The Meaninglessness of Modern Life
By: Pastor Andrew Isker
Modern life is meaningless. Our young people believe they have no other purpose on this earth other than to seek pleasure and entertain away their boredom. Tens of millions in our country live this way. Is it any wonder that we have never been more anxious, depressed, and suicidal?
Like many in the Millennial Generation, I went to college and enjoyed four years of few responsibilities and seemingly endless opportunities for fun with friends. Your first taste of life as an adult is pleasure island. You are young with unlimited free time and can do whatever you want. Even if you are a Christian and you avoid the bacchanal of drunkenness, drugs, and fornication, you still become accustomed to a slightly more wholesome dissipate lifestyle. You assume this is what adult life is. For many in my generation, you leave college and continue to chase that same high. You find a job—if you are lucky—and have less free time. You are separated from most of your college friends. But you become desperate to relive those glory days, even if only Friday night through Sunday.
For many, if not most in my generation, that is the “good life” you are programmed to pursue. You exist merely to maximize your own pleasure. You exist to work enough to be entertained. To produce enough so that you might consume. But as sand slowly drains from the hourglass and your youth slowly escapes you, at some point you begin to feel an existential dread. Deep down, in your bones, you know you were not made for this. This is not enough. There is something missing. Even recapturing the highs of college and taking a trip to Vegas with the boys doesn’t hit the same. The high wears off and the hangover sets in and never goes away.
Such is the experience of so many in my generation. It will be the experience of the generation to follow, as well. The days of our youth, when all our ancestors formed families and built with a mind to the future, are wasted by us. Looking at fertility statistics, nearly half of American women under 45 are childless. This portends a time to come when a majority of people are totally alone, with no stake whatsoever in the future. A people who will die alone and who will have devoted their life to nothing but conspicuous consumption.
This is how civilizations die. Sometimes they are overthrown in cataclysmic warfare and conquest. More often, they lose the will to live and die of demographic suicide. You cannot really blame this generation any more than you can blame the Boomers for the conditions they were born into and shaped by. And look at what this generation was formed by. They were born just after the median standard of living peaked in America. Everyone assumed the good times would continue on indefinitely and the next generation would simply inherit it. We came of age where everyone was living as if the good times were still here, but the fact that they were gone and never coming back was something that escaped everyone.
At the same time, all the things that give life meaning were taken from us and in many cases vilified. We grew up being taught that pride in your heritage as an American is the very grave sin of “ethnocentrism” and very near kin of the unforgivable sin of racism. Implicit in this idea is that it is good for America to simply die off and be replaced by random human beings from across the globe. Whether you were on the far left or a conservative evangelical, you were brought up believing the world is soon going to end, either from Global Warming or the Rapture, respectively. Why would you want to bring children into a doomed world to suffer?
A very brief blip of reinvigorated patriotism after 9/11 was quickly spent on trillion-dollar, decades-long, aimless occupations of third-world countries in the Middle East. The very same people singing along to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” would, less than two decades later, be calling America “the most racist country in the world.” Why would you want to create new Americans if that were the case? Any vital spirit, any pride in people or place was systematically removed. The energy that previous generations would devote to producing subsequent generations has been spent on satisfying our fleeting desires.
It may seem like our civilization is doomed. It might seem like we are never coming back. In many ways this is true. The old America is gone. It has no will to survive. This does not mean, however, that Americans will disappear. What instead is taking place is a great bifurcation. Those who still retain the will and energy and desire to see their nation be preserved, to have it continue on to the next generation are consciously separating themselves from the old world.
These are young people who love their country, love their people, love their place, and love their heritage. These are young people who have seen the worthlessness of living for nothing except to consume and be entertained. Young people who realize what I call “Trashworld” must be totally despised. Young people who recognize that their lives are about so much more than going to nice bars and restaurants with friends week after week. Young people who have rejected the path of least resistance offered to them and instead chosen the way of life our ancestors pursued. A life of dedication and duty. A life of honor. A life that produces life. They have instead sought out a life that rejects our world’s banishment of the transcendent and looked to the heavens to pursue the glory of God. No longer is the meaningless of modern life acceptable to them. They seek out what the Lord has created them to be.
There yet remains a vanguard of those who carry forth the torch of civilization. The events of the past few years have caused many of them to reorganize and reorient their lives around building communities that will survive what is to come. Just as ancient Christians lived in a polis—city—inside the polis, so too must we today. And not just communities of Christians generally, including those enamored with Trashworld, but those who see the time of day. God has orchestrated events such that we are forced into doing so. No longer can we remain comfortable and complacent like those who love the world of filth.
No, instead we must become like the Pilgrims who first settled in America. But unlike them, there is no wilderness of the New World to settle. We must re-found our nation even as the decaying one has not yet fully surrendered to ruin. This mission is the antidote to modern ennui. The mission of Christians is to rebuild what we have lost and carry forward the inheritance we have been given—a mission to build a Parallel Christian Society. Far from despairing at the death of the nation we love, we can devote ourselves to rebuilding it anew. And while the lovers of Trashworld breathe their last gasps alone and terrified with nothing but faded memories of brunch, we will go to glory surrounded by our children’s children who will take up the mantle of building a new Christendom after we have gone. That is a vision of the good life. That is the vision of a life well spent. And that is what we must pursue.
