The Age of Abandonment

The feeling we’re left with, God. How to describe it? It’s the feeling that nobody has our back. That we can’t trust anyone. That this world is terrifying and we are powerless, but if we attach to anything for support, we will be abandoned. I see it everywhere ; it cuts to the core of this generation**.** Difficulty trusting people, hypersensitivit

Throughout history our ancestors built customs and institutions to bind us together and then, one by one, we kicked them down. We killed God, we mocked marriage, we attacked the family, we uprooted neighbourhoods, we debunked every last myth and story. And we kept going and going, until we got here, with our sad little divorce parties. Until we got

By age 14, nearly half of first-born children in the UK no longer live with both their mother and father.

It does not matter what comfort and convenience we have if we think love is dead. Who cares what cool technologies we have, if the closest thing we’ve got to community is an online forum?

Of course families have fallen apart in every generation. But even a few decades ago children from broken homes had communities, they had neighbourhoods. Now our families fall apart and there is nothing, nobody, to catch us. We live far from extended family. We are more estranged than ever. And I can’t get across how little familiarity Gen Z has wi

I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it. I see so much abandonment pain. We are reparenting ourselves. We are self-soothing. We are healing our inner child. Nobody is asking why. Please will somebody step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love,

total abandonment of any sense that we belong to something bigger. Loss of faith—not just in religion, but in all social bonds. No sense that there’s anything binding us, that we even share the same values. Forget loving our neighbour, we can’t even make eye contact with them. Nothing holds us together anymore. We are alone

Our identity, our meaning, our purpose, as humans, was always our ties and obligations to others, and now we are trying to do it all alone, trying to figure out who we are alone, and we’re nobody alone, no wonder we’re confused. And for many of us life has become about trying to heal or hide this thing, shoving it down, this basic human need to bel

But the real reasons? We don’t want to know. We stick with young adults aren’t settling down because they can’t get on the housing ladder, or because wokeness is brainwashing them, because if we go any further, past that, down below, we might get too close to the truth. The hard truth. Like the fact that for many girls, the first man to break their