ListenFor those of us who work with and care about young people, the question of their sense of agency is a crucial factor in determining how and if they will engage life on their own terms. The ability to see the future as malleable within the scope of our ability to act is deeply implicated in the ways in which we see ourselves in relation to others and the world around us. For all of us, the question of our ability to exercise our creative capacity in ways that we find fulfilling is central to our sense of well-being and optimism about the future both personally and collectively. As CYC workers, there is nothing more daunting than being faced with a young person who has lost their sense of agency to the degree that it seems almost impossible to engage them in any kind of active relationship.
Of course, there is an almost infinite literature about how to motivate recalcitrant young people. There are many approaches and strategies to be found in any of the fields where adults and young people encounter one another. Embedded in these approaches is the underlying belief that such young people can be shown that they can change their lives and even the world around them. There sems to be a belief that the young person’s lack of motivation is rooted in an error in perception that can be corrected through rebuilding trust in adults and by inference trust in the broader society. With that increase in trust there will be an increase in optimism about human relations and through the development of unconditional positive regard, an optimism about themselves.
The implicit mapping of social dynamics that underlies this approach to motivational work premised in relationship, is that young people have lost trust in the adults they have known so far and that trust can be restored through encountering a trustworthy adult or group of adults. The focus is primarily individual. That is to say, it was an aberrant traumatic encounter with an individual adult or adults that has broken trust and it is an individual encounter with a CYC worker or workers who can restore that trust.
I must wonder though, if that premise holds as much significance under our current social conditions. Is the root of the kind of alienation and apathy that saps young people’s sense of agency still premised in individual sets of relations with untrustworthy adults or is there a broader social malaise? Like so much of what we are encountering, as what Spinoza would call the sad passions which induce passivity, such as anxiety and depression seem to be endemic across the global populations. When these kinds of passions debilitate whole populations, it would seem to make sense to ask whether the root of the issue is broader than any individual set of toxic relations.
That is not to say that individual toxic encounters are no longer relevant or that establishing relations with trustworthy adults is not worthwhile. It is simply to ask whether either set of relations, toxic or trusting, is sufficient for an increasing number of young people today. Perhaps, a significant portion of the etiology of losing agency has its origins in the shifts and changes of our lived experience as social subjects under 21st century global capitalism.
To say that the world as we have known is undergoing a radical shift in virtually every aspect of our lives is a reality that we must contend with as we move further into the 20th century. The ecological coordinates of all living things are deteriorating at a rate of species extinction that has been called the 6th Great or Holocene extinction. This loss of biodiversity across the planet threatens the integrity of ecosystems, global food security for humans and other species, and planetary stability.
In addition, as Felix Guattari points out, there is a commensurate loss of diversity within our social ecology. We are losing our traditional relational coordinates moment by moment, day by day. A simple example is the assertion by Elon Musk that empathy is a weakness in Western Civilization.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said, and while he said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society … The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
The claim that empathy is civilizational suicide by one of the wealthiest, most “successful” and influential leaders of contemporary capitalist culture has a powerful resonance for young people. To say that we should care, but at the same time qualify empathy as toxic caring sets a dangerous template that has far reaching impacts on our social ecology. Certainly, the capacity to care for one another is a central aspect of a healthy social ecology. If caring becomes a characteristic of our lives that is at risk of extinction, that is very bad news for our ability to thrive or even survive as a species.
Other aspects of our social ecology are also under threat. Our ability to socialize and affiliate with one another is also experiencing a decline. As Maya Nguyen notes, “Social connection in the U.S. is falling for many reasons — political conflict, economic stress and technological evolution are just a few.” This is echoed in recent research that notes a drop in the amount of time we spend socializing with one another. According to the American Bureau of Labor Statistics, “People were less likely to engage in socializing and communicating on an average day in 2025 than in 2015 — 30 percent compared with 38 percent. They also spent less time in these activities in 2025 than in 2015 — 35 minutes compared with 41 minutes.” According to new research in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, when we do communicate with one another, we are speaking approximately 300 fewer words than we did the previous day. In the fourteen years between 2005 and 2019, the number of words we speak every day has dropped 28%. According to Nugyen, this is amplified by
disappearing social infrastructure — physical places and services that encourage social activity. Third places, the informal public gathering spaces outside one’s home (first place) and work (second place), play critical roles in connecting people. From parks to bars to libraries, the nation has been losing places where friends and strangers congregate.
These losses in the robustness, diversity, and interconnectedness of our social ecology has resulted in what the U.S Surgeon General in 2023 called an epidemic of loneliness. This has immense implications for those of us interested in the importance and centrality of relationships and relational care.
