A Crisis of Peter Pans

While many young adults are eager to remain stagnant in their lives and complacent in their dissatisfaction or unhappiness—usually levelling the blame on the government or the rich—others reinforce excuses for them.

Phrases such as “you’re so young, you have so much time to figure it out” became commonplace advice while I was in attendance at university, and I’ve noticed its persistence even beyond the confines of higher-education institutions.

Online, particular movements centred around ideas of self-love and self-care reinforce the notion that because life isn’t a ‘race’, we can take all the time and money we need to figure it out. Better that than living any semblance of a life which you’re in any way dissatisfied with. Inevitably, these priorities and ways of thinking take the place of focussing on actionable steps that can improve one’s quality of life or help to get us closer to the achievement of a goal or dream.

Could an entire generation be defined by such coddling and idealism, though? And how does this generation’s attitude compare to the recent (and distant) past? If so, what could it mean for our future?

The Generations, Defined

Current generations are categorised by the Pew Research Center as such:

The Silent Generation is composed of people born during, or shortly before, the Great Depression and World War II. Many members of this generation may have had a brother or father go overseas to fight, and the rest of their family certainly would have contributed in some way to the war effort. From the time they were born, they would witness historical event after historical event: coming of age during the era of McCarthyism and watching as the first man walked on the Moon; witnessing the Civil Rights movement and ultimately the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Boomers are those born in the period of heightened optimism and security that came after World War II. Despite the contempt that Millennials and Gen Z appear to have for them (there is no shortage of online activists and publications blaming the current state of the economy on the Boomer generation), they’re renowned for their hard work, and at times have kept on working past the usual retirement age. Many of the world’s wealthiest individuals are of the Boomer generation, including Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.

The term ‘Generation X’, also referred to as the ‘Latchkey Generation’ because children of this age would often let themselves into their homes after school because both parents were at work, can be traced to Douglas Coupland, who used the letter ‘X’ to identify the refusal of “the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence.” 

For Coupland, ‘X’ is a term that defines not a chronological age but a way of looking at the world. Gen X’ers deviated substantially from past generations, in that they weren’t particularly set on making a lot of money at the expense of a fulfilling private life.

With the passing of each generation, there has been a noticeable decline in the strife and suffering each respective age group has had to face first-hand. For instance, while the Silent Generation knew sacrifice and conflict to be regular parts of life, Gen X as a whole didn’t get to live through those same life lessons on a personal level.

That trend has continued with the coming of the Millennial and Gen Z (Zoomer) generations. Until recently, and with a potential third World War looming on the horizon, their struggles have been comparatively minuscule.

Millennials and Zoomers: The Perpetual Peter Pans?

Millennials are the last generation to have spent their early years without instant access to all kinds of insane technologies. Older Millennials gained access to the internet, computers, and cell phones as they entered late adolescence or very early adulthood, and the youngest Millennials may remember the pre-mainstream-internet era before the age of five or six.

Millennials‌ were born into a comfortable world. There were no wars on the scale of WWII or Vietnam for their immediate family members to be forcibly drafted for, and the next nationwide recession wouldn’t happen until 2008. Even then, while belts may have needed to be tightened, 2008 was by no means a repeat of the Great Depression. 

In the US, the national tragedies Millennials lived through were the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 (the first domestic attack on the US since Pearl Harbour in 1941), the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, and subsequent school shootings in later years, including Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary.

Perhaps it was these events that prompted helicopter parenting to take off, at least way more so than in previous generations. Or maybe the cost of having and raising a child grew so much that parents placed more importance on keeping their children safe and secure? No matter the reason, the approach to parenting in a lot of ways did more harm than good to Millennial children.

Millennials are often more self-absorbed than previous generations. Besides having been coddled by their parents, they were told repeatedly that they were ‘unique’ and ‘special’ and that they could do or be what they wanted to be in life. In equal measure, and by merit of existing, they were told by society that they were deserving of respect, praise, or celebration, with all significant obstacles in life removed from them.

This attitude has translated over into the Millennial work life. Millennials have been observed to require the most regular, positive feedback at work, and most aim to work in businesses with shared employee values and cultures. While the latter isn’t inherently negative, it could suggest that Millennials see the workplace, and possibly the world, as something to conform and adjust to them, rather than seeing themselves as a part of society that must contribute as much (or more) than they take out of it.

Such an attitude plagues the Millennial personal life, too. Many seek validation from their peers and society through social media, and they use that avenue to reach as many people as possible to demonstrate how virtuous they are (and how despicable people who oppose them are).

