In the Summer of 1990 Time Magazine dubbed my generation “The Slacker Generation.” I had just graduated from High School. The moniker stuck. I hadn’t even had a chance to do anything yet! When you’re 17, everything is about you, even when it isn’t. However, I would experience that label through the 1990s in how my elders perceived me. I wasn’t mind-reading; sometimes they told me. I never was a “slacker;” I was a developing result of my upbringing in their world.
I get a bit irritated when glib versions of the same are cast upon today’s young people. “Kids these days!” If I’m honest, I’ve done it myself, but don’t tell anyone that. I just read The Overcoat from 1842, by Nikolai Gogol. It’s there in Tsarist Russia. The obliquely referenced "prominent personage” has the same gripe about the younger generations. Aristotle and Plato were preoccupied by the same. So, it’s perennial. It’s part of the structure of maturation. It says as much about the “us” as it does about the “them.” It’s what happens: elders are irritated by youths; elders cannot remember being youths themselves.
Adolescence is always adolescence; it’s the times that change.
The briefest of historical analogies:
The printing press and the Reformation: the printing press was the accelerant, a monk in Saxony was the spark, and the political, ideological, financial opportunity across Europe at the time was the forest in drought. A geopolitical/cultural firestorm would follow. We tend to think of the medieval era as having all the witch-burning. Vastly more people were killed in nasty ways for witchcraft after we left the medieval period than during. For European cultures, mid C16th to mid C17th CE was the pinnacle of atrocity for thought-crime (1).
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Today, for the printing press, we have digital technology as a new vector for information. For the monk, we have “democratized” access to cultural authority without institutional checks. The fuel is financial, political, and ideological opportunity; maybe a different order but, as ever, the usual suspects. The Post WW2 era, of unique stability in the West, may have already concluded (2) (3). It is safe to say that the potential energy is as great as it was right before the Reformation and an information revolution is already underway.
[End historical analogy - phew!]
A word about Zero-Sum Bias while attempting my best Hidden Brain/Shankar Vedantum:
Sometimes a material is finite. If we’re sharing a desert, the more I eat, the less you eat, and vice versa. Less materially, then, for a championship game, play will continue until there is one winner (+1) and one loser (-1). +1-1= zero. It’s a principle of result proportionality in the world.
However, problems occur when we over-apply a principle at the exclusion of others that have more felicity or demand more effort, when we become biased towards one way of interpreting the world. The discussion about technology easily devolves to a debate of whether it is good or bad. One side wins, which is a zero-sum result. The trouble is that with things as broad as “social intelligence technology,” we have to confront the complex shades of grey between the slivers of black and white on the outer edges. If we don’t think harder, we are left with status quo passivity or naked self-interest.
The antidote to this bias is to perform the higher cognitive and moral operation of holding multiple, often contradictory truths simultaneously. We have to find ways towards action from a “both and” perspective. These technologies are here, they are unchecked, they are not going away, so we better get a handle on them for our collective sake.
As we get into the cultural vectors below, let us not simply shake our heads and long for yester-year’s resolved anxieties. Instead, we have to see through the eyes of youth, as if now were the point of our emergence from childhood, and we must reach across the developmental divide.
Challenging vectors shaping development in today’s digital zeitgeist:
If these factors had been the grounds of our development, we’d have been exactly like them. It isn’t that these vectors determine each emerging adult, but, rather, these comprise the context that they are surrounded by, informed by, out of which they are becoming, and from which other people are acting upon them. This is the world of our making from which they are emerging:
Polarization: Cancel Culture v’s Edge Lording. The outrage driven algorithm silos us into non-diversity. This results in a loss of nuanced public space. The threat of ostracism for error leads to purity culture on the one hand, and on the other, no-holds-barred goat-getting. This is “edge lording,” or, riding//falling over the edge of the profane and anti-social in the name of reaction (e.g. Nick Fuentes) (4). Increasingly, the choices split into ideological-purism or smug nihilism. There is less room for critical thought in either camp than we generally found pre-social media. Yesterday, I was talking to a high school peer of my son’s. I recently read his copy of Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). I asked if he noticed how it might be read as anti-feminist. He froze. His eyes widened. It was as if he had been caught out, as if the book was suddenly contraband, as if he was about to be denounced. Discussion is not safe for these guys!
Subtle Dystopia: just as an AI interface can either direct a person towards engagement with the human world or direct a person deeper into AI interface by letting down dopamine, norepinephrine, and adrenaline, AI tech is an intensifier that can cut either way. An example of the former would be a guardrailed therabot helping someone connect to a suicide prevention line or figure out how to work an insurance policy; the latter would be a sexbot “replacing” interaction. The difference, relative to media, is that AI is not simply a tool; AI is iterative and does not simply do what it is told. AI is creative. When AI is unguardrailed, we are interacting with an alien intelligence, not simply an “it” (5). The smart phone, since 2007, has led to a massive commodification of connection while increasing anxiety and alienation (6). Now, the algorithm, which has been feeding curated versions of us to each other, has been joined by an entity that can feed one to oneself more than ever before.
