Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with writer and journalist Freya India. 15/01/2025
Why are resilience and mental health such critical issues for Generation Z? Elizabeth Oldfield and Freya India discuss the influence of social media, individualism, left–wing ideas and changes in parenting on Gen Z.
We explore themes such as divorce and family breakdown, the pervasive influence of the mental health narratives on youth and the search for identity and spiritual meaning in a disenchanted world.
Freya India is a Gen Z writer and journalist, featured in The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Independent and UnHerd, and known for her popular Substack, GIRLS.
The Sacred with Freya India
What is Sacred to you? Freya India responds
Elizabeth
Freya, I am going to ask you a question that is not your everyday warm up question, but I like it because it helps us go deep fast and sometimes opens up new rooms in our thinking in helpful ways. What is your best guess about what is sacred to you?
Freya India
I think what is probably most sacred to me and has always been, is family, which is a bit of a cliche! But I feel like there’s so much emphasis now on all these other values and all these other things we need to bring back. So there’s a lot of people talking about fighting the culture war and fighting to save Western civilization, and there’s not many people who I feel are just focusing on holding their own family together, and talking about that, and being an example of kind of a good father or a good mother, and trying to raise children who feel comfortable and stable. And I feel like young people really don’t hear that, don’t have those examples, and they kind of discourage themselves from being too dependent on people, being held back by family. And, yeah, I’ve been really trying lately to kind of fight that idea. Because I think one of my kind of core foundational beliefs is, if you can hold your family together, that’s the most virtuous thing you can do, and probably the most kind of rebellious thing you can do now against some of these cultural forces.
Elizabeth
I saw a headline recently about the numbers of young people in America who are going what they call ‘no contact’ with their parents. Have you been seeing this?
Freya India
Yeah, there’s a rise in estrangement among Gen Z, definitely.
Elizabeth
It obviously is something that my kids are not old enough yet (hopefully) to even have that occur to them. But the sort of chill that goes through anyone at the idea of that within a family, it really stayed with me. I’m sure we’ll circle back to that, but I’d love you to share a little bit about your childhood, in so far as you are comfortable. And I’m sure one of the things we’ll get on to is privacy, and the balance between sharing ideas online versus sharing ourselves. But I’d love to hear just a little bit about what was in the air. What was formative for young Freya, philosophically, religiously, economically, politically that formed you? It’s all usually implicit.
Navigating Parents’ Divorce and Emotional Pain
Freya India
Yeah, I think I didn’t grow up in a political family or religious family. So there was no kind of explicit teaching of values. It was more my personality and kind of instinctually, feeling more conservative. And and I think a big part of my childhood was actually my own family breaking down, and I had a really deep response to that. I had a real emotional response and a confusion. And I think as I grew up, I kind of internalized that as, oh, you’re just an emotional child. You kind of need to get over it because everyone else’s parents have split up, and it’s normal. But then now, as I’m reaching kind of my mid 20s, I’m realizing that, no, I just had a really instinctual feeling that it wasn’t right. And as I grow up, I kind of realized that that’s normal. And actually the fact that so many families break down and children just have to deal with it is what’s abnormal. So I mentioned that because I think that really shaped my worldview. It gave me a worldview of wanting a stable family life. I really think that that’s really important for people, more so than they tend to admit. So I already had this kind of conservative temperament, I suppose. But I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more confident in my convictions and less willing to back down on them. And really kind of trying to fight this idea, especially for young women, that if they have a moral instinct, not to view it as insecurity or an emotional problem, but to really kind of hold firm to it, which is difficult to do these days but I think it’s important.
Elizabeth
Do you mind me asking how old you were when your parents broke up?
Freya India
Yes, I was three. So I always had this real sense of loss that I’d never had kind of an intact family experience. But also I had a very comfortable, happy childhood. So I think I was kind of grieving it, but also at the same time thinking, oh, it’s not that bad, you know, something. People’s parents die, or they never see their dad again and things like that. So I kind of kept talking myself out a bit. But I think as I’ve grown up, I’ve just realized that any family breakdown is traumatic for a child. And I wrote recently in a piece about how this generation is not only going through huge amount of family breakdown, but it’s now normalized. There’s no stigma, there’s no shame around it. And that can free a lot of adults, but then it also puts pressure on children to not have a response to it and to kind of shove their emotions about it down. So, yeah, I think it’s really important to give young people the words and the space to articulate the pain of that and how it’s made them feel.
