Good evening. The more observant of you may have noticed that I am not my usual jovial, charming and charismatic self. Something happened to Grandpa.
Grandpa Dino is not as usual.
What happened?
Well, first of all, I had to review literature about young people, people under the age of 35 and people under the age of 25, these two cohorts.
I reviewed literature by Peggy Orenstein, I reviewed literature by Lisa Wade.
I read the studies by Twenge and Campbell. I read studies from Norway, from Portugal, from Brazil, from Nigeria, from Israel, from China, from the Middle East.
Studies comprising altogether a few million people actually.
I had to read several books, so I'm preparing the curriculum, the syllabus for next year's first semester, which would be youth psychology, the psychology of the young.
I also corresponded with quite a few young people, many of them my students, others who are not my students, viewers from YouTube.
I took on a few young clients, which I rarely do, and so I treated or work with clients under the age of 35, and I began to obtain a bit of a panoramic view of what's happening to young people today.
And I must say that I'm shaken to my foundations.
There are two possibilities. Either everything we think we know in psychology is wrong, or there's a new subspecies of humanity, Homo sapiens 2.0, that has nothing to do, psychologically speaking, with all previous generations going back to the time of Abraham.
The people I talk to, they have no emotions. They think they have emotions. They do emotions. They simulate emotions. They have no emotions.
The people I talk to, the people I read about, but the studies show, these people have sex without commitment, without emotion. They openly admit that the sex is perfectory, fast, meaningless. In 20% of the cases, they don't know the name of their sexual partner. They regard the partner's body as a masturbatory tool, a tool for masturbation, a dildo or a sex doll. They pass each other like ships in the night. They don't really communicate.
I went through a treasure trove, a database, a hoard of chat transcripts. It's an abomination. There's no real communication at all. So they have no emotions. Their sex is mechanical, short, brief, disappointing. Many of them abstain from sex altogether. The rate of relationship failure in this group under age 35, the rate of relationships failure is mind boggling.
First of all, they have an average of nine relationships before they reach 30. What they call relationships is also in great doubt and question, but even these are that's fake imitation relationships don't work. All of them fail with no exception.
The rate of marriage, which is a proxy for relationships, you don't have to get married to have a relationship, of course, but it's a good, it's a good proxy. It's a good kind of standard, good test. The rate of marriage has collapsed precipitously.
A huge portion of these people live as singles most of their lives actually. There's a hookup culture that is only on paper. They don't even hook up anymore.
It's a psychopathic landscape, absolutely psychopathic landscape, devoid of empathy, devoid of connectiveness, devoid of emotions, devoid of meaningful sex, devoid of meaning at all.
Rates of anxiety and depression among these age groups have quintupled. Quintupled, and this was three years before the pandemic.
We know that the pandemic has tripled this rate.
Addictions, 40 million people in the United States alone are constantly drunk, constantly drunk in a state of inebriation as defined by the relevant psychological authorities.
More than half of young people binge drink to the point of alcoholic blackout every single week. They're aimless. None of them is excited by the future. They go through the motions, they're zombified, they're the walking dead.
Of course the recession didn't help, the great recession, the pandemic didn't help. But previous generation had similar minor events like World War II and the Holocaust.
I don't buy this. They had the Great Depression, they had the Spanish Flu, they had the, you know, with all kinds of things. I personally went through four wars. I don't buy this, that these two seismic cataclysmic events are not underestimating the magnitude and the severity and the enormity of these events, but history is replete with such events.
These people are atomized completely. Their main sexual activity is masturbation. Their main mode of communication is online and then they chat.
A textual analysis revealed that 91% of all chats are comprised of one liners and emojis and the average length of the one liner is three words.
They had lost language. They had lost the capacity of language which had distinguished us as a species from animals. Luckily they still walk erect by pedal on two legs. I am really, in a horrible state of mind, have been exposed to this data. Horrible.
Because you know, I came across all these studies before, but I never had to kind of immerse myself, drown myself in this sea of information. Anything from Tinder to dating, from dating to sex, from sex to communication, from communication to marriage, from marriage to relationships, etc. It's an utterly dystopian scene. Its dystopia is here.
