Nobody is immune to this plague, but it’s hitting our youth the hardest. Many lack optimism about their futures while drowning in a crisis of meaning.
When life could be brimming with potential and flowing over with possibilities, there is too often an inner emptiness and a sense of foreboding. Although they lack nothing materially — decent home, parents, schools, etc. — their dearth of meaning keeps crashing the party.
I’ve recently been counseling a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old, both young men, both of whom exhibit the same trademark symptoms of being lost, confused, with a directionless mental outlook. It’s endemic among those who are just getting started out in their lives.
In an April 24 BreakPoint article, “Teen Sadness and the Crisis of Meaning,” John Stonestreet writes, “America’s teens are not all right.”
Author Derek Thomas wrote in an April 11 article in The Atlantic, “Why American Teens are So Sad,” that from 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26% to 44%.
“(This) is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded,“ he said. “(Almost) every measure of mental health is getting worse …”
Yes, we’re just emerging from a devastating COVID-19 pandemic and, yes, we’re dealing with one domestic and international crisis after another. But this meaninglessness syndrome goes deeper.
Looking further, we find widespread social isolation, ironically exacerbated by so-called “social” media.
The resulting pseudo-relationships are often punctuated by brutal peer criticism, which generates a need for continuous peer affirmation — “or I’ll die.” Porn addiction (false intimacy) and substance abuse (pain killers) come along for the ride, dulling the spiritual senses and causing ongoing low-grade shame, like an internal “soul-flu” that won’t go away.
Deeper yet, the core of the issue centers on life seeming to have no meaning, no ultimate significance, resulting in a cavalier “so what?” attitude.
Current generations have been born into a materialistic culture that has dismissed God as a historical artifact, relegated the notion of absolute “truth” as strictly relative to mankind’s latest “scientific advances,” and reduced man’s earthly life to the here and now.
This worldview automatically discards the notions of an afterlife, eternity and a heavenly kingdom out of hand, leaving its adherent’s feet firmly planted in thin air.
Stonestreet concludes, “… now we are living with the existential results of a culture, untethered from God, and therefore, untethered from any fixed reference point for truth, morality, identity and meaning.”
But then, like an intense beam of laser light, the words of Jesus pierce the soul-flu fog in Matthew 7:24-27:
“These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit — but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock.
“But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.”
Jesus’ words underpin a life anchored in the rugged reality of Christ’s resurrection from the tomb to redeem all creation. Such a foundation transcends the fleeting temporal realm and is not shaken by mere circumstances.
As described in Hebrews 12:1-3, true believers’ hearts and minds are focused beyond the visible veil to a Kingdom without end, “… looking only at Jesus, the originator and perfecter of the faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
The only escape from this profound sadness is Christ. And the only way to make that happen is by redirecting your life away from a “tick-by-tick” addiction to frantically keep up with a perishing world, and toward, what is described in Isaiah 40:28, “The Everlasting God, the Lord Jesus, who is the Creator of the ends of the earth (who) does not become weary or tired. His understanding is unsearchable.”
How About You?
Are you still infected by today’s spiritual plague, with no anchor tossed around in an ocean that lacks meaning? Maybe you feel dragged around by life’s ups and downs, or haunted by the past, while being fearful of the future.
Consider the words of the Apostle Paul who wrote in Philippians 3:12-14, “… one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies head, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
— D.C. Collier is a Bible teacher, discipleship mentor and writer focused on Christian apologetics. A mechanical engineer and internet entrepreneur, he is the author of My Origin, My Destiny, a book focused on Christianity’s basic “value proposition.” Click here for more information, or contact him at don@peervalue.com. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.