Millions of Millennials Live at Home and Support the Policies that Keep Them There. By Maura Pennington.

Millions of Millennials Live at Home and Support the Policies that Keep Them There. By Maura Pennington. Forbes, August 19, 2013.

Millennials Are Losing Faith in the Country, Not Obama. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 20, 2013.

In the Face of Obama’s Malaise Economy, Seek Success – and When You Find It, Be Proud of It. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 20, 2013.


Pennington:

In Man’s Search For Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl discusses the “existential vacuum.”  It is an internal emptiness and lack of purpose.  In a life with logos or meaning, anything can be endured.  Without it, a person is lost.  Frankl watched men in the German camps succumb who might otherwise have survived simply because they had nothing to hold onto.

 

When the greatest excitement today for twenty-somethings are hybrid baked goods, a list of 37 random tokens of nostalgia, or going on an endless string of meaningless Internet-facilitated dates, I have found myself surrounded by nihilists.

 

Those who are married or finished medical school already may exempt themselves.  Anyone with a legal partner or a life in service of others may wait until middle-age to experience the solitary struggle of a crisis of meaning.  The lost ones instead are those approaching thirty with no savings, no interest in anything but the near-term future, and no profitable outlet for creativity besides solipsistic online forums.

 

The lost ones are smart.  They pay attention to what goes on in the world.  They read the news along with the lists of 37 GIFs.  Yet what can they do?  They have minimal discretionary income and their free time is spent unwinding from occupations that force them to look at backlit words for eight hours or deal with whining strangers.  They are fully adults and can’t boast of anything their parents had at this age besides better means of communication, which many are horrible at maintaining.

 

I hear my peers say, “I’m lost.”  I say, “Yes, of course.”  Almost 22 million twenty-somethings live with their parents, myself for the second time currently included, though economists tell us that this is technically a “recovery” from a “recession” and not just one long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth for our country and for the development of individuals who thought for sure they could have had an apartment by now.  I went to a party recently where someone was bashful to admit that he bought his own place.  A room full of renters were ready to give him grief for having the means to pay a mortgage or the certitude and resolve to put down roots in one place.

 

The lost ones went to college. They know about Sisyphus.  They could draw the connection between checking and rechecking social media feeds and pushing a rock endlessly up a hill.   Yet, perhaps they will not self-identify as lost.  That abyss they feel inside is maybe just “growing up.”  It’s not.  It’s a vacuum.  If you are scoffing at the achievements of others, if you neurotically mutter, “Meh, like it makes a difference”—you have a internal vacuum.   If you have picked up a random hobby recently in a last ditch effort to entertain yourself, you have an internal vacuum.  Allow yourself the excuse that it’s only because there was a coupon for that evening of wine and a painting lesson, but know that you are filling a void.

 

It’s not that this lost segment of a generation made themselves willfully nihilists.  Life is crowded and getting stricter.  Whereas other generations might have persevered, they enjoyed less traffic and fewer regulations. They could visit Disneyland without timed tickets for rides or climb Yosemite’s Half-Dome without a permit. They could smoke cigarettes on their college campuses without nanny classmates and university bureaucrats shaming them into special areas.  They lived in an era where vaccinations for lethal diseases weren’t up for debate and no one was allergic to bread.  We, on the other hand, exist in an age in which the state explains booster seats at www.safercar.gov and female bullying at www.girlshealth.gov.  In the face of so many noodges, who wouldn’t be a nihilist?

 

The question for the lost ones is what to do about the vacuum.  They could fall in love, if they still believe in love.  The countries with higher divorce rates than the United States are former Soviet Republics and Belgium, the seat of the sinking EU.  They could get a cat or a dog, if they feel ready to take on that kind of responsibility.  The average age of a first-time mother in America is about 26.  It was 21 in 1970.  The lost ones are skewing that statistic as much as the women who are mindfully waiting.

 

Perhaps people could find purpose on the day they stop buying multiple bicycles and instead own a car.  The problem then becomes parking, guilt about the environment, and deeper existential angst.  People could start an affinity group of some kind, since one in four Millenials has no religious affiliation, but that would mean managing to get people to respond to messages, which requires a refusal to accept “My inbox is a mess right now” as anything approaching an apology.

 

Aside from these personal fixes, there is a solution to put the country (including any wayward stragglers or stunted post-adolescents) back on the path of prosperity.  Americans could stop supporting anti-growth politicians pushing agendas that strangle the economy, weaken the dollar, and surreptitiously erode civil liberties, but let’s be serious.  60% of those ages 18-29 reelected President Obama.  So, what’s left?  Keep checking feeds, going on pointless dates, and buying more gadgets?  Frankl would tell the lost ones to find a will to meaning in this world, but finding purpose can be put off, even if the abyss persists and they pester the rest of the world as impotently self-involved non-starters, for lack of ever finding a self or a start.

 

You can say the deck is stacked against this generation and that I am making an audacious assessment of my peers who were hit by an unexpected external blow. To that I say: Be someone who solves the harder puzzle we’ve been given.  Consider that this isn’t the first time young people have faced a sluggish economy and then investigate what made growth possible in the past.  (I’ll give you a hint: There is something about the 1980s and 90s that makes us all look back to our magical childhoods.)  Instead of complaining about arbitrarily arranged wages, wonder how and why our talents are being wasted and who, with sweeping executive authority, has been setting the policies that make it so.  Question the persistence of this so-called “recovery.”  At least work on the puzzle and you won’t be lost.