Elizabeth
Yeah, it’s one of those really like, neuralgic issues, isn’t it? There are a cluster of issues that go so deep into our own history and our own choices and the immediate and very understandable defensiveness and fear of judgment that gets kicked up as soon as you go anywhere near the consequences of some of these individual choices in a broader way. But I think my question is, I wonder if you feel so unusual for talking about the pain that you carry from your parents’ divorce, because so many children feel like they would be disloyal to their parents if they said that. Do you mind me asking, because you also speak incredibly positively about your mum and how loving she is. So it’s not like you have gone no contact with your parents, as far as I can tell. How do you navigate both saying that and honoring the family relationships with the parents that you have?
Backlash in writing and polarising narratives
Freya India
Yeah. I think I really struggled with that for a long time, because I always wanted to talk about family breakdown, and it was just too close to home, literally, for me! And but then I thought, well, you know, there’s so many children growing up this way. There’s probably so many children who feel that loyalty and sense of betrayal to their parents if they talk about it. So no one’s talking about it because, either their parents are divorced or they’re older and they played a part in a divorce. It’s an issue that’s so deep. But I actually found, the way I navigate it is I can talk about it, but I try not to talk about it from a position of resentment or bitterness or anything like that. It’s now more of like a sense of resolve. I’ve kind of grieved it, I’ve grown up now. But now I’m going to try and build something stable and talk about how important is, because I think the real tragedy would be for this many young people to have their families break down, and then we don’t talk about the importance of family. We don’t talk about the pain of it, and it continues to play out. So I think I can talk about it from a perspective of no one’s to blame, but it’s still a tragedy, and it’s still something that I don’t want to play out in my own life. And I think the only way we can move forward is to talk about how to actually fix marriage and prioritize family. And there’s a way to do that that’s detached from your own family. It’s just a way of looking forward.
Elizabeth
Thank you. I don’t know if I can quite articulate this question, but I was thinking a lot as I was reading your work and listening to you about moral norms. And how it feels like there are two things we can tip into as we try and build a healthy society where people flourish, and one of them was probably what some of the Boomers were reacting against, right, a very homogenous set of like, everyone knows what’s right and wrong, and if you get divorced, it’s high shame. Very strong social stigma, really, around that choice, which I’m sure had all kinds of challenges to live under its own way. But there’s this sense that we have of in our kind of ambient moral soup that we’re swimming in that like the worst thing you can do is cast any judgment whatsoever on anyone else’s choices, or, raise the possibility that, for example, a divorce, divorce might have a negative impact on children. You’re just judgy and compassionless. And I hear that voice as well. But I think the data is fairly clear, right, that in much as we would wish it was not the case in general, children whose parents stay together, do better. And it feels like we’ve swung from a high judgment, high shame society over to one where I feel slightly radical, even for saying, I think the data is fairly clear on this and that doesn’t mean I judge your choices, or I think you’re a terrible person if you’ve got divorced. I just think it’s something to bear in mind when we are deciding. Is there a way of getting to somewhere between those two that feels humane and livable?
Judgment is good for our society?
Freya India
Yeah, it’s definitely swung to the extreme. I mean, I’ve not had as much backlash for anything I’ve written than the last piece I did about divorce. And I really tried to position it from a perspective of my feeling, rather than, I’m making a political statement here. It was definitely more of, this is just how I feel, does anyone else feel this way? And it’s still got a wave of like, you know, why are you forcing us to stay together? And everyone goes straight to the extreme arguments of really kind of abusive marriages. And, you know things we would all agree on that, at that stage, they would need to break up for something better. So it’s definitely a very charged conversation. But I think unfortunately, what we’ve done with my generation is adults seem to have, in general, stepped back. They don’t want to judge, and they don’t want to offer direction, they don’t want to really talk about these issues. So if you think about the previous generation of parents, maybe they were too judgmental. Maybe the norms around marriage at one point were too harsh, but we’ve gone the other way now, and it hasn’t produced the generation who are less anxious, more stable. It’s actually created generation that are extremely anxious, that are confused, that I would say are full of doubt about everything, doubt about what to do, where to go, who they are, what’s important.