It's not science fiction anymore and it is the reality of these young people.
I'm not talking about parameters like porn consumption and so on and so forth. This is not a value judgment. I don't judge one-night stands. My generation had invented them and I had my share, honestly.
It's not a value judgment. It's not what they do. It's how they do it.
They are sleepwalking. They are sedated.
It's an amarathon generation or generations. Now they go through the motions. They participate in all the right victimhood movements and they spew out the slogans and they march and everything, but even this feels very fake, very narcissistic, very imitative.
It's like mimicry. It's not the real thing.
I witnessed the real thing in the sixties.
This is not the real thing. I can tell the difference immediately.
This is a show. It's a spectacle. They're showing off in every way.
It's like made for the media thing. It's like an HBO production, Game of Thrones. I can't find a single point of light in this picture. I couldn't.
Even the levels of literacy had collapsed completely. About 40% of this generation cannot properly read a bottle, a label on a bottle. That's how bad it is.
Then over 50% of them hadn't touched a book ever. The average number of books was 1.3.
Okay, forget books. What do they do? About five hours? Video games. Rest? Serve the internet.
What do they serve? Do they educate themselves? Do they?
No. You know what they're doing.
Their head is filled with trash. It's terrifying, honestly. If this is the custodian of the future of the human species, it's terrifying. Terrifying.
In measures of critical thinking and analytical thinking, in tests applied to the majority of this, to members of the generation, sorry. I mean, they don't know, according to these studies, they have no idea how to think critically or analytically. They don't know the most basic syllogisms. They don't even know what is a syllogism, of course. They don't know how to think.
They adopt this part, this faculty. The thinking is beyond them. They regurgitate. They emulate. They imitate. They follow a herd of phlemings. They follow gurus, business coaches, dating coaches, all kinds of mystics. That's it. They don't even do it the way we did it in the 60s, when we did follow such figures, but we have added, we had written books.
They don't do it in an active way. They do it as though they are, lethargically, it's like a drug-induced thing. It's like they're stoned all the time.
I'm telling all this because it led me to think, to try to think very hard.
What is the problem? Why these young people don't have higher functions, no intellectual life, no interests, no hobbies?
They have what I call flat speech. Flat speech is like flat affect or flat attachment. It's the appearance of conversation without conveying any meaningful content. Dismissive one-liners with no depth and no background, as dull as drying paint.
Why? Why are they like that?
And I think the answer, my opinion, that's an opinion of course, I think the answer might be that they are action figures. They're action-oriented.
You see, a few decades ago, not so many, we had made the transition from thinking to emotion. Let's say there was a 60s, maybe 50s, from thinking to emotion. Because there was a period of 300 years, the Enlightenment, where we had emphasized thinking. And we said thinking got us nowhere. Thinking got us to the atomic bomb. Thinking got us to Adolf Hitler. Thinking got us to communism. So thinking got us nowhere.
Let's try emotions and feelings.
And so for a few decades, we tried emotions and feelings and it got us nowhere.
And so we settled on distractions, on entertainment, on leisure, on action. We are obsessed with action, especially the young generations. That's why you come to see a young person without his face buried in a smartphone and his thumb overactive.
Action follows us everywhere. Action is in our pockets. Action is in our ears. We are constantly active.
But you see, this is something psychology teaches us.
I started this diatribe by saying that what we are learning about the young generations defies everything we thought we knew in psychology. Because we believe that relationships are important.
We believe in psychology, that relationships actually create the self. The self is relational. It's an outcome of relationships.
We believe that sex is always meaningful, even if it's quicky. And all of it, we believe that intellectual stimulation is like hunger. You can't do it without it.
And all our thinking in psychology, all our theorems, all our hypotheses, all our theories are dying, slaughtered by the young generations. Their psychology has yet to be captured. Everything we teach in universities from textbooks does not apply to the young.