The losses or degradation of key elements in our social ecology in combination with the crises in our biosphere signals a significant, if sometimes obscured, sense of loss. This loss of key ecological coordinates at all levels of our lived experience can function as a pervasive background noise that can operate just outside our conscious awareness. It functions as a kind of repressed symptom of what might be termed our collective self-destructive neurosis. This latent rage and grief spills ever more frequently into full blown psychotic violence across our social landscape.
Under such conditions it is no wonder that the latest Harvard Youth Poll cites a loss of perceived agency as one of the most defining shifts in young people’s sense of themselves and the world around them. Nearly 50% felt as though they had no say in government and that they had no impact on the future. This is amplified by the sense that for young people today there is no going back to an idyllic world that used to exist. They have a profound sense that the world is driving relentlessly forward and there is no way of knowing whether what the future holds is good or bad. According to Spellman, McMillan and Collier this indeterminacy can lead to a kind of paralysis.
There is a sense among young people that whatever happens we will have to change the way we live and that whatever the promise of capitalism as embodied in the “American Dream” is over. The notion of class mobility is fading quickly as the social and financial infrastructure that has supported it is deteriorating. For the first time, in the centers of capitalism, young people’s prospects financially, educationally, and in terms of lifespan will be worse than their parents. For Spellman, McMillan, and Collier the question then becomes, how do we mourn the loss of the capitalist dream? How do we grieve the loss of possibility?
We at the center of capitalist social relations do a poor job of grieving our losses. We tend to go very quickly into denial. This has certainly been the case post-COVID. We lost millions of people who we seldom if ever acknowledge. We have never created a collective space for mourning those immense losses.
This cultural and political willful denial of so much of our collective traumas over generations from, colonization, to enslavement, generations of physical and sexual assaults on women, violent homophobia, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, has left scars of unresolved grief. Much of our capacity for denial was masked by the apparent progress of capitalism. But now that such progress is failing, more of the overwhelming grief and shame is surfacing and we have very little if any tools to manage the paralyzing grief other than nihilism. As Colyar puts it,
And not just the massive amount of death and sickness and our own vulnerability, but we really did lose a sense of opportunity, of progress — of social progress. And because we did not deal with that, I think a lot of us were able to be peeled off by a politics of nihilism, or nostalgic nihilism, which I would say Donald Trump is very good at selling. Because it is not so much that he is going to make America great again; it is that he will do whatever is necessary to falsely inflate the sense that we once again have a 1950s economy, even though it is not real in any material sense, right?
This form of nihilistic nostalgia is deadly at all levels of our encounter with a rapidly changing world. The idea that there is nothing to be done but to retreat into a psychotic fantasy of a world that never really existed is equivalent to social and cultural suicide. Colyar argues that this kind of nihilistic politics leads to a kind of narcissism in which we become falsely pragmatic and self-involved,
I think young people are so black-pilled and so nihilistic in a way that, yeah, there’s almost no time for emotions. It’s almost like, things just have to get done now. It’s really every man for himself. . . I think part of the reason we would struggle with coming up with a vision, a hopeful vision of the future that doesn’t reproduce the contradictions of the past, is that we have not grieved that we’re going to have to be something different … But it is going to be different. You are different after grief. We are different after Covid, right? We are different after a 9/11. There is a before and and after when that kind of cultural rupture happens, and if you do not name it, the same thing that happens when you try to ignore the fact that you’ve had a tremendous loss in your personal life . . .It spills over into everything. So, the challenge, I think, in our moment is that if you don’t deal with the grief, there actually isn’t much positive that you can say about the future, because you’ll still be talking about a past that has really already gone.
For those of us working with and thinking about caring for young people this is our challenge. We must face the actuality of the coming world while acknowledging the grief and loss associated with both our unresolved past and our impinging future. Fortunately, we in CYC are skilled in dealing with grief and trauma at the level of the individual young person. The question is can we bring that same skill set to the necessities of the collectivity of children and youth in a way that challenges the spreading nihilism of our age and opens the door to new ways of life that sustain our ability to live, love, and care? Can we find a way through the grief we must acknowledge if we are to move forward with integrity in the 21st century.
Is grief something that young people talk about when they talk about their future?
Colyar: I don’t think so.
It is the encroachment of tech also that has ruined all of this about their lives, and just by getting out and talking to people — and maybe that’s a part of the grief process, like actually having conversations with people that you know in real life — then you can start to gin up a positive vision for the future, even if you still feel a little helpless.
Spiegelman: I think that’s very true. You can’t grieve alone. And you have to be able to spend time with your friends, create art, do things you feel are meaningful. Maybe even go to protests and dance in the street — even if you don’t think it’s going to do anything. You’re not stopping.
I think what the generation who’s entering into the marketplace now, people who are just a few years younger than them, you know, I think they feel that isolation more deeply.
We have to believe that something is better and possible, and that we are building it.
