In 2020, a study from the CDC found that more than one in four young Americans (18–24) have seriously considered ending their lives. Almost 20% of high school students have contemplated suicide and 8.9% of high school students have done more than imagined such extreme action; they actually attempted it.

A recent poll conducted by the University of Michigan revealed a deep well of self-loathing and youthful despair as almost half of the teen respondents agreed with dyspeptic statements such as, “I can’t do anything right,” “I do not enjoy life,” and “My life is not useful.”

A never-ending geyser of tragedy haunts the fragile psyche of young Americans today. We classroom teachers see it not only in their eyes, but can observe it by the unmistakable frequency of their absenteeism and the ubiquitous use of the word “anxiety” when describing their mental state. The subtle certitudes of life that their teachers and other older Americans once took as a matter of conventional faith—that life is a blessing and a gift, that love is an intrinsic good worth cultivating and enlarging in the mysterious chasm of the human soul, that striving, seeking and yearning for self-knowledge and universal wisdom are nectars of life that only sweeten as we age—now seem utterly foreign to young Americans. 

The consequence is a torrent of generational despair the likes of which the United States has never witnessed. Something sinister clearly lurks in our culture when broad swathes of our youth population explicitly consider ending their lives on such a grand scale, crushed by relentless and mercurial waves of ennui. But more than that, there is something uniquely ominous in their suffering, something quintessentially American, an affliction of the modern soul wrapped in a bilious membrane colored red, white, and blue.

Teen suffering is nothing new, of course. “Teenage angst” and adolescent sorrow are fixtures of some of our best literature, from S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye half a century ago to modern iterations such as John Green’s Looking for Alaska and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. 

What ails young Americans today takes place on a wholly different scale of enormity and tragedy—it is more than an inchoate desire to deflect conformity or the gnawing yearning to escape generational poverty. The modern incarnation of teenage angst, as revealed in recent studies, is clearly more deadly and hopeless in its effect. 

But why?

Because today’s young Americans are unique in that they do not suffer for a cause, an ideal, an institution, a relationship, or even God. As Nietzsche correctly observed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” But there is no why for young suffering Americans today. No reason for their agony. No purpose for their pain. Nothing ennobling or enriching or exalting in the meatgrinder of daily existence. The pain of their lives is unfettered, barren, and empty of edification or grace. In short, their suffering is unique because it is in service of nothing. Their suffering occurs within The Eternal Void, devoid of any echo beyond the temporal, bereft of the slightest pulse of spiritual epiphenomenon or moral consequence.

This isn’t to suggest we need world wars, famines, and established churches to spare us from this agony. What today’s young Americans uniquely lack is a form of wisdom that used to accompany human suffering, wisdom that meaningful relationships and classical learning once provided.

Instead of a rich network of adult influences—two parents, multiple grandparents, a rich assortment of siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, as well as church ministers and school teachers with high expectations—modern American teens have access to few of the voices that once helped them make sense of their suffering. The voices my students are listening to instead—hours per day of an endless stream of arbitrary frivolity on social media—aim more for mere amusement than genuine human wisdom.

My students freely admit that the formation of their moral and political selves is heavily curated by the voices of celebrities and social media influencers, more so than even parents or extended family members. The dinner table has been displaced by a steady digital drumbeat of juvenile outrage and celebrity opining, the ostentatious sheen of bling queued up by fetid algorithms replacing the ordinary trappings of traditional family life. Instead of paternal guidance or maternal affection, our students ingest a digital diet teeming with the trivial and the toxic. The most predictive element of well-being—abundant and effusive gratitude—is a thematic no-show on the reels and feeds of our young people. Instead, our children are shepherded down rabbit holes of political extremism where they surrender common sense and traditional values to the chic fads of the moment.

On digital platforms and in their social media lives, the allure of identity politics is proportional to the amount of outrage one harbors online or the amplitude of zealotry expressed. Whereas normal life is lived in a world of known norms, acknowledged customs, and salubrious social interactions, the digital landscape of young Americans today rewards something very different—vapid spectacles or gestures of outrageousness. In a world where authentic meaning and purpose are won with eye contact, genuine affection, and earnest interaction, the ethic of the online gladiator forever in quest of fresh smears and newfangled aggrievements only serves to aggravate their suffering by depriving them of any sense of normal human interaction.

