priority different from nurturing sharp understandings of the social issues at hand.
In the absence of proximate, healthy social connections like those you’d find in a local center of worship, we dedicate greater sums of energy to signaling virtue rather than actually possessing it––all in exchange for rapid positive feedback through clicks, likes, and upvotes. In the quick turnaround demanded by this performative virtue ethic, an appreciation for depth naturally trades off, and our resultant ignorance is just the collateral damage. Staying true to basic history, scientific reality, and liberal moral convictions are secondary considerations to a young person struggling to find a stable core community.
What’s more, once a teen dabbles in online activism, social media algorithms render it a permanent cycle. They overwhelm a young teen’s personalized feed with as many different social justice campaigns as possible, flooding the zone so as to drown out any meaningful grasp of the relevant material.
Who’s behind the algorithms? Woke corporate profiteers who target anxious, fed-up, meaning-deprived young people as reliable consumers and chain their mental health to the movements of a capricious market.
Big Tech is one such group of offenders. During the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter in 2020, Instagram, a top facilitator of BLM’s online organizing, drew in $28 billion in annual profit, a 40 percent increase from the year prior. The next year, it jumped an additional 52 percent to reach $43 billion. In the same time frame, schools, homes, and businesses––disproportionately Black-owned––were burned, ransacked, and vandalized by rioters in major American cities, totaling somewhere between $1-2 billion in property damage. After raking in all that cash, top corporations like Instagram quelled the masses by publicly committing arbitrary dollar figures to vaguely defined DEI initiatives, counting on us to forget that they are the grifters behind historic wealth inequality and cronyism.
Lo and behold, a summer of tedious rioting and looting ended, and anxious, meaning-deprived teens had nothing to do but wait to jump on the next corporately sponsored bandwagon.
Following such a bleak picture, one might ask how young people can find consistent sources of meaning and purpose in such an environment. Burke helps us lay the foundational thought nicely: We are all armed with an impulse to believe in something bigger and better. We all follow a faith, whether we say the quiet part out loud or even vehemently deny it. And without proper direction, we land in nothing but confusion, anger, and resentment, and unwittingly feed a system that profits on keeping that cycle in motion.
My advice on the matter? Choose wisely. Look for proximity and permanence, not abstraction and isolation. Attend services at your local church, synagogue, or mosque. Fill the void created by a once-in-a-century pandemic with a community built on charity, personal morality, and the sanctity of individual life––not revolution, gratuitous violence, and destruction. Do so alongside school, friendships, a healthy romantic partnership, and family.
Having experienced the transformation myself, I promise you, it’s worth it.