Please disable your Ad Blocker to better interact with this website.

EducationOpinionPersonal DevelopmentPhilosophyReligionScienceSocial Issues

How We Are Losing Our Youth To Uncertainty and Despair

The successful continuance of our country depends on our youth and with what we see happening today, I am very concerned if America as we have known it will even exist in a couple of decades. So many of our future leaders do not have even a basic understanding of our founding documents and the principles they enshrine. They do not understand how the concepts of self-governance and personal responsibility have led to the freedom and prosperity they enjoy today.

Their ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills make them easy prey for avowed socialists promoting absurd societal models that have produced nothing but misery, poverty, and death wherever they have been instituted. I fear the kind of violence seen last week in Chicago will continue to effervesce as the hateful Left steps up its efforts to stoke ignorant rage and unjustified hatred to burn down America and remake it into their own personal utopia.

Our youth for some reason have become increasingly more anxious and depressed despite the prosperity and opportunity they enjoy. Jesse Singal documents this in a recent article at nymag.com. In the piece, Singal states: “Ever since the 1930’s, young people in America have reported feeling increasingly anxious and depressed. And no one knows exactly why.”

Singal quotes social psychologist, Dr. Jean Twenge, who has done significant research into this phenomenon, saying, “I think the research tells us that modern life is not good for mental health.” Twenge has researched results obtained from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) that has been given to high school and college students since the 1930’s. The MMPI assesses the level of anxiety and depression and the results of her analysis are unmistakable – there has been a significant rise in the symptoms of these conditions in young people over the last eighty years. The question is why?

Twenge believes a main cause is the lack of interaction and connection with others as a condition of modern life today. It seems though we are more and more connected with our electronic appliances, we are less and less connected with our own species. There is a basic need we all have for human contact and intimacy that our electronics is stripping away.

Twenge also blames smaller families, the higher divorce rate, and couples marrying later in life. She also identifies that our youth’s preoccupation with money, fame, and image lead to higher levels of depression and anxiety. She then goes so far to cite increased female autonomy as another anxiety producing factor and states that: “…the potential tradeoff for our equality and freedom is more anxiety and depression because we’re more isolated.”

I can agree with the causal factors Twenge cites in Singal’s article, but I believe they are secondary in nature and not the principle reason for the increasing uncertainty and anxiety in our youth. I believe the true cause lies with the secular, humanistic worldview that has been thrust upon them. Our kids are indoctrinated in our schools to believe that they are here through a long series of accidental, totally random events and that they have no more worth than an earthworm or the bird that eats it.

Objective, universal morality has been displaced with what’s expedient and individual. Truth has become malleable and situational. Even our sense of who we are as individuals is questioned. The late Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, Francis Crick, completely undermines the idea that we are autonomous individuals with free will. In his book on the nature of consciousness, The Astonishing Hypothesis, he states this about the true nature of the human experience:

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Now Francis Crick is smart and our kids are told they just need to accept what he says without debate. Scientists have become our high priests of reality and our kids are pressured to just accept what they say and do not question anything.

Think about what such a view does to a young person’s developing sense of self. There is no ultimate meaning or purpose to your life. There is no right or wrong, good or bad, righteous or evil. Things just are. This robs kids of their initiative and their confidence to act in any capacity.

Kelly Monroe Kullberg in her book Finding God At Harvard described many of today’s college students this way:

“Students feel safer as doubters than as believers, and as perpetual seekers rather than eventual finders.”

Our youth has no foundation anymore to base their beliefs and actions on. When there is no right or wrong, how do you make a decision on anything? When nothing is good or evil, how do you make any kind of behavioral judgment? Most people will just acquiesce into passivity but others can spiral into frustration and violence.

Our greatest defender of Christianity today is philosopher William Lane Craig. He makes the point that life without God is absurd. Without God there is simply no grounding for objective moral values that make life livable and gives us certainty and confidence on how to live. Take this away and you see what happens – anxiety, uncertainly, hostility, and depression. It’s becoming all too clear.

Share if you agree modern attitudes and educational philosophies are driving our society — and our youth — into anxiety and despair

John Tutten

John Tutten holds degrees in both engineering and business management. He is veteran of thirty-three years in the high technology business world where he spent time in development engineering and technology management predominantly in the area of custom semiconductor circuits. He recently retired to the mountains of north Georgia where he devotes his time to the study of Christian Apologetics and writing in defense of the Christian worldview.