This Is Devastating for Gen Z

[Music] well I recently had this somewhat sad maybe is the right language experience of listening to a colleague share in a moment of vulnerability his fears that his hope of finding a wholesome young lady to settle down with and to get married to will forever evade his grasp and he even shared something more surprising than that which was that he has never even had a really close friendship in his life which has obviously been characterized by a lot of loneliness and as upsetting as that may be it seems to me that this isn't an isolated experience but rather a symptom of a concerning Trend in our society researchers they're not mincing their words when they describe an epidemic of loneliness in society today which forgive me if this is harsh but I would say this is just one more disgraceful accomplishment we can add to the experiments of modernity and the unfulfilled Promises of the 20th Cent C this is what gets me more than a little annoyed when progressives when they face opposition from anyone exposing anything remotely conservative or traditional in nature they always make this vapid accusation that goes something like oh he just wants to take us back to the 1950s or or Worse the 19th century he wants to take us back in time and maybe that tactic has worked well for them uh for the past several Generations because even when it's become obvious that the Brave New World their constructing is actually inhuman they just dangle some distraction like a new car or an iPhone in front of us to say see look at the wonderful progress we're making and if that doesn't work sometimes they'll reveal something even more terrifying like like the nuclear bomb to convince us that we need them to protect us from the awesome power that they they themselves wield but honestly I think that that strategy is proving less and less effective because I think people are starting to look back at the past and ask themselves are things really getting better did we actually trade up just to be clear you mean the past when kids played outside exploring the world around them and and forging lifelong bonds with other real human beings the past when a single income was enough to provide for a family including a home two cars and a guaranteed pension when kids books in libraries and weren't in the habit of celebrating sodomy as like this harmless Pastime and didn't promote gender dysphoria as a healthy expression of one's identity in which young men weren't saddled with the guilt of all the evils committed throughout the course of history as well as quite a few invented evils simply because they were born men something that they can't change in which massively powerful tech companies didn't Prey Upon the psychological vulnerabilities of teenage girls in order to score a quick advertising uh payday and with which our media while not perfect wasn't an unthinking partisan machine devoted to political candidates whims no matter how demonstrably corrupt he or she is in which it wasn't hard to find a family doctor at an affordable rate is that is that the past we should be terrified to return to well if all the bounced checks of the modern era aren't enough now you can add an epidemic of loneliness to the accomplishments of the Progressive Brave modern new world it's like wow we sure have come a long way from those rotten old days when people used to have friends but hey at least we can now get on with the important work of of championing inclusion and diversity although who wants to be included in a society in which people don't even have friends so to share just a few more statistics about this particular epidemic Pew research reported that 30% of adults are neither married or living with a partner nor engaged in a committed Rel relationship 30% and as of 2022 for the first time ever I believe the majority of women in the US are single this is correlated with the fact uh from the CDC that alcohol abuse and addiction among women has recently experienced unprecedented growth previously this was always seen as like a problem for men right but now women have jumped on to the I want to say bandwagon but I'll say Patty wagon maybe in increasing numbers and that makes sense when you don't find joy and satisfaction in life through healthy means like relationships you will cope through unhealthy means like addiction and there are lots and lots of reasons we we could identify to fix the blame for yet another collapse of a vital aspect of our society but that isn't the point of this video all I have to say is this is one more symptom of the death throws of a culture living through its last portions of decadence and if you don't want to fall victim to it then there's not much else to do but to withdraw from it my advice is find a traditional pocket of society where people are not pressing on the gas pedal forward as everything good collapses around them and then shelter there in a traditional community and maybe even build a life there but that isn't the problem for my colleague he is finding his refuge in traditional Catholicism so what gives why is he still finding the prospect of romantic love so hopeless now I wouldn't want to try to diagnose him specifically but in returning to the wider symptoms of our culture I find one statistic extremely revealing which is that 15% of men reported having no close friendships in 202 2022 which is a 500% increase since 1990 so hear that again they're not saying uh they don't have as many friends as someone in the early '90s they're saying they have no close friends none uh they have nobody they are adult men who are just going through the monotony of life and work with nobody to share that with and here's the thing about romantic love with the opposite sex it doesn't come easily or naturally we don't just have this ingrained ability to navigate those kinds of relationships men and women are largely a riddle to one another men and women don't have the same instincts the same psychology biology emotional or rational Constitution which means that getting along with the opposite sex it requires us to make sacrifices to like meet them in the middle but members of the same sex on approach tend to just make sense which is why it's less intimidating and easier in practice to learn to love someone in Friendship of the same sex for the simple fact that it's it's easier to love want someone who is just like you someone who has the same instincts as you same interests as you and doesn't require all that much of you it's a high value low cost kind of relationship and for someone who hasn't been conditioned by self-sacrificial love this is