Key points
- Young people are describing pervasive numbness, lack of motivation, and an absence of drive or purpose.
- Their struggles reflect the fragmenting of the social values and truths on which inner conviction depends.
- Learning to be a friend might provide them, and us, some firm footing.
Feelings of emptiness and estrangement seem to be spreading in contemporary society, especially among the young. Why this is happening was the basis for an article, “A Brief History of Purpose-Seeking,” that I published in the January/February 2026 issue of Psychology Today. Not long after it came out, I received an astute letter from Sobia Mahmood, a Toronto-based registered psychotherapist, who gave me permission to quote it. She said she felt compelled to write because the article “articulated something I’ve been observing clinically for some time.”
Ms. Mahmood explains: “I work with children and adolescents, as well as adults, and increasingly I find myself sitting with young teens who describe pervasive numbness, lack of motivation, and an absence of drive or purpose. What stands out is that some of these youth do not identify a clear history of trauma or deprivation; some have supportive families and considerable intellectual capacity.”
She then gives the type of example that many other people who work with youth have reported: “a bright adolescent who knows she could excel academically if she applied herself, yet she sees little meaning or value in doing so and reports feeling this way since early childhood. She often questions the point of conventional paths such as a 9-to-5 career, sentiments that echo much of the discourse circulating on social media.”
Following on one of the points in the article, Ms. Mahmood also wonders if what she is “seeing clinically reflects a fragmentation or erosion of the internalized convictions that once helped structure identity and purpose.” Such inner convictions, I argued in “Brief History,” require external and stable reference points, which are increasingly unavailable. Now, young people, Ms. Mahmood rightly observes, are often forced to navigate amid “rapidly shifting and often contradictory value systems.”
Picking up on this thread, I want to reflect on the need for stable reference points, the lack of which leaves people, like Ms. Mahmood’s clients, feeling empty and adrift
Everything Has Become a Question
What, we might ask, does a coherent, vital sense of self require? At a minimum, we need our actions, our convictions, and our life direction to make sense to us, and to see them as meaningful and harmoniously interconnected. An understanding of right and wrong is also essential, and the confidence that we can choose between them. Capacities like these, in turn, require a supporting structure. We can’t lead good lives, find our identity, and be of service to others without some fixed social coordinates, some solid ground of truth and values to stand on, and so orient ourselves to the world. As psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis once wrote: “[I]f everything is open to question, no question can be answered.”1
The problem for many is that nearly everything isopen to question. Consider this simple example. In her book Alone Together, sociologist Sherry Turkle notes that preteen girls in the late 1980s and early 1990s were wearing clothes so provocative that the style was called “baby harlot.” Their boomer parents, who grew up rejecting parental rules, didn’t know where to draw lines. But what they did know, Turkle observes, is that there were rules. “One might say,” she writes, “it is the job of teenagers to complain about constraints and the job of parents to insist on them, even if the rules are not obeyed.”2
Now, however, the rules themselves have gone missing. This is not to say that all values and standards have disappeared. The change, rather, is that the old certainties, which had previously been taken for granted as matters of pre-reflective routine, have broken up. Rules, truths, roles, and standards, like the parental authority and values the boomer generation was subject to, have lost their self-evident quality. They are no longer authoritative and socially constitutive. Now, everything must be taken up and negotiated as questions, such as about age-appropriate dress, by individuals and in the context of their private lives.
Up for discussion and in need of justification, the now fragmented rules and values provide no consistent orienting compass in matters small (appropriate dress) or great (future direction). Teenagers are marooned, as in Turkle’s example, unable, she found, to “easily articulate any rules about sexual conduct except for those that will keep them ‘safe.’”
A lack of specific guidance is one consequence. Another, deeper outcome follows from the loss of firm structures of rules, values, and standards. Young people (all of us) have little they can really count on. Without a definite shape, social life loses its objective quality and appears arbitrary: ambivalent, inconsistent, and contradictory. Deciding everything seems like freedom as the old rules have lost their grip. But choosing is precarious—failure, the wrong choice, is always an immediate possibility—and deprives experience of any intrinsic meaning or ultimate value or purpose. The world becomes more like a mirror, merely reflecting back one’s own fears and desires.
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Young people are facing a social void, where their concerns can find no settled response. Many are left feeling empty, unmotivated, and without conviction
Finding Some Footing
Psychotherapist Mahmood’s letter ends with a request. If the “broader social foundations” are increasingly unstable, how might those “working with children and adolescents help [them] build a sense of ‘firm footing’”? This is not an easy question to answer. If it were, the problem would have already been addressed, or we would not have abandoned or failed to maintain the stable structures in the first place. The hard reality is that we are in a new situation. Once upended, established customs, traditions, moral codes, and the like cannot be restored to the realm of the tacitly believed and understood. We have no choice now but to choose.
No big program will help us. If we are to make a space out of which commitments can grow, we might begin by cultivating the art of friendship and the habits of the heart that make friendship possible. This art is a tradition, going back at least to the reflections of Plato and Aristotle on philia, and continuing ever since
The forces of fragmentation, however, have been at work. Many today have few friends; many describe the friendships they do have as shallow, superficial, and unreliable. Numerous are the barriers and obstacles to the practice of friendship and hospitality. In a recent post, for instance, I noted the rise of a new ethic of self. With the loss of routine and culturally shared guides to action, we are now pressed, institutionally and as a kind of moral duty, to make choices about our life and goals based on our private self-interest. Such an ethic is poor soil for the growth of friendship, both in terms of being present to the best interest of others and knowing what we have to offer in friendship with them.
But the art is alive, and we can learn, and teach others, how to be a good friend. The hunger is there. People want to be known and loved for their own sake, to be heard, to be in conversation, to be needed. In nurturing friendship, we find virtue and push back against the tyranny of our contemporary preoccupation with self. In these fluid times, it can provide some stable ground on which to develop commitments we can stand by
1. Allen Wheelis, The Quest for Identity. New York: Norton, 1958
2. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together. New York: Basic Books, 2011