And I feel that is because adults have stopped judgment. Society has stopped judgment. Because when there’s nobody to judge you, there’s also nobody to guide you, there’s nobody to ground you, there’s nobody to get in your way, but there’s also nobody to get you out of your own way and tell you where you’re going wrong. And there’s also nobody to understand when things go wrong. A family breaking down is a tragic situation, but if everyone’s being non–judgmental, no one’s going to sit with you, and talk through that, and understand it. So I actually think we need a little bit more judgment. And that isn’t to say that we need these really harsh feelings that you can never break up a marriage and it’s your fault, it’s not to shame. But it’s more, as a society, we need to judge that situation as a tragic negative one, and we need to judge it as something that has gone wrong and we need to solve it. It’s a problem. Because I think we’ve gone so far the other way now that we don’t even judge it as a sad situation. We just think, oh, it’s a neutral thing. Or we even go further and we glamorize it, and say, oh, it’s a really positive thing for the parents. You know, this divorce is going to change their lives, and we just ignore the children who are grieving. So, yeah, I don’t know quite how this happened, but we’ve just veered completely away from any kind of shame or judgment in society that I think was there for a reason, and I think a big part of the reason was for children.
Elizabeth
Yes, it’s that I think a lot about individualism, and the way the story that we’ve been told about a human being is, is just fundamentally, ‘I think I act, I optimize’. And it’s not that we go, well, therefore when I have children, they’re just like an accessory or an appendage. No good parent thinks that. But the kind of older stories, which could trend to be very oppressive, particularly for women. But at heart, we’re about a story that said we as human beings are interdependent and interconnected, and we need each other, right? We are made for each other. We’re made by each other, and these relations between us are sacred, right? And they’re worth protecting, and sometimes you might need to sacrifice your immediate gratification, or your happiness, or your free choice for the good of this family, or this community, or this nation. Go on?
Freya India
Oh, no, I was just thinking. You just reminded me, I think that’s why there can’t really be blame. Like for example, I think previous generations, maybe my generation’s parents, I think they were also lied to, but they had that their own lies, which were, you should pursue your own self actualization and fulfillment at all costs, that nothing should get in your way, even kind of the burdens of your own family. They kind of had a very extreme messaging to put their own kind of happiness first. And I think there’s obviously situations where families broke down for bigger reasons than that, but I think there are also a lot of situations where they broke down purely because of that messaging of the grass is greener somewhere else or I should never feel burdened or oppressed in any way. And I think there’s actually a lot of people leaving that generation, growing older and having a lot of regrets for following that message. So again, it’s difficult to blame older generations when that was kind of the message coming from culture in all different directions. But as you said, it’s a complete lie. We all need each other. And actually in that sacrifice and compromising for other people and for your family, you find a whole different level of fulfillment. And I think that’s a message that people aren’t hearing or understanding, maybe because we just can’t be truthful about it because it’s too close to home.
Having a conservative temperament
Elizabeth
You said you thought you were “temperamentally conservative” as a child. What did you mean by that?
Freya India
Yeah, again, I was never political as I was growing up, but I had a family that instinctually prioritized family, instinctually very reserved. I’m quite a kind of shy, risk averse person, I think that kind of just tends to be more conservative. So it’s kind of been my instincts as I’ve been growing up, and then as I got older, I would be reading more, finding out about more ideas, and then realizing, oh, this is a whole kind of political worldview that people have. But yeah, I think it’s more of a personality thing, definitely.
Elizabeth
Well, obviously Jonathan Haidt’s work, who you work closely with, in the kind of moral tastebuds theory, I think really helps us with that, this sense that actually a lot of the conclusions we come to, I think this holds for theology as well and philosophy are deeply rooted in these temperamental preferences that in some ways, map onto that Big Five psychological thing about openness, and desire for new experiences versus the opposite of those things. And I think it can help us to have enough epistemic humility to go, yes, there are important arguments to be had about how we structure a society, but also the things that we instinctively think are obvious might be more about our own personality.
Freya India
Yeah. I have to be careful sometimes. For example, when I talk about privacy on social media and things like that, you know, I’m quite a reserved person, so that kind of comes naturally to me. But I think there’s a big problem now, if you’re, if you’re talking about things in any kind of conservative way. People think you have a political agenda, or you’re trying to impose this whole view of the world you have, whereas some people are just naturally more conservative. You know, they’ve not been brainwashed that way. They’re not trying to impose anything on other people. It’s just in my mind, like a disposition, and it’s difficult sometimes writing as a young woman about these things and not coming across many other young women who have that conservative disposition, and people are quite suspicious of it.
