Failure to launch
Increasingly, there's such a thing as young people "failing to launch". 17-year-olds aren't getting their driver's license, they aren't giving a shit at work so they're getting fired, they aren't dating, they aren't having sex, they aren't drinking, partying, or clubbing. They're literally doing nothing with their lives.
Having been born in 2001, I genuinely feel I was on the last chopper out of 'Nam. Even my generation has some level of this apathy towards life. To be fully honest, my story was a close one as well: I ended up being invited to parties out of dumb luck, I went to university on a whim, I got my first girlfriend out of "right place, right time", I got my driver's license because my dad wouldn't shut up about it, and I started my career because I just happened to have an obsession with computers.
My "successful launch" was by a hair. Though I do feel many people's stories are relatively similar. It's kind of like a butterfly-effect thing: tiny things lead to massive things.
Many mid-wit Redditors would tell you this is because there's very little to actually live for: dating is too expensive and risky, you can't buy a house, the career as we know it is dead. I've always felt it's a perception thing.
People having their houses bombed in WWII would've felt the world was ending.
People watching 2/3rds of those around them die during the Black Plague would've felt the world was ending.
People watching the Mongol hordes come over the hills to rape and pillage their villages would've felt the world was ending.
But life carried on.
Now, because you have to save for 3–4 years for a deposit instead of buying a house with the cash in your bank account — or because scientists say farmland in Bangladesh may have lower yields as water levels rise over the next 80 years — everyone is opting out of life.
People entirely lack perspective. Even though we objectively live in one of the best periods in all of time by most objective measures, everyone's massively de-motivated to actually live a life. It's unbelievably pathetic, but I genuinely wouldn't know what to say to these people.
Why
Everybody is their "own person" now, which just means everyone's atomised and alone.
I grew up as one of these baseless, lost young men. Someone close to me is Catholic, and I see the community they immediately have by virtue of being Catholic: you go to church, you see similar faces, you likely went to the same school, you share common traditions. I never had any of this. This goes alongside people pointing out that modern society lacks rites of passage.
Social media is one of the most damaging things to have ever hit the human race.
Life is too comfortable. We're so fortunate now that you can contribute nothing to yourself or your community and still be kept alive by the surplus value of society.
Everything is performative and consumerist — people aren't human any more. In American Psycho there's a line I'll quote time and time again, because it encapsulates the modern person so well: "There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there." People you meet are defined by what brands they consume, what identities or humour they've downloaded from the internet, iPhone or Android, whether you're blackpill / bluepill / redpill or pinkpill. No one has a personality any more. There's this resurgence of religious zoomers now — thank god for Evola. I always suspected much of the "zoomers turn to religion" thing to be performative and non-genuine; you could not have a better example of Evola's "second religiosity" than the zoomer turn to religion.
Maturity crisis
Growing up, I realised something quite terrifying: there are actually very few adults in the world.
There are plenty of large children, but very few genuine, fully formed adults.
Why
It started with the boomers — as with many things, it was almost seen as a good thing not to mature. Remaining a child for your whole life is, for some reason, seen in the culture as a positive.
As with many brain worms, the 60s hippy thinking made too many people comfortable with being children their entire lives.
So what
There's no one at the wheel.
In the online space there's a lot of talk around whether modern institutions are suspicious of physically and mentally capable young men. Examples of various EU countries restricting young men's access to fitness content online because of "links to the far right" keep popping up.
It's not particularly surprising that when you build some muscle, eat right, sleep right, and stop complaining, you all of a sudden become "right wing". Societies live and die based on whether the people in them give a shit about maintaining them. When boundaries collapse into the suicidal empathy of "let's just treat the whole world like they're our family", things start to fall apart.
We now have a society with far too many passive adults — whether through their own fault or through incentives that reward comfort, grievance, and learned helplessness over competence.
Steelman: Calling it toddlerhood risks mistaking adaptation for immaturity. If work, housing, dating, and community formation have become lower-trust and higher-cost, some withdrawal is not just softness; it is a rational response to institutions that no longer convert effort into adulthood reliably.