And I can see my young students gazing back at me with derision in their eyes, mocking me openly.
When I tell them, for example, you know, sex always has an emotional aspect because of hormones. They laugh. They don't know what the heck I'm talking about.
Or when I say, you know, relationships are very important. And they say, well, relationships always end badly. Better not to have them.
When I say you should read, why? What for?
So everything we thought we knew in psychology and everything we are teaching is obsolete, obsolete, absolutely obsolete.
And this has to do with the transition to action. This action is essentially psychopathic. Action is always goal oriented. However minor the goal, however unimportant the goal, it's always goal oriented.
And action does not involve or rarely involves overt emotions, empathy, and so on. It's a very solipsistic thing. It's a very, very self-centered thing.
When you act, you act. And then you act upon someone else. So you objectify the other person.
In an age where only action matters, where feelings and emotions are a threat because they always result in pain, where communication had been rendered virtual and simulated, where other people are avatars on Tinder.
In this kind of generation, this kind of period in history, the basic components of the human mind, cognition, emotion, empathy, relational object relations, they're irrelevant. They are, let's put it this way. They are inactivated. They're inactive. They're disabled.
We would have to reboot humanity to go back to these times to render our textbooks accurate again.
Actions don't matter. That's the issue. The heart matters. Motivations matter.
If your motivation is negative, you are negative, even if you act positively, and then you will be judged negatively.
And the overwhelming majority of actions take you away from people, take you away from life, separate you from reality, especially in today's world, where there are alternative universes, for example, in social media, online.
To accomplish anything, you need to change from the inside. You need to change yourself.
And then the world adopts itself. The world changes in reaction to your change.
You need to work on yourself as you modify your behavior, the way you think, the way you remote, the way you relate, the way you communicate, the words, you are changing the world as well.
Inadvertently sometimes, but it always changes.
When the action ends, you are still stuck with yourself.
Action takes you nowhere. It's circular. It's from you to you.
Action regulates your moods, maybe. Action causes you pleasure. If you are capable of pleasure, because about one third of young people are unhedonic, incapable of pleasure in anything. That's 34%.
But even if the action causes you pleasure and changes your mood for the better, it ends. It ends.
And when you're back where you had begun, where did you begin? In yourself, with yourself.
There's one thing you cannot escape ever. Yourself.
Working on yourself is a good project if it is not tinged with anxiety or with negative emotions like pain aversion, avoidance, envy, the wish to show off grandiosity or fear.
You can improve, you can change, you can reach for goals and you can modify your behaviors, even your cognitions and emotions.
But not if you start from negative territory.
And we all know, for example, the social media is constructed on negative motivations. Envy, competition, comparison.
So we are flooded with negativity, negative news, negative platforms, negative technologies, negative human relations, whatever is left of them.
So we're surrounded with negativity and we develop negative motivations.
And we think that negative motivations can lead us to a positive territory. Never, never, ever.
These are the outcomes of catastrophizing. They lead to negative territory, never to positive territory.
Out of love, out of love you should act. Out of pleasure, out of curiosity, out of wonder, out of the miracle that is reality.
You should never act with a gun to your head. The same action exactly is experienced very differently if you do it for a loved one or if you do it for your boss whom you fear because he's a bully. The same action, exactly.
Actions that have no background, that are detached, floating in space, atomized, that have no resonance with anything positive inside you, these actions will never have meaning nor will they ever last.
And today most of the actions we undertake resonate with the negative inside us.
And consequently they cause trauma and a rejection of life and a rejection of reality.
So we end up all of us being loners.
It's a loner civilization. We use the word society, it's fiction. We don't have society anymore. We don't have society anymore. We don't have community anymore. We hardly have families anymore. Most of us don't.
That's majority of children grow up in single parent families or in divorced families. We have nothing left. No institution, no fabric, no network, no one to look to for support, for empathy, for sympathy, for compassion, for comfort, nowhere to go to least of all to ourselves because we are imbued and poisoned with negative toxicity emanating from all possible directions.
From the first second we open our eyes to the last second that we dive into sleep more fierce.