Elizabeth
Let’s just reverse a little bit. I want to just hear about your kind of early teens, because I know that the kind of combination of coming into puberty at the same time that social media was really taking off is very, very formative for you, will you just fill in a few of those gaps for us?
Freya India
I think that, again, ties back to personality. So obviously, adolescence is a very stressful time of kind of like inner angst and turmoil anyway. So I had all of that, and then I had this kind of reserved personality and so as social media was coming along, I’m going through puberty, and I’m also going through this expectation now to share and perform your life and to join in on all these things, you know, to take selfies and post about what you’re doing, and kind of play this game, I suppose. And I went to an all girls school where social media was very integrated with friendships. So the kind of hierarchy of friendships was all playing out online. And it was a way for girls to really compete with one another and to be quite vicious with one another. But I joined in. I did all the social media stuff. I had Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. And I did it but the whole time I was doing it, I had a feeling of not just anxiety and insecurity, but also kind of shame. I just I really felt strange about it, so I’d post a picture of myself and feel ashamed of it, ashamed of like checking the likes, and ashamed of wanting the validation for it. And it’s only when I got off of social media and grew older that I realized, that I do actually think there’s something wrong with documenting and performing your life, especially as a child. So I started writing about it, and kind of writing in defense of keeping those moments private and not selling yourself like a product online.
Elizabeth
I think a lot about this word ‘formation’, which is just who are we becoming? And how are we being shaped by our influences? What do you think is the formation that has been left, really, on Gen Z because of the timing of them coming of age, when social media was so new?
Freya India
I think we really underestimate what it’s done to young people’s view of themselves and the world. I think that young people view themselves like products to be sold, to be analyzed and optimized, and put on display. So I think people are very anxious about how they look and how they come across. And I mean, they’ve grown up managing their personal brand while also being a child, and then also being a teenager. So you know that gives you a feeling of you constantly have to do this kind of reputation management, and you have to package up your personality and present it to people. I think that gives a lot of feeling of anxiety, of not knowing who you are. And obviously you’ve grown up putting yourself worth into these platforms, into the likes and comments you get, the feedback, the ratings and reviews that other people are giving you. Yeah, I really do think young people see themselves as objects, and then I think they see each other as objects. I genuinely believe that social media is degrading our ability to love each other and commit to one another and do all those things we talked about, sacrifice and compromise for someone because we’ve just had it drilled into our heads that we are a personal brand. Other people are products that we swipe through, their lives are just kind of content that we skip through on our phones and consume. And I think we really underestimate how that affects how humans relate to one another.
Elizabeth
Yeah, and as a mother of children coming into this age, I’m very grateful for you and Jonathan’s work around this. There’s a particular thing that you’ve written about that I found very fascinating around resilience. And one of the things that are very powerful about your work is you manage to put your finger on some tendencies within your generation which are troubling, but without contempt. With a huge amount of compassion, actually. And there’s a few interviews I’ve listened to where I can hear the podcast host coming on and expecting to just have a like, big bitch fest with you about how terrible and snow–flakey Gen Z is, and you just very gently complexifying the picture of what some of the like drivers of this might have been and who was at the wheel during that season. What do you think is going on with risk and resilience amongst people your age at the moment?
The Mental Health Industry’s Impact on Youth
Freya India
I mean, I used to be really harsh. I think I used to be harsh on myself because I wasn’t very resilient when I was younger, and I didn’t want to take any risks. I was very socially anxious, and I think I internalized this idea now that Gen Z are just snowflakes and need to pull themselves together. Because you look around and you think we have so much affluence and material comfort. And you do think, well, why can’t you cope?
Elizabeth
We’re not going down the mines. We’re not going to war!