an ideal first step in what it means to love someone other than yourself that's a great genius in friendship and why it's ideal to form Rich friendships earlier in life they prepare you for more demanding relationships like marriage and Parenthood later on because romance and marriage are much more ambitious relationships and require certain measures of maturity but if we don't even have the lowcost experience of making sacrifices in friendships with the same sex how can we ever be expected to perform well in the much more ambitious opposite sex scenario and an example that illustrates this reality so well for me is in EVN W novel Brides had Revisited so in this story there are two characters named char and Sebastian who develop an intensely intimate friendship in their their freshman year of college and our contemporary Society proves how foreign this kind of friendship Is by being unable to read that story any other way than by assuming that because they loved each other and they were of the same sex it must have been homosexual in nature forgetting that love isn't always sexual honestly I don't I don't know how some of these people um understand the love that they're supposed to have for their own children it's actually it's kind of frightening when you think about it the fact is that friendship is a kind of love and if there's any doubt about the platonic nature of Charles and Sebastian's relationship W explicitly inserts a flamboyantly gay character to provide the glaring contrast between himself and Charles and Sebastian and if that's not enough there's a scene in which the two of them Charles and Sebastian are at a club and they're approached by a couple of uh I don't know let's say escorts ladies of the night but but both of them they just kind of act dumb they don't know what to do with this approach um so they just don't respond um having no experiences with the opposite sex the girls in turn accuse them of being gay and then just leave them alone but Charles and Sebastian not wanting the accusation to stick they do their best to entertain the ladies the story portrays them in the early phases of their friendship as being mostly indifferent towards the opposite sex the way all adolescents are prior to getting old enough to then take an interest it portrays their intimate friendship as the necessary prerequisite to moving on to the more ambitious love found in Romance with the opposite sex and this was certainly my and most of my peers experience as as kids you typically start off ignoring or treating the opposite sex with a kind of hostility you develop deep friendships with members of the same sex and then eventually you acquire enough social experience and equity and let's say hormonal motivation to begin to approach the opposite sex in the novel uh another character describes Charles and Sebastian as exemplars of the English version of this in which it takes place at a much later age just before adulthood and eventually Charles's interests move on from Sebastian to Sebastian's sister Julia and the takeaway from all of this including the novel which I would recommend reading um it was written by a very traditional or Orthodox Catholic although I'm not trying to say that Charles and Sebastian's relationships should be idealized it's not they make massive mistakes and it's something of a tragedy uh in their lives or at least Sebastian's life is portrayed as a tragedy and so it's not it's not this exemplification of the kinds of friendships we should have but that we should have intimate friendships um so that's that's the takeaway friendships are a prerequisite to romantic love but the problem is younger Generations aren't finding those friendships and the experiences that come with them and then they hit their 20s and they think oh why aren't I able to navigate the challenges of romantic love with the opposite sex the answer is because you skipped a vital step I also want to qualify what I'm saying here I I can't speak to the the female experience of this as much but I think that this is a principle that is definitely true for men why because men have to lead vocationally and romantically and within the context of the relationship they have to initiate it a lot of the time and to be a leader requires greater degrees of experience an experience that can be acquired in a safe and again lowcost way in Intimate friendships prior to moving on to the opposite sex but because this isn't happening it's no wonder in this age in which we've forgotten how to have Rich and intimate friendships that marriages struggle as much as they have for so long now reaching the point where people don't even know how to pair off in the first place and yes we can blame a lot of this on technology wedging itself between us in our social lives promising to enhance social life when all it's actually done is replace real life social interactions with lazy second rate digital interactions conditioned by the busyness and the noise of the digital sphere and the Relentless uh scrolling and distraction that make real meaningful interactions and relationships almost impossible so if you're finding yourself stuck in this way if you're if you've hit your 20s and you're saying like why why can't I find relationships with the opposite sex that that work and feel natural um first of all my advice would be disconnect from social media and go find some real friends join a sports team or a dance club or take group art lessons just do something that will expose you to other people with similar interests and then make some meaningful friendships and invest everything you can into them that will hopefully form you in all the ways you need to to be ready to then find romantic love not to mention the fact that the best romances are found in the context of your community of friends can I ask you to stick around for one extra minute because if you enjoyed that well first of all thanks thanks for watching but now I could really benefit from your help um which you can do in a couple of ways you can check out my sponsor Real Estate For Life who is a network of pro family real estate agents that can connect you with one in your area so if you're looking to buy a home check them out at real estate forlife.org and if you can help out directly financially I 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Channel: Brian Holdsworth

Views: 65,636

Keywords: Brian Holdsworth, Holdsworth Brian, Worthy Commentary, Brian Holdsworth Catholic, Catholic Apologist, Catholic Speaker, Catholic Philosophy, Catechism, Catechesis

Id: d_sP0vTVuL8

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024