If you do the right thing, the right things for the wrong reasons, if you do healthy things for unhealthy reasons it creates dissonance.
Even the right actions done for the wrong motivations create dissonance.
And where there's dissonance there's no happiness, there's no pleasure, there's no satisfaction, there's no gratification, there is no future, there is no horizon, there is no hope and no belief and no nothing. There's nothing.
It's a culture of nihilism. It's a culture of nihilism because the only thing left is nothing, not nothingness which is positive. Emptiness which is negative.
It's the malignant form of nothingness. It's devoid.
We are all floating in deep space about to be disconnected from our oxygen tanks, about to be untethered from the mothership.
It doesn't get you anywhere.
What's wrong with me? You ask? I'm doing all the right things. I'm doing everything I can. I'm doing all the right things but it's not getting me anywhere.
Why? Why you insist? What's wrong?
Probably something's wrong with me.
Hence mental illness, the internalization of guilt, of anomie, of the external disintegration.
As your environment disintegrates, you disintegrate. There's no animal without ecosystem and there's no human being without an ego system.
When things fall apart around you, you fall apart. When people divorce, they fall apart. The marriage falls apart, they fall apart.
And now everything is falling apart. And everything is falling apart because we had forgotten the young generations, had forgotten the art of connecting, the art of emoting.
This search for meaning. They had rendered their lives worthless, dispensable, disposable, interchangeable, unmodified, ugly. There's no beauty. It's ugly. It's simply ugly to behold.
The young generations are repulsive. I'm repelled. You remember my video yesterday? I feel the need to take a shower after each study.
How do they survive? Or shall I ask, do they survive?
And they ask themselves, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?
Because they keep failing. They keep failing because our basic equipment is still the same. The programming is wrong. We've gone awry. We've gone to the wrong path. We've taken the wrong fork in the road, not with regards to the hardware, with regards to the software.
Instead of doing right things, instead of acting, focus on getting the right motivations. Focus on feeling, not on acting. Action will not get you anywhere. Action that is not dictated by emotion, determined by emotion, respondent to emotion, resonates with emotion, is meaningless.
And in the absence of meaning, we are animals.
And here's the breaking news, the breaking news. We are very, very badly designed, inefficient animals.
The only thing that keeps us alive is the meaning, the narratives that unite us.
We need emotion and cognition, and we need these emotional and cognitive orientations to motivate our actions, because we need a story to glue us together.
If we lose this glue as we are doing, acceleratingly fast, the moment we lose this glue, finally, irrevocably, irretrievably, we are doomed as a species, because we are not as fast as the cheetah. We don't have as much fur as the buffalo. We don't have strength. We don't have nothing. We have very, very weak animals.
And so our action should be predicated on emotion and cognition, our two prefrontal cortex advantages.
Cognitive, cognition, inspired emotion and cognition.
Don't follow algorithms. Don't automate. Don't obey commands. Don't adhere to recipes, like in religion or self-help books.
Human beings are not dishes. You can't cook them the same way each and every time.
And as long as you don't change your motivation, your emotional landscape, your background, no action will get you anywhere.
Young people put the cart before the horse. Emotions come first. Actions follow. Actions don't create reliable long-term emotions, which create reliable long-term actions. Actions don't lead to the kind of emotions that perpetuate action.
That's why most of the young today stop midway. They don't finish their studies. They don't consummate their relationships. They don't create families. They don't create, period, not only families, because they can't get to the finish line.
Their actions are wrongly motivated, so they don't lead to additional actions.
But emotions lead to reliable long-term actions, and these actions enhance the emotions which lead to more actions, and this is a virtuous cycle.
Ask not what you need, but what you need to feel. Ask not what to do. Ask why to do. Feel anything positive. Love if you can, if you're lucky enough. Feel love. Reach out. Reach out to intimate partners, to friends and family.
These are the defaults. Reach out to life. Reach out to reality.
Yes, with a pain, with a hurt, with a blood, with a body parts. Reach out. Touch. Let it touch you.
