Age of Abandonment

Beneath what looks like the age of entitlement, below the culture of narcissism, this is the age of abandonment.” So writes Freya India in her Substack, “Girls.” She says that her Gen-Z cohort has come of age in a time when traditional institutions of support and belonging have collapsed. The liquefaction of norms, institutions, and traditions triggers a pervasive fear that one is doomed to be alone in the world—abandoned.

India observes that neighborhoods are no longer thick networks of connection. Social bonds are weak: “Forget loving our neighbors, we can’t even make eye contact with them.” The very word “community” has been debased, referring to “abstract concepts like the LGBT community or mental health communities.” Such notions lack reality and solidity—“which is why whenever someone says something like online communities are a lifeline for young people! I feel like screaming because it’s just so bleak. What have we done?”

India focuses on homelife, which is in tatters. “Our parents are strangers to one another; our childhood a series of exchanges from one house to the next. No real home, no place to belong.” Her experience is not unique. “By age 14, nearly half of first-born children in the UK no longer live with both their mother and father.” Similar rates of single-parent households obtain in the United States. More than one-third of children grow up in homes from which their fathers are absent.

These are difficult circumstances for children. They are made worse by the fact that we are not permitted to offer consolation or speak openly about the suffering.

Ours is a culture choking on its own compassion yet offering next to none for children of divorce. We are the first generation to grow up without stigma around family breakdown, but near total normalisation of it. And when you normalise something, you stigmatise the reaction. So many marriages end; what did you expect? Your friends’ families are the same; what’s wrong with you. It’s just a contract anyway. Kids are resilient. All this tells us that abandonment is trivial. That if you feel deeply affected by it you might be the problem. And anyone who does try to articulate the pain is treated with suspicion, accused of having some political agenda, rather than just being overcome with this feeling. This feeling of absolute ­abandonment.

I’ll note that for children of gay couples, the omertà is even stronger. In the present ideological climate, it’s impossible to express sympathy for the difficulty of growing up without a mother or without a father. Saying so out loud risks detonating cultural and emotional explosives.

Fear of abandonment debilitates Gen Z in many ways. “Fear of abandonment explains much of Gen Z’s lack of resilience” and overwrought concerns for safety. “If you fear abandonment, you won’t risk romance. Words will feel traumatic.” The snowflake phenomenon is to be expected. “How can we stand on our own two feet when the ground keeps crumbling beneath us?”

India urges cultural conservatives to avoid summary dismissals of young people as selfish and shallow—or mindlessly woke. “When young women rage against marriage and motherhood so viscerally what I’m really hearing is it’s not safe to marry. It’s not safe to have kids.” Just look at what’s going on in contemporary society. “Why would you risk that?” The parents of Gen-Z youth couldn’t tough it out. “We simply don’t believe anyone will stay.”

The Gen-Z motive for downplaying marriage and championing nontraditional families does not rest in a sunny progressive confidence in the so-called arc of history. Only Baby Boomers can sustain that conceit. Instead, fear of abandonment encourages young people “to take family less seriously, to put less of ourselves into relationships, do it all half-heartedly so it hurts less in the end.” Having children? It’s not that Gen-Z women are brainwashed by radical feminists; they’ve been disabled by a culture long ago transformed by the sexual revolution. “We haven’t lost sight of what’s important, we were never shown what was important. And no wonder we don’t want kids. We were kids when we got left.”

The imperative of “self-care” is often emphasized as the solution for Gen-Z unhappiness. India sees this as a perverse response to abandonment. “There are young women whose families fell apart and who their whole lives dreamed of nothing but a stable, lasting love to depend on, and are now being told that’s pathological, that’s needy, they should love themselves more . . . I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it.” Stop! Stop! Stop! “Please will someone step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love, more belief in themselves, but something to belong to.” I would add, something to serve and give themselves to.

India might have added reflections on the hypercompetitive, college-or-bust educational culture. Or the winner-take-all economic system. Or the dark horizon of war, about which Baby Boomer and Millennial political leaders seem so nonchalant. But she’s right to focus on matters of the heart—mom, dad, wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend. From time immemorial,­ the domestic hearth has offered comfort and consolation in an often cold, cruel world. We have deprived the rising generation of that comfort and consolation, in large part because our society has embraced the Rainbow ­Reich. India: “No amount of material progress has helped this generation so far. The fear is still there. It does not matter what comfort and convenience we have if we think love is dead.”