Millions Of Millenials Live At Home and Support the Policies That Keep Them There

Photo Credit: marklarson

In Man’s Search For Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl discusses the “existential vacuum.” It is an internal emptiness and lack of purpose. In a life with logos or meaning, anything can be endured. Without it, a person is lost. Frankl watched men in the German camps succumb who might otherwise have survived simply because they had nothing to hold onto.

When the greatest excitement today for twenty-somethings are hybrid baked goods, a list of 37 random tokens of nostalgia, or going on an endless string of meaningless Internet-facilitated dates, I have found myself surrounded by nihilists.

Those who are married or finished medical school already may exempt themselves. Anyone with a legal partner or a life in service of others may wait until middle-age to experience the solitary struggle of a crisis of meaning. The lost ones instead are those approaching thirty with no savings, no interest in anything but the near-term future, and no profitable outlet for creativity besides solipsistic online forums.

The lost ones are smart. They pay attention to what goes on in the world. They read the news along with the lists of 37 GIFs. Yet what can they do? They have minimal discretionary income and their free time is spent unwinding from occupations that force them to look at backlit words for eight hours or deal with whining strangers. They are fully adults and can’t boast of anything their parents had at this age besides better means of communication, which many are horrible at maintaining.

I hear my peers say, “I’m lost.” I say, “Yes, of course.” Almost 22 million twenty-somethings live with their parents, myself for the second time currently included, though economists tell us that this is technically a “recovery” from a “recession” and not just one long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth for our country and for the development of individuals who thought for sure they could have had an apartment by now. I went to a party recently where someone was bashful to admit that he bought his own place. A room full of renters were ready to give him grief for having the means to pay a mortgage or the certitude and resolve to put down roots in one place.