Negativity can take you a long way. Don't misunderstand me. Look at Adolf Hitler. He became the king of the world. Negativity took him there, the most negative person to have ever lived.
But then, how did he end? How did Germany end? How did Europe end? And how did the world end?
Japan, for example. Negativity takes you only so far up to a point, and then it ends badly. Then you implode. Then you disintegrate. Then you fall apart. Then there's nothing left of you, not even your self-respect and dignity. Then you give your body away. You give your mind away. You give your body away to strangers. You give your mind away to drugs and alcohol. You forget. You forget to exist. You go through a process of unbeing rather than a process of becoming.
Negative emotions are not glue. They're explosives. Positive emotions are glue. Negative emotions are explosives. They tear things apart. Actions dictated by negative emotions are destructive actions, even if they seem to be the absolutely right and healthy actions.
Do not fear hell, but love God if you're religious. Negativity in constriction, limitation of life, narrowing life. These are choices, not circumstances.
Everything we do in life is a choice, made, selection to have or to not have children, to write a book or not, to sleep or to watch a movie.
Can you conceive of anything that is not a choice?
I cannot, with the exception, perhaps, of abused children up to a certain age.
So negativity and constriction in adults, they're choices.
And they are, again, if you are religiously inclined, they're blasphemous choices because it's a rejection of a gift.
Each and every one of us was given gifts, not the same gifts. My gifts are not your gifts for which you should be very grateful, believe me. But we were all given gifts and these gifts were given to us to be used.
The aim was to use them for the betterment of ourselves and others.
Some people use the word God, God's gift. You know what? If it's God's gift, then to be negative, to narrow your life, to limit your choices, to throw emotions out the window when you're having sex, that is to spit in God's face, to reject God himself if you are religious, which I'm not.
But if this is your favorite metaphor, that's what you're doing. You're spitting in life's face. You're giving up on the world. It's sacrilegious or inefficacious, depending if you're religious or not. It's not efficient.
If you're a tough kind of person, bottom line kind of person, concerned with numbers and profits, you don't like the mushy-cushy text right now because it's too sanctimonious and too self-righteous.
Okay, let's talk business.
Negativity sucks. It's inefficient. It gets you bad outcomes. It impacts the bottom line. It drives you to the red from the black.
Do something. Total rejection of life is suicide. Suicide is this, isn't it?
And in every conceivable philosophical and religious system, suicide is the biggest possible sin.
But here are whole generations committing mental suicide. And they convince themselves that mental suicide is not as bad as physical suicide.
I beg to differ. Mental suicide is much worse than physical suicide.
In physical suicide, you die once. In mental suicide, you die every second or every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of your life. You die by a million cuts. You die a million times. You commit suicide a million times when you commit mental suicide.
Every time you suspend yourself, every time you suspend your being, your judgment, your cognition, your emotions, your self-respect, and then you just throw yourself as so much trash into something, casual sex, reckless behaviors, counterproductive or self-defeating choices. Every time you do this, you're committing yet another suicide.
There has never been, have never been generations more sinful than today's generations.
Why?
Because they're all dead and they are dead by their own hands.
I am not a religious person. I don't know how many times I will say this.
And no, I'm not going through a spiritual epiphany or theophany.
But in religion, God that you believe in embraces life, embraces truth and positivity and love. There is not a single God, true God in the big religions, which embraces death and isolation and unbeing and suspension of emotions.
And the devil may care and throwing your life away and waste and irrationality is not suitable. Even monks embrace life. They reject commitments. They reject external commitments because they need their undivided commitment, attention, resources and energy for God.
But they don't reject life. Even the most backward reactionary institutions embrace marriage and family and love and relationships.
Even under Nazism, even under communism, I don't recall any system of thought, ideology, which had rejected life, not even Nazism.
And yet here we are. The ideology of unbeing, the ideology of emptiness is upon us, the ideology of the spectacle, the ideology of make-believe and imitation and 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 already halfway there. Armageddon is not a battle. It is silence when we are all gone.