Gen Z has a shockingly high suicide rate:

The new data suggests Gen Z – or the generation of Americans born during 1997 onward – might be seeing a mental health crisis even worse than that faced by the older millennial generation.

Since 2014, millennials (or people who turned 23 to 38 in 2019) have seen a 47% increase in major-depression diagnoses. “Deaths of despair,” or dying from suicide, alcohol, and drugs, increased in the millennial population in the last 10 years, and they are more likely to report feeling lonely than other generations.

While the article doesn’t break suicide out by sex, men in general are four times more likely to commit suicide than women, and I’m seeing no reason to think GenZ men are any different.

Let’s get this straight – bad things happen when you raise a generation of men disproportionately without fathers?

When you pathologize and medicate boyhood traits ’til boys check out of higher education – men are now 40% of college students, headed toward 33% at this rate, which in turn limits their potential for a life partner, since women have an evolutionary preference for men who are more capable of providing, not less?

While labeling male traits “toxic” and actively demonizing them?

Or while mocking and taunting them – look at who plays the buffoon in most advertisements today; while it’s mostly white men, black men are moving into the role more and more. It’s not hard to imagine an 18 year old, coming into a world with a straitened future, where masculinity is demonized and popular culture seems to be grooming you for a future as an impotent nebbish who will at best be the comic relief for a (inevitably, in pop culture) strong, powerful woman, and at worst a villain in waiting?

Bad things happen to people who grow up that way?

Huh. Weird.

I’m not sure we could have lost a generation any more effectively if we’d sent them to fight in the trenches of Flanders.

Washington Post correspondent David Weigel – with whom I had a few minor interactions, back in the 1990s when he was working at the late, unlamented “City Pages “– got suspended from the WaPo last week for retweeting an un-PC joke that was around most likely before man landed on the moon.

Now, I’m not exactly leaping to Weigel’s defense, here. When covering a Minnesota legislative race, he once got into a bit of trouble (I’m told) for getting the candidates District wrong. Also the candidates name. You know – the kind of stuff that journalists used to get into trouble for getting wrong.

Nonetheless, he was hounded into a suspension without pay by a group that has become, in fact, the equivalent of the layer of commissars that used to accompany the Soviet army into battle: the parallel political advisors that could veto the decision of any military commander.

One of them – a male and graduate of the Stanford journalism program – wrote a student op-ed castigating the University‘s food service for not prepackaging his meals, since he had too much anxiety to go to the buffet.

Excerpt:

I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds himself rooting for this twerp and Weigel to have a cage match.

Beyond that?

Sometimes I wonder if the problem with millennials is that they had no great existential struggles in life, as a group.

Humans have evolved over humanities history to be keenly adapted to responding to existential crises. And life certainly threw them crises. Up until our great great grandparents times, life itself – surviving past age three, not succumbing to famine or injury or childhood diseases or childbirth or a war, was a great and noble struggle in its own right.

Our parents/grandparents generations had the depression and a couple of world wars to deal with. The generation after that, a number of decidedly first world crusades; ending communism or ending poverty, and/or getting to the moon, depending on one’s point of view.

After that?

We’ve got a generation now, maybe two, whose greatest struggles have been a recession and society — and, it would seem, at the end of the day, the least worthy and yet most intractable opponent of all, themselves.

I personally detest inter-generational politics, and the identitymongering that lt breeds. Few things make me want to clap a couple of cinderblocks around someones head like Bugs Bunny playing the cymbals on Elmer Fudds noggin like some moronic little twerp chirping “OK, Boomer”, or “Go get your participation trophy, Millie”, for that matter.

But you know your “generation” spends too much time navel-gazing about itself when people start writing bilge like this about it.

The opening chapter of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: A History of the World from the 20’s to the ’80s, relates the reporting, academic as well as journalistic, of the discovery of the theory of relativity – and the intellectual shockwave it sent through the intelligentsia and technocracy of the day.

Which was dwarfed, over time, by the side-effects of what it helped introduce – relativism, a version of the universe very much at odds with the Western Judeochristian notions of truth, creating an intellectual climate where materialistic philosophies like Progressivism, Marxism, Socialism and all manners of intellectual and (eventually) political totalitarianism throve.

Modern Times goes on to relate the history of that struggle – both World Wars, the (first) apex of Marxism, the West’s (first) attempt at suicide in the ’60s and ’70s, and ends (in its first edition) right around the elections of Reagan and Thatcher – both hopeful developments (that led, in the second, early ’90s edition, to a little burst of unaccustomed triumphalism from the normally utterly sober Johnson, relating the collapse of Communism.

Reading this piece in Federalist, it appears relativism won the rematch – at least, in regards to how the latest generation views “reality”:

Reading this piece in Federalist, it appears relativism won the rematch – at least, in regards to how the latest generation views “reality”…

“In 1998,” Derek Thompson wrote, “The Wall Street Journal and NBC News asked several hundred young Americans to name their most important values. Work ethic led the way—naturally. After that, large majorities picked patriotism, religion, and having childre“Twenty-one years later,” Thompson continued, “the same pollsters asked the same questions of today’s 18-to-38-year-olds—members of the Millennial and Z generations. The results, published last week in The Wall Street Journal, showed a major value shift among young adults. Today’s respondents were 10 percentage points less likely to value having children and 20 points less likely to highly prize patriotism or religion.”

The good news: there’s a vacuum out there. Nature – and the human mind and soul – abhor vacuums.

The bad news: the “other side”, being intellectual empty carbs, are much better at filling vacuums quickly than the hard-to-digest protein of the cultural right.

I suggest reading the whole thing.