The kids are not alright

In a preelection episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, journalist Mark Halperin predicted that if Donald Trump won a second term, it would spark “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.” Carlson was incredulous, but Halperin calmly enumerated the sorts of things he believed you could expect to see in the wake of a Trump victory: nervous breakdowns, marital breakdowns, suicide attempts, people so disoriented that they would start to question the ties that bind them to family, friends, and nation.

Fast-forward to election week, and we could see at least some of this coming true in real time. Of course, talking heads and elite opinion makers all played their part right on cue, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Jimmy Kimmel to Amanda Calhoun, a Yale-certified psychiatrist instructing people to cut off Trump-voting family members. Yes, even for Thanksgiving. (So much for the idea that some things are more important than politics.) You could also find transgender ideologues angry that the next four years might somewhat slow their indoctrination train. Activist Erin Reed provided parents with a “risk-assessment map” to show which states are more and less “safe” for families determined to enable their gender-confused children.

That panic response trickled down to TikTok, where young people across the country began to post hysterical reaction clips—crying, screaming, swearing, repeating garbled talking points from left-wing media. The more I scrolled through these clips, the more dispirited I felt. These young performers seemed to inhabit their own world. They freely cursed the half of the country that hadn’t voted exactly the way they did. In particular, women freely cursed men. A few even expressed violent fantasies.

What does it all mean? Trump’s election may be the catalyst for these reactions, but they reveal a spiritual darkness far deeper than the political discourse of the day. They reveal a generation unmoored—from family, from community, from all the old tools of sensemaking that used to ground a young American’s identity.

If you pay attention to the scripts for these short clips, you notice recurring hints of disconnection, as people tearfully inveigh against their parents or sometimes even against “Christians.” It’s a sobering thought but worth keeping in mind that a not insignificant percentage of them may well have rejected a conservative Christian upbringing. Now, they are determined to reinvent themselves, except they’ve discovered that self-reinvention is a lonely business when you do it all by yourself.

Hence platforms like TikTok, which allow a person to feel like he’s part of a “community” without really being part of a community. These scripts sometimes have the quality of audition tapes, because, in a sense, that’s what they are. Instead of engaging with the world as it is, these young men and women have cast themselves as the heroes of their own fantasy, their own grand drama. Their need to feel like they’re not isolated players—like they’re sharing this dramatic adventure with someone—is so intense that they’ll do anything to experience that dopamine rush, even embarrass themselves on camera.

Some women announced that they were joining “4B,” a trend originating in South Korea, where the word “bi” means “no” (hence the “B”). The “Four Nos” are no sex, no dating, no marriage, and no childbirth. This is a complicated trend for a social conservative to assess, but I don’t think we should welcome it as a healthy sign. I was especially struck by a young woman who said not only was she joining 4B, she didn’t want to speak to any woman who was not “hoarding” abortion pills with her. “It costs me zero dollars to cut people off,” she reasons, “and in this economy, I’m taking all the free [obscenity] that I can get.” In a godless, misanthropic frame like this, a vow of abstinence feels less like an act of prudent self-control and more like a cynical rejection of what it means to be human. It feels like an act of despair.

But even as she says it, this young woman doesn’t sound like she really believes it. In our hearts, we know that it does cost to cut people off. It costs very dearly. For some, this may be a hard lesson that can only fully be learned by hard experience.

It’s tempting to give up on these young people as hopeless causes, but Christians must persevere in the hope that for at least some of them, reality will crash in. Perhaps not today, tomorrow, or even next year, but one day. One day, we hope that epiphany will dawn. Mom and Dad will start to look a lot smarter. The pastor down the street will start to make an unreasonable amount of sense. Life in the real world will look a lot less lonely than life on TikTok.

Such happy endings are never promised. Yet God is still in the business of softening hearts and calling lost souls home. Is the Church ready?