The Age of Abandonment

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?

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

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,

All this to say, being abandoned is not trivial. Not only having divorced parents, but being cut off from community, from culture, from all sources of support. Maybe it means more to you than you are letting on. Feel it, grieve it. Then turn that disappointment into determination. Nothing’s guaranteed, but we can take the pain and put every inch of

we grew up and got it drilled into us that the problem is dependence. Don’t be needy.

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

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

When some of us hear the word community we think of Instagram. We think of Reddit. Or abstract concepts like the LGBT community or mental health communities, nothing real or solid. Which is why whenever someone says something like online communities are a lifeline for young people! I feel like screaming because it’s just so bleak. What have we done

That’s the thing about attachment—you need to depend to be independent. You need a stable base to venture out. Something to rely on to take risks. Some stability to cope with chaos. Otherwise you can’t explore with confidence. If you fear abandonment, you won’t risk romance. Words will feel traumatic. You will stay stagnant, afraid to move. Maybe t

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