Join Millennials In Fighting The Void

Resetting ourselves is the challenge of a lifetime

This is the most worrying article I've encountered, and it's simply the findings of the Israeli psychologist Professor Sam Vaknin. [1]

He's a teacher, a researcher and a clinical psychologist and he decided that he needed to dig deeper to understand what's going on with the population’s “young-to-middle”. 

I wrote this as a transcript a year ago. Now I see that its lessons apply to all of us: younger and older — and Millennials, too.

Pxfuel

Nov 10, 2021

On one level it's nothing new. Millennials have long known something does not feel right and they've filled acres of newsprint reaching for the words to make others hear.

Headlines are like: 10 Reasons Why This Generation Is Losing The Ability To Be In Love [2[ Or: Why Dating As A Millennial Is So Screwed Up [3]

These and many similar articles might seem to be the same self-conscious reflections of a passing phase. Something is different, however, because this is no flush of embarrassed youth. It persists and haunts a generation. And now we are faced with the imposition of The Great Reset. Perhaps we should seize the initiative.

Professor Vaknin knew from talking to his students that something's gone very wrong and he determined to dig out the problem. I think we all need to hear this.

Vaknin and his researchers interviewed two cohorts, of under 25s and under 35s. What he discovered left him disturbed.

The problem

"Either everything we think in psychology is wrong or there is a new sub-species in humanity that has nothing to do with all previous generations.

It is a psychopathic landscape. Devoid of empathy, connectiveness, emotions, meaningful sex, devoid of meaning at all. Rates of anxiety and depression in these age groups have quintupled and this was three years before the pandemic. And we know the pandemic has tripled the rate. Forty million people in the U.S. alone are constantly drunk. More than half of young people binge drink to blackout every week. None of them is excited by the future. They are walking dead.

The great recession didn't help, nor did the pandemic. Previous generations had “minor” events like WW2 and the Holocaust so I don't buy this. We've all gone through things. These people are atomized completely. Their main sexual activity is masturbation. Their main communication is online.

Textual analysis revealed that 90 per cent of chats are comprised of one-liners and emojis and the average length of the one-liner is three words. They have lost the capacity of language which had distinguished us as a species from animals. Luckily they still walk erect on two legs.

Reset ready

Dystopia is here. It's the reality of these young people. This is not a value judgement. It's not what they do, it's how they do it. They are sleep walking, sedated. They participate in all the right victimhood movements and they spew out the slogans and they march but even this feels very fake, narcissistic, imitative: it’s mimicry. It's a spectacle, made for the media. It's like Game of Thrones.

I can't find a single point of light in this picture. Even the levels of literacy have collapsed. About 40 per cent of this generation cannot read a label on a bottle. About 50 per cent have never read a book. Forget books, what do they do? They play video games for five hours. Rest. Surf the internet. Do they educate themselves? No. Their head is filled with trash. It's terrifying. If this is the custodian of the future of the human species, it is terrifying.

In terms of measures of critical thinking, they have no idea how to think analytically. They don't know the most basic syllogism. Thinking is beyond them. They regurgitate, they emulate, they imitate, they follow gurus, business cultures, dating cultures, mystics but they don't do it in an active way, like adding to it or writing books. They do it as a drug-induced thing like they're stoned all the time. 

What is the problem: why do these young people have no higher functions, no intellectual life, no interests? They have flat speech, dismissive one-liners with no depth... and I think the reason is they are action figures, action oriented.

In the fifties or sixties we made the transition from thinking to emotion. There was the period of 500 years from the Enlightenment when thinking got us nowhere: to the atomic bomb, to Adolf Hitler. So for a few decades we tried emotions and feelings and it got us nowhere. So we settled on distractions, entertainment, leisure and action.

New minds

All our theories in psychology are dying, slaughtered by the young generations. Their psychology has yet to be captured. I see my young students staring back at me with derision. They laugh at me when I say sex always has an emotional aspect because of hormones. Or when I say relationships are important — they say relationships always end badly; better not to have them. Or when I say read, they ask, why? Everything we thought before, is now obsolete because of this transition to action.

Action is always goal-oriented, however unimportant the goal. Action rarely involves overt emotions or empathy. It is very self-centered. When you act, you act and then you act upon someone else. You objectify the other person. In an age where only action matters, where feelings are a threat because they always result in pain, where communication has been rendered virtual, where other people are avatars on Tinder, the basic components of the mind — cognition, emotion, empathy, object relations — are inactivated.

We would have to reboot humanity, to go back in time, to render our textbooks accurate again.

The fact is, actions don't matter. The heart matters, motivations matter. If your motivations are negative you are negative, even if you act positively. The majority of actions take you away from life, from people and separate you from reality... When the action ends you are stuck with yourself.

Action takes you nowhere. It's circular. Action may give you pleasure but one third of young people are anhedonic: incapable of pleasure in anything. Even if action gives you pleasure it ends. Where did you begin: with yourself. That is one thing you can't ever escape.

Face yourself

Working on yourself is a good project if it is not tinged with negative emotions like pain avoidance, envy, the wish to show off, grandiosity or fear... but not if you start from negative territory. We know social media is constructed on negative emotions: competition, envy, comparison, negative news, negative platforms, negative technologies, negative human relationships, whatever is left of them. We think negative motivations can lead us to a positive territory: never. They lead only to negative territory.

Out of love you should act, out of pleasure, out of curiosity, out of wonder, the miracle that is reality. You should never act with a gun to your head. The same action is experienced very differently if you do it for a loved one or if you do it for your boss whom you fear.

Most of the actions we undertake today resonate with the negative inside us and consequently they cause trauma in a rejection of life and reality and we end up as loners. We don't have society any more. We don't have community. Most of us don't have families. We have no institution, fabric or network. No one to look to for empathy, sympathy, compassion or comfort: least of all to ourselves.

How do the younger generation survive — do they survive? They ask what is wrong with me because they keep failing. The programming is wrong. We've taken the wrong fork in the road not because of the hardware but because of the software. Instead of acting, focus on getting the right motivations. Focus on feeling not on acting. Focus on positivity not on action. If it does not resonate with emotion, action is meaningless.

We are badly-designed, inefficient animals. The only thing that keeps us alive is the meaning, the narratives that unite us. We need emotion and cognition to motivate our actions because we need a story to glue us together. The moment we lose this glue we're doomed as a species. We are very weak animals. Our action should be predicated on emotion and cognition, or two prefrontal cortex advantages.

AI illusion

Don't follow algorithms, don't automate, don't obey commands, don't adhere to recipes. Human beings are not dishes. Young people put the cart before the horse. Emotions come first... actions do lead to the emotions that perpetuate long term action. That is why most young people don't finish their studies or have long term relationships — because they can't get to the finish line.

Feel anything positive: love if you are lucky enough. Reach out to friends and family, to life, to reality, yes, with pain, hurt, blood and body parts. Reach out, touch. Let it touch you.

I don't recall any system which rejected life, not even Nazism. Yet here we are. The ideology of unbeing, of emptiness is upon us. The ideology of the spectacle, simulacrum and simulation, the ideology of why do I need to be if instead I can act. It's not going to end well and we are halfway there. Armageddon is not a battle; it is silence when we are all gone."

Those are the words of Professor Sam Vaknin. I think we can all learn from them.

[1] Prof Sam Vaknin, Bitchute: Warning Young Folks: Silence When We Are All Gone: Silence When We Are All Gone

[2] Paul Hudson, Elite Daily, 2015 — 10 Reasons Why This Generation Is Losing The Ability To Be In Love

[3] Drea Rose, Bolde — Why Dating As A Millennial Is So Screwed Up