Why Our Children Are Nihilists

By Elizabeth Grace Matthew

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

Americans today spend a great deal of political and cultural energy litigating between the comparative importance and veracity of two well-documented crises, in education as well as in life more broadly.

 

The first crisis, worrisome to conservatives and thoughtful liberals but considered explicable if not laudable by many progressives, is the political radicalization of young women. While young men’s average views have remained fairly steady over the past several decades, young women’s have drifted sharply leftward. Decreased fertility and a rejection of motherhood seem to be both a cause and a result of this phenomenon insofar as mainstream feminism, which typically evinces disdain for the traditional family, is inextricable from progressivism.

 

The second crisis, broadly associated with masculinity, has two elements: male academic and professional underperformance and failure to launch, combined with elevated mortality and decreasing life expectancy, which worries everyone but those leftists who pooh-pooh its existence; and male radicalization rightward that may be limited in scope but is nonetheless deeply disturbing in substance (i.e., a growing embrace of overt racism, antisemitism, and misogyny, along with a rejection of marriage and involved fatherhood).

 

But the truth is that too many young Americans of both sexes have the same basic problem: They lack any sense of purpose or duty larger than themselves and their own preferences. Whether or not to embrace marriage and parenthood has become a question—rather than a given—on both the left and the right,because young Americans often see these pillars of civilization merely as morally neutral lifestyle choices that should be made only insofar as they increase one’s own happiness. Similarly, “quiet quitting” is prevalent among Gen Z employees because many of them place no value on work or productivity for its own sake. There is no longer, in other words, any significant internalized pressure or social impetus to prioritize marriage, children, or hard work.

 

Gone are the antiheroines of 20 years ago—Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaw—performing pseudo-empowered 30-something singleness while not-so-secretly pining for marriage. Today, nothing is universally considered worth either pining or working for.

 

Too many young Americans are nihilistic individualists, with no true conception of either the common good or their own. This is true of those who profess collectivist social justice and gender identity-based feminism in defiance of facts and logic. It is equally true of those who, in defiance of the American idea itself, wish to repeal the 19^th Amendment and object to the white Vice President J.D. Vance having married the daughter of Indian immigrants.

 

How did we get here?

 

Both the left and the right would like to blame our failure to produce more young people who understand pluralism, evince grit, and embody hope mostly on economic and cultural conditions wrought by the other side. Popular scapegoats include the so-called affordability crisis; the ongoing political and cultural polarization of women and men; and the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in elite professions that resulted in discrimination against white males. But none of these scapegoats can reasonably account for the youth’s fall away from fertility, industry, and patriotism.

 

While it’s true that economic anxiety is prevalent among young people, today’s affordability struggles are not new. We have had a system in need of reform, and overweighted toward the super-rich, for decades. Yet only in the last decade have so many young Americans veered toward revolutionary politics, been alienated from marriage and children, and demonstrated little desire to achieve status, purpose, or success. Meanwhile, while women still do more child care than men, fathers have never been more involved with their children; the birth rate is tanking alongside enormous increases in paternal caregiving. And, sure, millennial and Gen Z white men (and nonwhite people who do not accept leftist tenets on race) were indeed systematically excluded from advancement in certain high-status, high-earning professions in 2010s. But such professions do not comprise anywhere near a majority of the workforce; so, one would be hard-pressed to blame the well-documented malaise and underachievement of many young men on decreasing numbers of white males getting tenure lines at universities. Something else—something deeper and more fundamental than any partial, zero-sum, and clinical diagnosis can capture—is going on here.

 

It seems that so many of today’s young people are fundamentally unmoored because they lack a working cultural script for a respectable, meaningful adult life that involves pursuits bigger than their own momentary convenience or pleasure. One undersold component of our broad slide toward nihilism, then, might be our collective failure to effectively inculcate in a new generation of Americans that most American of lessons: An ordinary life with ordinary sacrifices, freely and courageously lived, is not ordinary at all, but extraordinary.

 

***

 

The question confronting us as Americans today is not how to have a functional civilization. We already know how to do that, though we sometimes lack the political will to act on what we know. The issue we now face is how to help a generation of blinkered, ignorant young people recognize that a functional civilization is worth perpetuating; and that its perpetuation ultimately depends not on some bounce of a governmental or cosmic ball, but on the collective virtue of everyone’s individual choices.

 

This is a difficult pill for young Americans to swallow. After all, we have taught them that virtue applies only to collectivist goods, like equal rights. Moreover, we have allowed them to believe that with the absence of overwhelming adversity comes the right to exist without struggle.

