This is part two of a selection from Finding Happiness, Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life by Abbot Christopher Jamison. Click here to read part one.
There is one disturbing fact that goes against the flow of this youthful view of happiness: in Britain and America, suicide rates among adults have been falling in recent decades, but suicide rates among teenagers have been rising. In his bestselling book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam uses figures from the US Public Health Service to put the point starkly: “Americans born and raised in the 1970s and 1980s were three to four times more likely to commit suicide as people that age had been at mid-century.” So why are the most materially advantaged teenagers history has ever known killing themselves in such numbers? Depression plays a devastating role in this, as discussed in the earlier chapter on sadness. But that is shared with adults and does not explain the higher rate of suicide among teenagers.
The answer given by Putnam and others is social isolation. Declining numbers of young people take part in community clubs, join political parties or go to church. This is a generation that belongs to many loose groups but refuses to join any longer-term community. They will readily join in one-off events but their suspicion of institutions makes them wary of joining any kind of institution or club. They want to belong but they do not want to join. Studies in the USA suggest that many young people are spending long hours on their own. This means that if they cannot easily make friends, they are completely isolated because, apart from school, there are no formal structures to help them create relationships. Even if they can make friends, the pressure to have a successful set of relationships and love affairs is so intense that failure is unbearable. In a life that is only supported by relationships with a few friends, when those relationships fail, there is nowhere else to go. The growth of absentee parents for a whole host of reasons exacerbates this, as does the social mobility that puts grandparents at a distance.
Since they believe that close friends are the only really important people in life, young people carry the full weight of life with the support of just a few friends. This leads to a shared sense of self-importance within the group. Outside the group, or if the group breaks up, they are quite isolated. Paradoxically, the “keeping friends” culture is one of the reasons for the growth in social isolation among the young.
Abbot Christopher Jamison
Finding Happiness, pp. 166-167.
