Nihilistic Youth: How Radical Optimism Died
A retrospective on Joan Didion's 1967 essay
Welcome to today’s edition of Write & Lift.
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Today’s Workout
Today was a light leg workout. I’m currently healing from a lower back strain so I kept the volume moderate and focused on basic squat and hinge patterns.
Front Squat: 3x5
Goblet Squat: 3x12
Leg Extensions: 3x10
Romanian Deadlift: 3x8
Reverse Nordics: 3x12
Nihilistic Youth: How Radical Optimism Died
Imagine a cadre of schizophrenics attempting in a group setting to discuss the revelations of their inner voice. This is how I feel watching others, and myself, try and “make sense” of our current time. Is the “Hawk Tuah” girl a Jewish deep-state plant? Is Joe Biden alive or dead? Who is actually running the country? Was the Trump assassination attempt a setup?
It would sound insane if only there weren’t a slight probability it could all be true. A necessary caveat here—only because we’re all so on edge we put a lot of emotional and moral weight behind our “rabbit hole” takes—you can observe without endorsing. You can take a deep breath and eat your funnel cake and observe everyone else at the carnival. It’s ok.
Decades happen in months. We don’t trust each other. We’re wary of our institutions. We have a lingering animosity towards the buffet of ideas and opinions and subcultures and media shoved into our periphery.
Yet I remain an eternal optimist. I can’t have it any other way. And I refuse to become a “doomer”. I know we’re adaptable. I know—with 99% certainty—we went to the MOON. I still enjoy conversations with strangers in the checkout line. I think we can “turn it around”.
To find a little psychological balance, I revisited a personal favorite essay of mine; Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. I want to understand “the youth”, and since the upheaval of the late sixties closely resembles the social turmoil of the last five years, I felt it would be worth a re-read.
In STB, Didion walks us through a Summer in 1967 San Francisco during the height of the free-love Hippie zeitgeist. A similar, but altogether, different time in American history, where everything felt both new and off. A collective holding of breath as we climbed the final steps to the final view from the edge of vantage. The view we’d all been sold, but never had seen.
Didion did her best to claw her way in and dig up the neurosis of this time. Who were the kids dropping acid in crowded Haight Street apartments? Were they enlightened seekers of truth, or resentful and fragile kids running away from religion, a career, and tradition?
The late sixties youth culture is still painted in a utopian light. As a bartender, I had many conversations with sun-hat-clad boomers talking about what a miracle it was to have been born at this uniquely perfect time. Contemporary documentaries, artists, and writers talk about the unifying movement of peace and enlightenment just like Rolling Stone and the Village Voice did in their heyday.
As a general heuristic, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. Few writers are as sharp as Didion. Few writers possess her honesty or recognition of the Jungian threads—the known but unquantifiable—aspects of our psyche that connect individuals into a larger memetic network.
She begins her essay by describing a Nation fractured, divided, and unsure of itself. She writes:
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it? An “uneasy national apprehension”. A “you only live once” mentality. Dancing and jumping and taking drugs on the bending floorboards and no one seems to notice or care.
The Nihilistic Strain
He takes a much-folded letter from his wallet. The letter is from a little girl he helped. “My loving brother,” it begins. “I thought I’d write you a letter since I’m a part of you. Remember that: When you feel happiness, I do, when you feel . . .”
In STB, there’s a lot of talk about the message encased in a bad trip. A sense that the subconscious is pulling toward a great understanding. A lot of talk about “doing the internal work”.
The flower-power hippies of the late sixties felt like they had seen a hidden light of a concealed millennia. It was a spiritual revolution. The despotism of the “man”: McNamara and his war in Vietnam, evangelical Christians; corporate allegiance, could be understood through a lens of purposeful delusion. They were bad, but they weren’t irredeemable. Everyone, as Timothy Leary said, could “turn on, tune in, and drop out”. The first step involves recognizing how the brainwashed “self” perpetuates the delusion.
There was, in hindsight, a sort of gentle naivety in this generation. They still carried with them a sense of eternal optimism for the future. The truth was a generation away. They wanted communes they wanted families and farms and organic veggies and property to grow cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms on.
Even those who had done enough LSD to permanently alter their brain chemistry still had an easiness to them. A sense that everything was ok; a mellow nihilism.
Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is 23, was raised in Virginia and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. “I feel it’s insane,” he says, and his voice drops. “This chick tells me there’s no meaning to life, but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just flow right out. There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again. At least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it’s going to happen.” He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. “Here you know it’s not going to.”
Didion describes an interaction with a young man named ‘Steve’ in San Francisco
I am confident, with the amount of reading and self-study I’ve subjected myself to about the late sixties hippie zeitgeist, that if you were to transplant your young, bra-less, hemp-wearing, acid-tripping 20-year-old future mother-in-law into a State College in 2024, she would be shocked to see what this young generation lacks. Hope.
Gen Z are isolated, neurotic, anxious, and hopeless. A 2023 AEI survey found that only 56% of Gen Z reported having had a romantic partner as a teenager, compared with 69% of Millennials and 78% of Baby Boomers. They work less, party less, and put off common rights of passage like getting a driver’s license. They are lonely, and they bare the weight of the world’s omnipresent problems on their shoulders.
It’s tragic really. From a young age, Gen Z has been told that the world that they want is dying. And that the ones doing the killing are the unassailable technocrats, government officials, and corporations. Instead of being normal, horny, and naively curious kids, Gen Z are faced with an impossible task. It’s no wonder why they feel hopeless, anxious, and isolated.
There is no technological optimism, there is no back-to-the-land utopian movement, there are no “third-eye” opening drugs, and there is no spiritual revival. For a majority of Gen Z, the world is bleak and lost beyond repair. Many find solace in committing to a type of pseudo-marxist freedom fighter mentality, but even an identity of opposition carries with it a weight of the impossibility of the mounting task to “overthrow” the “systems of oppression”. It’s a lose-lose.
As always, thanks for reading
-Joe