Freya India
But then, the more you think about it, that is the problem. We don’t have anything to fight for or grow up for. We have never had to prove our own resilience. You literally don’t need to take a risk in modern life if you don’t want to. It won’t be a great life, but you can get away with it now in ways that you couldn’t before. You can get away with not growing up. And so I think there’s every incentive in the world for Gen Z to stay young and not capable of doing things. And I also talk a lot about this mental health industry, which now provides kind of endless excuses for doing that. When I was a teenager and I was really shy and anxious, it was very attractive to me to say, “Oh, maybe it’s an anxiety disorder”, or “No, I just have a social anxiety problem that no one understands.” But again, that kills the incentive to get over it. So yeah, I do have a lot of compassion for Gen Z, because I think this is actually the hardest time to grow up and develop resilience than ever before. It’s not the hardest time in terms of physical danger and poverty or anything like that, but the cross we have to bear is the consequences of comfort, too much comfort. So in a lot of my writing, I’m trying to be compassionate, but I’m also trying to encourage young people to snap out of it and get over it, and things like that. So what I try and do is lay out the causes and the reasons so they have an understanding of where it comes from. It’s not their fault. But then the time for excuses is over. You know, if you’re 25 and you’re scared to talk to someone on the phone, it’s not social anxiety, it’s not cute or funny, it’s kind of tragic. So trying to navigate that line of compassion, but not coddling. It’s difficult.
Elizabeth
Yeah, it really is. Firm, but kind is the is the phrase that we use in parenting land! Yeah, I’d love to hear more about that kind of mental health world, because you’re very clear that therapy is sometimes really useful, that people do have serious mental health struggles, that is a real thing. But that this mission, this creep, and your explanation is really quite economic about the way the market has been crowded with actors whose profits rely on people’s mental health struggles. And the line between actually what’s just normal human suffering, just the fact it’s painful being a person, and it’s particularly painful being a teenager. Could you say just a little bit about how you would narrate what’s happened maybe over the last decade?
Freya India
I think the best way to put it is to imagine you’re a 12–year–old girl now, and you’re anxious and unsure of yourself. I mean, the experience of a young girl now is, first of all constant bombardment of ads for therapy. You know, like these Better Help ads and Talk Space and companies like that, who are now saying very explicitly that everyone needs therapy. It’s not just for people who’ve been through serious trauma, it’s for everyone. These companies now know that it’s young girls that are suffering the most in modern life, and so the marketing is very targeted toward young girls. I was looking at one of the websites recently for an American therapy company, and they were saying, it’s probably good to get therapy and mental health medication before exam stress kicks in, or just as you’re having your big breakup, you should try anxiety medication to speed up the process. So they’re genuinely taking these kind of age–old adolescent feelings and experiences and medicalising them. Which, if you’re just a 12–year–old anxious girl, you’re going to want a quick solution to that, because it’s painful. So yeah, I find the emphasis on everyone needs therapy, and the emphasis on, if you’re someone who’s sad, or quiet, or insecure, there’s something wrong with you that needs solving, I find that to be criminal. Because I think of me as at that age, and it’s painful. As I said before, if you’re like a reserved, shy, maybe you’re more temperamentally conservative young girl, you’re going to feel like you don’t fit in at all. You know, I felt like I had nowhere to belong in modern life, I didn’t understand other people. They didn’t understand me. I had, for example, that big emotional reaction to my parents divorce. Now I’d probably interpret that as, oh, I have separation anxiety, or an attachment disorder, or autism or something like that. I mean, these are literally the kind of videos and advertisements young people are getting.
And the real tragedy is that there are things in modern life that would understandably make young people feel anxious and traumatized, I would say, including family breakdown, including the collapse of community, including no belief in anything bigger than themselves, no faith in anything, and again, no moral direction or guidance. So feeling anxious and insecure is completely understandable. So you’ve got kind of two things going on, which is a genuine reaction and sadness to the modern world, and then this massive mental health industry that is capitalizing and pushing that further. And I do think young girls are the primary victims of it, not because they’re weak, but because they’re vulnerable and extremely vulnerable during puberty. And yeah, I think the mental health industry doesn’t just mindlessly advertise to them, it directly targets them for that reason.
Algorithms Shaping Mental Health Narratives
Elizabeth
It’s really making me think about how cultural change works. And I have a question that’s not massively coherently formulated today, forgive me, and I’d just love to think about this together. Do you think it’s the case that culture is always just swinging? You have more communitarian leanings times, and then that gets a bit claustrophobic like the 1960s. And then you swing into some more individualistic times. And eventually people realize that pure individualism is deeply unsatisfying, and everyone’s lonely and bored, and discontent, and desperate for community, and we’ll find a way to find our way back to each other. And then you’ve got the kind of talking about your mental health, or talking about really deep, dark, difficult emotional experiences, is kind of a hidden, private thing, and no one should ever talk about it. There’s some shame and stigma around it, and then it swings and you’ve got, like, ‘hot girl pills’, which you talk about, and it feels like, in some sections of Gen Z, the stigma is if you do not have a mental health disorder. If you do not have a diagnosis, there’s nothing interesting about you. Do you think that’s always happened? My kind of working hypothesis is that has always happened and what we have seen with the internet, essentially, is this algorithmic funneling and intensifying of things that would not have got anywhere near as extreme. What’s your hunch?