Environmental/Economic Fatalism: the Post-War economic boom was an exponential rise in material gain unparalleled in human civilization (7). That era is receding over the horizon behind us. The Covid pandemic response, unfortunately, wove uncertainty/instability into the fabric of their childhoods. To varying degrees, key developmental contexts broke down. We now are faced with un-fun forecasts, anticipated AI redundancy, and working hard for institutions is often interpreted as a sucker’s game. Alternative frames, due to polarization, are often emprisoned in other silos. Since the pandemic, in my own work, it seems that the entitled kid with a parents’ credit card and a substance problem is now isolated in the basement with no plans of going out any time soon.
Continuum of Main Character Energy (MCE) Manifestation: a TikTok led adaptation to the pandemic, and now Modernity, by framing one’s experience as a main character in a movie or a reality TV show (8). It ranges from a cultural ethos to a personal hermeneutic. It is rooted in deterministic positive thinking; imagine growing up with Rhonda Byrne’s, The Secret (2006), as your primary existential frame. When this lens goes wrong, it makes people solipsistic, performative, and dissociative. It becomes The Truman Show (1998) in reverse. It’s what people are doing, to one extent or another, when obliviously flouncing about in Grand Central Station making movies of themselves to upload. When that behavior becomes an increasingly fundamental orientation, people stop iterating their personal narrative through lived realities, but through their uploads or their own imagination. It becomes a subtle anti-Theory of Mind. It breeds victim response and narcissism (9) (10). There’s a PhD thesis available here, and if the point seems overdriven, urgent care centers now categorize for TikTok injuries.
Maturation Antipathy: an unconscious adaptation to a foreboding future by putting-off maturation. When it is conscious, it is referred to as “Slow Life Strategy” (11). Increasingly, kids do not look forward to growing up. At age 15 they can be harboring a belief that “these are the best years of my life.” They are world weary before they can get a driver’s licence they don’t even want anymore.
Kardashianization (the Reality TV phenomenon, writ large): the shared reference points in culture are increasingly paragons of material excess and reality-TV grade pathology. Here, the sum is: personal economic fatalism + vicarious MCE escapism = apathy/imitation.
Doom Scrolling: the endless feed of anxiety and outrage (we all know this one).
Over-pathologizing: the shadow side of “mental health awareness.” The Psych 101 experience of “I’m/you’re text book crazy” is now built into people’s feed from childhood.
These dynamics comprise a context that is new or intensified. Each dynamic informs the next. These phenomena have varying relevance to individuals, but they are the updated matrix that is not fully perceived by those of us who came of age at an earlier time.
Kids are, as they have always been, resilient and creative. They are still more verb than noun. They are now, as we were then, more free to become than they will be later, as we are now. They do not need our sympathy. We should spare them the false praise of “how hard it is growing up today.” That is flattery that takes more than it gives. And, as professionals, teachers, and parents, we need to make conscious with them the water they are native to as we should for ourselves as late-comers. Their quirks are what being young has ever been mixed with a world we have made for them. The “both and” aspect is that we must point them toward responsibility for themselves moving forward, regardless of their hardships, regardless of what is or isn’t fair. This is what becoming an adult means. And their becoming is on the pivot of global history. The speed of Change has gone from horseback to fiber optics since that last information revolution. We will need to hold fast to each other.
References:
Levack, B. (2006) The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe.
Hassoulas, T. (January 12, 2026). Bound by Blood Broken by Power: The fall of the post world war two era. The Canary.
https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2026/01/12/world-war-two-era/
Krasnyanskyy, M. (27 June, 2026). The Post-WW II Era is Over, and the Pre-WW III Era Has Begun. Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6893560
Callaghan, A. [Channel Five with Andrew Callaghan]. (2026, July 24). Nick Fuentes Interview, featuring Hunter Biden [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3V-X_BRp_o&t=5861s
Harai, Y. N. (2024) Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI.
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
Maddison, A. (2001) The World Economy: A millennial perspective. Organization for Economic and Co-operative Development.
McBain, M. [Marina McBain]. (2026, August 29). Main Character Syndrome Isn’t Cringe Anymore, It’s TERRIFYING [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnboMpak5bs
Gotlib, A. (27 September, 2024) Main Character Syndrome: Why romanticizing your own life is philosophically dubious, setting up toxic narratives and an inability to truly love. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/why-main-character-syndrome-is-philosophically-dangerous
Bellamy, A. (31 January, 2026) How Practicing Your “Main Character Energy” Uses This Universal Law to Create Your Life’s Best Narrative. Medium. https://medium.com/soul-steering/how-practising-your-main-character-energy-uses-this-universal-law-to-create-your-lifes-best-afa18e053c53?sk=3eba175175e8e7a286102ca91873213c
Twenge, J. & Park, H. (18 September, 2017). The Decline in Adult Activities Among U.S. Adolescents: 1976-2016. Child Development.