 

In the 2015 Broadway hit Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s storyline draws on the class differences between the impoverished, fatherless founding father Alexander Hamilton and his orphaned yet wealthy contemporary and eventual assassin, Aaron Burr. Hamilton, Burr points out, “faces an endless uphill climb. He has something to prove; he has nothing to lose.”

 

Historically, most Americans have tended to love tales of underdogs like Hamilton achieving their due: Determined 19^th-century suffragettes getting women the vote; impoverished 19^th- and 20^th-century immigrants (and first- and second-generation Americans) pursuing and obtaining the American dream; courageous 20^th-century Black Americans obtaining long overdue civil rights and economic mobility.

 

But many young Americans, reared on such stories—not just in popular culture but in family lore—have no idea how to orient themselves toward virtue from the position of relative privilege that they in fact occupy. So, some cosplay as underdogs who are being barred from the erstwhile pillars of adult life by malevolent forces beyond their own control: Men are misogynistic shirkers, so marriage and motherhood are oppressive to women; women are shrill, slutty hags, so marriage is for men who are weak and pathetic; and so on.

 

Others take parents’ economic security as license to opt out of life itself by failing to “launch” or to progress: Professional advancement and financial independence involve trade-offs that don’t always jive with “wellness” or self-actualization, so working hard is for suckers. Meanwhile, many rely on their parents and their therapists to validate the nihilistic notion that the foundational aspects of civilization (marriage, family, industry) are only worth engaging if they make you momentarily happy, and that independent households are overrated. Plenty of younger Boomers and older Gen Xers are credulous and hypocritical enough to oblige. So much for other-regard and sacrifice; so long, It’s A Wonderful Life.

 

In reality, however, we know that the vast majority of people, male and female, are better off married; that marriage is tied to fertility; and that children’s outcomes are best when they are raised by married parents. We know that to lose the American work ethic is to condemn our children to devolution and decay. Sure, the average American today could survive while opting out of marriage, parenthood, and professional productivity—but in almost all cases (s)he should not. Survival is the baseline, not the aspiration.

 

We need to bring back “should.” Not out of a desire to be judgmental or punitive. But out of the recognition that, without it, we are depriving the young of civilizational wisdom, and thereby contributing to their depression, anxiety, and malaise.

 

My husband and I, both college graduates with terminal degrees, are raising four sons. We live beneath our upper-middle class means in a racially and socioeconomically mixed neighborhood, and send our children to a similarly diverse parochial school.

 

My husband is a first-generation Liberian American. As a kid growing up in East Cleveland, he dreamed of a childhood of Little League baseball, school plays, and modest family vacations. He has spent the 13 years of our marriage working himself dizzy, both at work and at home, to give that childhood to our sons.

 

Today’s zeitgeist is shot through with morally relativistic disdain for all that he has achieved. Yet, those who accept that zeitgeist also continue to congratulate him for having achieved it.

 

This is an unstable equilibrium. Either these erstwhile hallmarks of adult life well-lived are objectively valuable, or they aren’t. We say that they are.

 

But in a wider culture that won’t offer that kind of clarity due to excessive concerns about tolerance, how do we inculcate in our sons the kind of commitment, faithfulness, and work ethic that will increase their likelihood of following their father’s example? This is the animating question of our lives, and we have no playbook to follow. Sure, we have instincts that involve manufacturing a lot of countercultural adversity ourselves: Growing boys need strict discipline more than dialogic indulgence; objective competition more than subjective cooperation; and some measure of independence more than an excess of safety.

 

But providing an example and following our instincts is not likely to be enough. We also need precepts. And precepts are by definition rife with a controversial “should”: Marriage is good and younger marriage is better; children are good and more children are better; work is good, and more meaningful, productive, and successful work is better.

 

The achievement of what was once but is no longer an ordinary adult life—marriage, children, work—is not a mere lifestyle preference. Nor is it a boring cope. It is extraordinary; it always was. The sacrifices it involves are noble; they always were.

 

My 9-year-old asked me the other day: “How come you and Daddy don’t have more kids?” (He is still angling for a sister). I told him that we think four is likely the number of children we are called to have and can raise well, given our family’s resources, limitations, and other obligations. “Well. Maybe I’ll be able to have six one day,” he replied. “I hope so, if that’s what you feel called to do,” I told him. And I do.

 

The thing we want to cultivate in our sons, more than anything else, then, is a kind of noblesse oblige. My husband and I are not working so hard—parentally, professionally, or communally—so that our sons can one day do less. Indeed, we hope that they work every bit as hard, and that they do more, especially for others. So, our greatest ally in parenting, it turns out, is Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

 

Young people today have a lot more power than our society acknowledges. Maybe it would help if we all took some responsibility for telling them so, and helping them see the moral virtue and personal happiness to be found in making the most of it.