Freya India
Yeah, I think that you’re right, that the culture does kind of oscillate between extremes. And I do think there’s some hope that my generation will raise their children differently, but that will obviously come with its own problems. There’ll be a backlash to some of the trends now. But I think what concerns me is, as you said, these massive industries that are built on it now, whose fuel is these anxieties and insecurities. So while the trends might change, I don’t see the mental health industry going anywhere. I don’t see social media companies changing anything. And so I think, yeah, you might have maybe a backlash to the over diagnosing of everything at some point, but they’ll find other ways to exploit these anxieties and insecurities. And also, with social media, unfortunately with the personalized ads and algorithms, which are only going to get more powerful, you can target people specifically based on their insecurities, their fears and their problems. So yeah, the culture can change, but the algorithms that go after the very worst traits our deepest vulnerabilities or vices, they’re only going to get more powerful. So I tend to think that whatever happens in culture now just gets dragged to the extreme, to the negative extreme, because we have these billion–dollar industries that are able to get so big, and we have these personalized algorithms that are able to so intimately access children and adults as well. So yeah, I’m quite pessimistic about it, because I feel like now there’s nothing stopping a trend from being dragged to its darkest extreme, which is what I see keeps happening. So there’ll be like a beauty trend that starts normal and gets dragged to an extreme because the algorithms favor more extreme content, it gets more engagement. Same with political stuff, same with the mental health industry, everything is getting pulled that way. So, yeah, sorry, I’m being so negative.
Elizabeth
But no, it’s okay. I think you know, sort of being clear eyed about where we are, it’s helpful, because my fear is that the swing back on the mental health stuff, and I can already see it is, particularly kind of media personalities and YouTubers, being like, well, none of it exists, right? There’s no such thing as autism. No one has ever had ADHD, and no one is ever worth clinically diagnosing with depression or anxiety. So the reaction to the sense of, oh, that’s got a bit too extreme that way, is this swing back in the other direction. And then the real gains that we’ve made get lost, and just this deep frustration. Sometimes it’s quite helpful being a Christian, in the sense of, my anthropology is we’re a mess, and deep foolishness and fragility. I find the doctrine of sin sort of weirdly helpful because I’m like, oh, yeah. Look at us go!
Freya India
Yeah, I’m the same. That’s, that’s kind of how I view it. But yeah, I think we just have to fight for that. This is big part of the reason I think young people should be off social media, and adults as well, as much as possible, because it’s really hard to hold that center. So you get to a position where you say, okay, we’ve over diagnosed, over medicalized children. This is getting extreme, you kind of find a sensible middle ground of there are people that really struggle with trauma. There are people that have brain differences that mean that they’re more susceptible to things like depression. But again, you start doing that, and then your algorithm suggests you going even further, where you’re then saying nobody suffers with anything. It’s all nonsense. So I think trying to stay off social media actually helps you hold that firm center.
Elizabeth
And just being able to hold complexity in your head?
Freya India
Yeah. That’s a big part of it is that things are complicated, and algorithms don’t favor complex, careful explanations. And it’s hard as a writer to not fall into that, because you’re also getting feedback from people. You’re also now selling your writing on an algorithm. So I find I have to write things and then leave and not really read through all the comments. I have a look at the kind of the top responses, but I don’t want to be dragged further into it. I kind of want to have my worldview shaped by the world instead of online.
Elizabeth
Yeah, it’s really helpful. I was going to ask you how you’re trying to resist the network effect, because I think a lot of our sort of public intellectuals are people very caught up in this algorithmic space, right? And I see how fast people can go from sounding very sane and thoughtful to just like down a narrow rabbit hole of ending up somewhere very far from where they began. And I think that that wisdom of just trying to write and then not to pay too much attention, because even Substack does it. They’re like, this is your top engagement thing. Write more like this! Which is exactly how we got into this mess.
