THE FEEL-GOOD GENERATION

Millennials and those younger have become preoccupied with what feels good. Self-help books abound with advice about feeling good about ourselves. Communications training and psychotherapy are centered on what will produce good feelings.

In a Psychology Today article, “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges,” Peter Gray had written:

• ...emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. (September, 2015)

Gray quotes the head of counseling services at a major university:

• “Our students are no different from what is being reported across the country on the state of late adolescence/early adulthood. There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life. Whether we want it or not, these students are bringing their struggles to their teachers and others on campus who deal with students on a day-to-day basis.”

Others cite the same problems. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article by Robin Wilson entitled, “An Epidemic of Anguish: Overwhelmed by Demand for Mental-Health Care, Colleges Face Conflicts in Choosing How to Respond" (Aug. 31, 2015):

• “Families often expect campuses to provide immediate, sophisticated, and sustained mental-health care…Students, too, want colleges to give them the help they need, when they need it. And they need a lot. Rates of anxiety and depression among American college students have soared in the last decade, and many more students than in the past come to campus already on medication for such illnesses. The number of students with suicidal thoughts has risen as well. Some are dealing with serious issues, such as psychosis, which typically presents itself in young adulthood, just when students are going off to college.

What underlies these problems? I think that they stem from a preoccupation with feelings. However, before you dismiss this simplistic sounding explanation, let me relate to you an illuminating discussion I had today with mostly millennials. While discussing the benefits of performing acts of kindness, one very empathetic and affirming young man asked this question of the group:

·       I have been financially supporting a group that does good things. However, I am no longer deriving a good feeling from my giving. Should I give to another group where I will get a greater feeling of self-satisfaction?

I thought that his question illuminated a vast underlying problem with this generation, so I answered:

·       Let me speak to you from my perspective of having been around for 71 years. We cannot live our lives based simply on our feelings. Feelings change. The good feelings you once derived often diminish. Therefore, we need to live our lives based upon something more substantial and unchanging – our convictions of right and wrong. Our feelings for your wives, husbands, parents, and children will change, sometimes daily. We cannot be so feelings-dependent that our commitments change from moment to moment. There has to be unchanging truths that also govern our lives.

However, we have rejected this necessary element of reality once we embraced moral relativism (the belief that morality is just something that we or society just made up.) Therefore, we cannot take an evolving and relative morality seriously. As a result, we have only our feelings, with their ups and downs, to guide our way. And if we live according to our feelings, there is no stability, no ability to stay-the-course when our feelings tell us to bail out and no relief from feeling-based self-obsession.

Maturity requires that we find a solid foundation of moral convictions for our lives – the commitment that we will hang-in-there with our wives and children even when our feelings refuse to conform. If we fail to re-examine our commitment to moral relativism, our feelings will continue to tyrannize us and maturity will elude us.

I then added that moral relativism had become so popular because it affirms morality without affirming God. I reasoned that we intuitively know that moral law requires a moral-law-Giver, something to be avoided at all costs, even though He is vitally necessary to our well-being. After detonating this necessary bomb-shell, I was disappointed that the conversation continued as if I hadn’t said anything. I knew that what I had said was foundational to the young man’s question, but the group clearly didn’t want to go there.

I finally marshalled up my courage to tell the group that I was disappointed that no one had responded to what I had said. After a while, one astute young man asked me “What kind of response were you looking for?”

I answered that at least I would have liked it if someone acknowledged that this is a critical issue. The group leader then said he’d think about, it but that he now had to run. He added that anyone who wants to stay and talk is welcome to. However, after I returned from the men’s room, I found that all were gone.