The Enablement of Society

Objectively, character traits like entitlement and pettiness are regarded as annoying in children, and in a perfect world, parents wouldn’t let such behaviour fester in their children. Yet many Millennials (and older Zoomers) get a pass. There is of course the argument that adolescence continues beyond age 18 because “brain development doesn’t complete until age 25.”

The phrasing of such statements, however, is vague, to say the least. Should we actually consider people adolescents until age 25? Are we not able to hold them accountable for their shortcomings in life, since they’re operating without a ‘fully developed’ brain?

The term ‘fully developed’ when referring to the brain’s maturation by age 25 is partially misconstrued. It’s not like neurons are being newly created at that age—in fact, at that age, it’s more likely that the brain’s neurons and nerve connections are being pruned. After the onset of puberty, the prefrontal cortex, which manages behaviour, reasoning, and problem-solving, begins development, along with the internal reward system. With this section of the brain being barely formed, it explains why some teens might engage in reckless behaviours. They do not picture life beyond the current moment, and have not adequately developed the skill of long-term thinking needed to hold off from certain behaviours in the interest of future reward. 

Regardless, brain development is not a cookie-cutter process. Many, if not most girls mature faster than boys, and many people may complete development of the prefrontal cortex prior to age 25. Reportedly, others complete development as late as 30 years old, so 25 is the reported average.

There are also individual factors that may affect brain development altogether. Studies suggest that severe stress introduced early in life (ages zero to five) as a result of life events including illness, parental divorce, or the death of a loved one may lead to faster maturation of the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus. Conversely, stress introduced later in life (especially in adolescence) from low peer-esteem may result in the brain delaying development.

Many members of the Silent Generation faced incredible hardship. Those at the older end of its membership came up during the Great Depression and the Second World War, and may have lost family members during that time. If they somehow didn’t experience loss during this time, there was always the promise of that from the wars of the 50s and 60s. One Harvard student commented for TIME magazine in 1951: “When a fellow gets his draft notice in February and keeps on working and planning till June, instead of boozing up every night and having a succession of farewell parties, he has made a very difficult, positive decision. Most make that decision today.” Younger Boomers grew up with their own versions ‌of that stress, having spent their formative years amidst the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many members of that generation would also be drafted to serve in Vietnam.

There was, for most of civil society, no room to live an individualistic life centred around themselves or their desires in the way many youths today do. They either had to be responsible and negate their luxuries, or sacrifice themselves to the war effort. The former resulted in a productive work ethic that drove them towards hard graft and the creation of financial stability and prosperity for themselves; the latter propagated a resilient mind.

Succeeding generations lacked that kind of stress. This has inevitably amounted to a generation that has been almost completely removed from direct conflict and life-altering external stressors. Culminating with the toxic tendency of deifying the self, Millennials have utilised all the tools at their disposal to capitalise on their delayed (or forgone) sense of adulthood. With excuses like brain development, and the importance of self-care over everything else, we as a society continue to signal that such juvenility is okay. There is thus no reason for Millennials to seek a higher purpose.

A Nation of Children

Someday soon, there will be no living members of the Silent Generation, and after that, no more Boomers. What will the world look like run by Millennials? Looking at politicians from that generation, the present looks bleak. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez come to mind, with AOC in particular seizing every chance she can to prove how woke or virtuous she is or how much of a victim she is. The most prevalent example of this is her capitalisation of the “attack” on the Capitol by “violent insurrectionists” on January 6th, 2021. 

While some say Gen Z is the most conservative generation since World War II, we can’t rely on Gen Z to rise up and save the nation (although one certainly hopes so). As of 2018, they appear to closely mimic the Millennials’ thinking, and have been regularly seen to believe that the government should step up to solve their problems.

What we know for certain is that the egocentrism of Millennials—and especially the Leftists dominating politics and culture—is unsustainable. In the next few years, we can expect an epidemic of ‘detransitioners’ to appear in society. These are the people currently being groomed by teachers, parents, government media, and online LGBTQ advocates to think flippantly about transgenderism before undertaking irreversible medical procedures that forever alter their lives. In the present, we’re already seeing the effects of a mentally absent president as championed by the Left. This has translated into more global conflict and a severe economic strain on the middle and lower class, just to highlight these phenomena at the surface level.

Perhaps with all that is going wrong in the world, and what could continue to go wrong, Zoomers and other future generations will realise that there needs to be more sought ‌in life than just surface-level activism and Millennial egocentrism. They might realise that the pursuit of a higher purpose and self-reliance can not go hand-in-hand with waiting for the government to tell one how to live one’s life and solve one’s problems. Maybe a hot war will break out in the form of World War III, and the Peter Pans of the West will be forced to grow up. Maybe then we’ll be able to reset the cycle, and the subsequent generations will be strengthened by the stress of war.