Freya India
Yeah, and I think it can go two ways. You either get so much positive engagement from something, that you kind of double down and you’re like, okay, people liked this before, so I’m going to say it even more extremely and dramatically. Or you can go the other way, where you get criticism from people, and then you kind of weaken your confidence in something. So I wrote the piece about family breakdown, and there’s a lot of people saying, “I had a great family, and my parents split up, and I’m fine.” And you know, people who’ve got valid stories, but who are trying to shut down anyone who’s talking about the pain of it. And it’s quite easy to then think, oh, okay, I’ll soften my position. I’ll just weaken it, water it down. And I don’t want to fall into that trap either, because I do think it’s important to have convictions. And I think, you can get swung the other way, where you’re kind of talked out of your beliefs and talked down from standing up against something. So yeah, I really try and just post my articles and then go back to reading, thinking, being in the world, and trying to connect with what I actually feel is true, rather than this is what worked for me last time, or this is what people would prefer I phrase it like.
Elizabeth
Yeah. talk to me about, I mean, my language would be a vocation, but certainly the position you found yourself in which is someone who’s writing a lot about Gen Z, and at least on the outside, looks like the easiest audience for that is the generations above right? I’m older than you. Lots of the people that you’ve had conversations with are older than you. I’m sort of looking and looking for you talking to someone else who’s in Gen Z, and I don’t get the impression that young men who are saying, not the same things as you, but talking about the problems for their generation of young men, they’re talking to each other as well as older men and otherwise. How have you navigated this sense that you have some stuff to say to people your age? And actually, often it comes through as if they’re the people you hope are reading. But it’s easier to find an audience that aren’t of your particular age and demographic. Why do you think that is? And how do you navigate that?
Freya India
Well, I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with Substack for finding young women who think like me, which I’ve never found really in my life. And I’ve had conversations with people who talk about their childhood, and talk about feeling like they don’t fit in in the modern world, feeling like they don’t belong anywhere. And really kind of bonding with young women over that, and that’s been really refreshing, actually. So they are out there, and a few of them have been in touch, and I’ve had conversations which have been very personally fulfilling for me. But I think the real problem is, unfortunately, young women are veering much further to the left than young men. And they’re not veering into the kind of normal political left. They’re veering into the obviously kind of cliche now, but ‘woke’ left. I guess the only way to describe it is they’re just not able to comprehend a different worldview. They’re not able to comprehend a different, as I said at the beginning, a different disposition and temperament to their own. So again, I write that piece on family breakdown, and it’s all young women that have a problem with it. You feel that it’s backward and regressive, and it’s, super conservative and traditional. And if you read the piece, it’s genuinely just like, I feel this way, and I think this is painful for children. There’s no political prescription. There’s not me saying we should impose this. I’m just talking about a feeling I strongly have.
And yeah, I think it’s something particular to young women, especially who seem to feel very threatened by anything that’s remotely conservative, or sounds traditional, or sounds different from what they’re used to. But that, to me, is fine to keep going. Because everything I read on Substack is very liberal, left leaning. Maybe I don’t agree with it, but I never feel the need to kind of call it out or attack it, or say take it down, or find it threatening to me. I just think, okay, well, I’m going to focus on my writing and show my perspective on this. But there seems to be this faction of the left now who just want it removed, they don’t even want to read about it. So yeah, it’s been a struggle to write something which I want to be aimed toward young women, but as soon as they see anything that’s remotely different in worldview, they switch off.
Are Gen–Z considering religion?
Elizabeth
I think that growing values divide between young men and young women. And my understanding is young men have become slightly more conservative, and young women have come become much more progressive, which has all kinds of implications for like, how do you find a life partner if you are straight? But I want to ask about religion, because you’ve written a little bit about it, and I have been observing for the last maybe five years a very different spiritual landscape, a sense that the openness to the possibility, both of spirituality in a very wide variety of forms and honestly, this is something that would have been unthinkable in my late 20s and early 30s for highly educated people, that religion might have something to offer us. And my hunch has been that it is younger people whose parents weren’t religious. They don’t have a lot of associations or baggage or wounds. And I think some people raised in religion do have real, real wounds. But neither do they care who Richard Dawkins is right? Neither were they the young men who came for university where, smart was coded new atheist. What are you seeing? Is there a renewed interest? Is it like wishful thinking on the part of Christians like me? No,
Freya India
I think there is. I think there’s a kind of feeling that there has to be more to life than this. I think young people have grown up in such a, the only way to describe it is like a disenchanted world where everything is very cheap and commodified and anything deeper is kind of maligned in some way. So as I said at the beginning, deep relationships are threatening or a burden. Any kind of deeper spiritual feeling is backward and old fashioned. And it’s probably that cultural swing that when you grow up with that sense that it’s silly, or superstitious, or needy to want something deeper out of life, you inevitably kind of swing back the other way. And I do see that happening. I see a lot of people my age. Maybe it’s just kind of the circles that I’m in, but having much more conversations with people who are saying they’re going to church for the first time, or they’re reading C.S. Lewis, or some kind of introduction to Christianity. I think that is a search for enchantment after growing up in such a kind of dead, materialistic world. But again, that is happening, but then there’s also, that kind of minority of people who are very loud about their view on things, and find that to be threatening.
