Loneliness kills. There is acute loneliness amongst the young: individual loneliness and collective pain. It is a loneliness rarely uttered in words by this articulate generation. It shows itself behaviourally. It shows itself statistically, in suicide tallies. Life is empty for many. Life, as lived, is a major killer of the young, writes Marie Murray
A vacuum exists that affluence has not filled. Progress and profit have not brought psychological prosperity. Freedom has not brought liberty. Autonomy is captivity in disguise: the illusion of independence for adult-children, whose dependence on their parents is protracted, forcing them to remain much longer in the family home. Young people are disenchanted. They live with contradiction. They are the generation most vilified and admired, the youth most privileged and most deprived.
The mental milieu in which they live is what reduces them. They are burdened by descriptions of how fortunate they are, how materially advantaged, how many sacrifices have been made on their behalf, how privileged their position, how liberal their lives in comparison with past oppressive times. They are expected to be grateful inheritors of this Ireland.
Yet educational opportunity has increased pressure on them to succeed. Educational competition has increased the points they need for college. Collecting educational credentials has just multiplied the qualifications they require for the most basic of jobs. Unrealistic expectations have made them feel inadequate, regardless of attainment, and many lead visibly restless lives.
The "dumbing down" of life has diminished them. Negative ascriptions have humiliated them. Described as rude, crude, selfish, self-indulgent and self obsessed; they are depicted to themselves and others as living hedonistic, meaningless, alcohol-saturated lives.
Life in Ireland has not just changed. Each aspect has been altered. Like the ship of Theseus, which had its planks replaced one by one as they decayed, until no part of the original ship remained, yet people still saw the new ship as the Theseus ship; so we too have replaced ourselves with versions of ourselves, yet it is not clear if we remain the people we thought we were.
And if we are different what parts remain? And if we are similar what are the differences? Or have we, when erasing the errors of the past, provided an equally erroneous unacceptable present?
Technological change has altered our physical and mental landscapes. We frequent cyberspace, the world, described by writer William Gibson as one of "consensual hallucination".
"Mediaization" has condensed conversation to sound bytes. Most newspapers look like comics wherein suffering is sensationalised, frailty is exposed and vulnerability is violated. Entertainment is not information. Facts are not fiction.
Yet the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred into what French social theorist Baudrillard calls "hyper-reality". Nightly news programmes pour out catalogues of catastrophe in vivid sequential images. These scenes of carnage and poverty are followed by "weather" or "sport". This is the inadvertent cultural callousness with which we portray life. These are the cultural messages in which we cultivate the young.
Truth has been trivialised. Ethics is relative. Choice is coercive. Families are fragmented. Relationships are transitory and commitment is defunct. Goals are replaced by greed. Profit is the only purpose. Beauty is bought. Age is obsolete. Pornography is protected. Rape is minimised and rationalised. Childhood is eroded. Advertising is abusive. Adolescence invaded. Promiscuity is promoted.
The local is global. Culture is homogenised. Identity is diffuse. Politics opportunistic. Democracy can be duplicitous, selective and impositional. Peace is precarious. Terror pervasive. Religion is irrelevant, education competitive, career choice so extensive that decision-making is difficult, and ordinary aspirations of home ownership are financially prohibitive. The mental vacuum is a chasm that seems impossible to fill.
Youth, a time that should be full of hope, excitement and expectation, instead is filled with anxiety, depression and despair. We are confronted by stark statistics on suicide. We are concerned at anger and rage that expresses itself in crime and vandalism by some. We dread to think that drugs provide an escape from the raw reality of life. We fear the desensitisation of screen violence. We reel before the sexual exploits of the young, the demise of decency and descent into decadence
How did it happen? How did those to whom we wished to give everything, have so much given and so much more taken away? For they are jaded by the deprivation of excess: too much, too soon, too often, they search for new sensations. In the absence of meaning, sensation must suffice. In the excess of sensation, new sensations are needed. In the search for something, any substance may soothe, if only for an hour.
They have been deprived of what nurtures the heart, the mind, the soul and the imagination of the young. They have been deprived of inspirational narratives. They have been deprived of tales of heroism, of humanity at its best, youth at its most magnificent, the sanctuary of appropriate controls, role models that motivate, models of behaviour that keep them safe and the scaffolding of spiritual beliefs to support them, to shield them against a harsh world and provide a path towards their higher potential.
The boundaries between childhood and adulthood have been eroded and young people are left with no safe place that is their own. Asked to be adults while still children, they have nowhere to go and nobody to lead them into the best that they might be. Given every activity, they have not been given the gift of stillness. Given every entertainment, they have been deprived of the solace of silence. They are products of this time, packaged, marketed and labelled: the generation most targeted for profit, the generation most deprived of prophets.
Yet they retain the reservoirs of idealism, energy, enthusiasm and altruism that have always characterised the young. They retain the capacity to give generously, love unconditionally and work strenuously for humankind. They can challenge critically, fight fairly, compete gloriously and battle bravely if we give them the inspiration to do so, the models to motivate them and the opportunities to be the best they may be. This is the challenge of Céifin. To keep alive an ideology that interrogates the culture in which we live, provide a vocabulary to discuss it and mechanisms to confront it, in order to fill the vacuum in the lives of the young.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin. This is an extract from her address "Prophets or Profit: Who fills the Vacuum?" delivered at the Céifin Conference, Ennis yesterday