Nor does modern education provide much guidance. Sophocles and Dostoevsky understood that suffering is the price that must be paid for wisdom and the discernment of truth. Shakespeare portrayed suffering as the consequence of some defect of character or excess of self. The Homeric Achaeans suffered for honor. Most of Christ’s apostles suffered torturous deaths, refusing to disclaim the many verities of Jesus’s messianic status—the purpose for their suffering was neither vague nor vacuous. A new parent suffers from sleep deprivation when the child is a baby and then suffers acute financial hardship eighteen years later when this same child goes away to college, all for the same reason: indescribable and unconditional love. Modern public school teachers whose jobs have become increasingly arduous and thankless refuse to leave their schools despite the suffering modern teaching often inflicts upon its practitioners because they know they are often the only positive adult relationship in the lives of their students.

We all suffer—physically, emotionally, existentially. It is the fate of every human soul that ever draws breath. The difference between a life well lived and a life mired in the doldrums of despair is not the absence of suffering, it is the absence of a genuine reason to suffer.

The statistics don’t lie: students who sit in our classrooms and populate our universities do not suffer in the spirit of a parent, a soldier, or a saint. They suffer in isolation and ignorance. They suffer as they endlessly scroll on their phones and occupy toxic corners of the digital universe. They suffer because they believe they are unworthy of their “privilege” or because they are citizens of a country with a history to be ashamed of. They suffer because they know next to nothing about any God or the great religious traditions of human history. They suffer because theirs is a world largely bereft of books or the enlargement of life that occurs when one is an avid reader. They suffer because they have an excessively individualistic view of marriage and family in which children are seen as nuisances, mere hurdles to unapologetic indulgence of the self.

If you took away my wife and children, told me God was merely a mental phantom of the unsophisticated, forced me to retire from my beloved profession, removed all books from my home and told me my life as an author was over, fed me processed foods and insisted I live a lethargic lifestyle, I am not sure if I would become suicidal—but I might, and I would certainly understand and empathize with those who do under similar circumstances. The world of our young people is materially and technologically rich yet impoverished in the realm of the things that have always mattered most. Consider that their ethics have been thoroughly atheized, their friendships the fodder of endless electronification, their romantic lives sadistically corrupted by the likes of Tinder into sexual transactions of narcissistic satiation, not to mention their civic identities often feed a modern fetish for self-loathing.

I cannot help but juxtapose the palpable suffering of my current and former students with my own simple and traditional childhood, a childhood I never took to be idyllic at the time. But it most certainly was; as I reached my teenage years it was occasionally littered with moments of rich vitality, moments that were droplets of subtle grandeur in a youthful meadow hinting at richer pastures of an adult world. I am not just referring to sunsets and symphonies, first loves and movie magic, but to a higher dimension of possibility, to a subtle awakening of the soul to realms of human existence transcending the tedium of simple amusement or juvenile merriment.

Young Americans who want to end their lives, who see it as pointless or the world as utterly unredeemable, do not view creation as rooted in goodness. They do not conceive life as a journey of unlocking the secrets of their own lives. They often do not believe in objective truth or a loving God who has authored a purpose for their human journey. Tomas Halik, winner of the Templeton Prize and author of the magisterial Night of the Confessor, vividly describes what awaits those who believe they suffer in the benign vice of a grander purpose: “One day we’ll discover at last the entire and real truth about ourselves, about our lives and about everything that appertained to them; we’ll hear at last the ‘solution’ that eluded us in the thicket of unanswered questions, errors, and complex mysteries.” 

Halik’s conception of life as a thicket of deep mystery appeals to those who believe suffering can be didactic, that it can rouse our desire to know our truest and best selves, that it can be a necessary step on the journey towards the discovery of meaning and purpose. Instead of a future teeming with infinite possibilities—statecraft and commerce, artistry and innovation, mountaintops and mountain streams, parenting and friendship—our young people have turned into the twilight of the Darkness, and in the place of resisting its inevitability or raging against its eternal finality, they run with open arms, hoping the oblivion of nothingness can forever quell the pain of their existence.