So, you know, I wasn’t raised religious. I have no background in that, and I find myself being drawn to it, and it kind of coming out in my writing without me even trying. And immediately you get comments really deeply suspicious, like, again, you have some agenda, or you’re secretly trying to convince people of this kind of backward worldview. So, yeah, that there’s young people that are more interested in it, but there’s still this faction of people who find any reference to it to be scary. And it seems like you can’t explore it now, because sometimes I’ll kind of write about, you know, getting closer to it and how I’m feeling about it, and people demand to know, are you religious or not? Like exactly what you believe, as if you’re hiding it and trying to like people, but it’s a big thing to kind of figure out. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of people searching for enchantment, but it’s still difficult to talk about.
Elizabeth
My fear is, and this is what I think we’re already seeing, is that’s much easier for young men than young women. And it’s the first time in, like, a very long time that the church is working out… maybe 20 years ago, there was all this hand wringing about the feminization of the church and how the pews were full of women, and how could churches appeal to men? And you had like these really off–putting, like, ultra macho pastors talking about, how to be a real man for Jesus as a way of trying to get them then into the churches. And a lot of them had major moral failings. And it’s sort of whiplash–giving to see how much for the first time, it is much easier for a young man (and I think Jordan Peterson, is like 80% of the reason behind this) to say I’m interested in reading the Bible, or I’m interested in going to church, than it is for young women. And I think part of that is from very understandable reasons, primarily around the American church and the rhetoric where it really does sound like Christianity involves becoming a trad wife and criminalizing all abortion, including in circumstances of rape or whatever it is, that Christianity equals patriarchy. Could you just say a bit more about that? Is there anything those of us who are interested in people of all genders who want to explore it, having space to explore it (which we do)?
Freya India
We spoke a lot about the meaning crisis among young people in recent years. And we’ve kind of all come to the conclusion that young people need meaning and lack meaning, and they’re lost in some way. I mean, you only have to look at the mental health statistics to show that they’re anxious, and lost, and confused. But I think what happened is we, there’s a real crisis among young men, and we did kind of fill the gap with role models of men who are giving them self–help advice, and guidance, and discipline, and direction. You know that I remember when I was in university, it was like young men’s self–help everywhere. So it was like Chris Williamson, David Goggins, it was Jordan Peterson. And they were trying to infuse young men’s lives with meaning, and it was really great movement. But I think we kind of missed young women. I think there’s a lot of young women who really want direction, and guidance, and discipline, and they respond to that. I find the kind of female self–help really patronizing. It’s things like, you know, love yourself, you’re doing fine as you are, you’re worth more than this. It’s just kind of empty platitudes. And young women also need meaning in their life.
They also need a sense of purpose and a reason to take on sacrifices and burdens and everything. And I think the trouble is we view it as telling young women what to do. So young women look at something like Christianity and think, like you said, patriarchy, it’s giving me limits of how to live my life, and it’s restrictions. And I think adults kind of step back and thought, oh, we just won’t tell young women what’s right and wrong. We just let them kind of live their life. And, yeah, I find it incredibly, patronizing, because women can take it, you know. I quite like hard discipline. I quite like that masculine approach as it’s been branded. So, yeah, I think we left a big void for young women. So now you’re seeing men turning to faith. You’re seeing men, in many ways, find meaning in their lives, pull themselves together. And I don’t feel women have had that. I think our role models are usually just pop culture figures, influencers. We don’t really have these matriarchal figures or anyone telling us to pull ourselves together and sort ourselves out. But we can take it, I don’t think we need to be treated like children.
Elizabeth
Yeah, Freya India, there is much more we could talk about, but I’m very grateful for your time. Thank you for talking to me today on The Sacred, thank you.
Freya India
Thanks so much for having me.
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