Youthful existential void: Anguish older than TikTok

Salinger and Camus mourned the emptiness now blamed on Gen Z

The existential void among young people is not new. It is an anguish with centuries of bibliography behind it, and those who believe it was born with TikTok have missed several bookshelves. The thesis starting the conversation is blunt: this discomfort has always existed and was written by Salinger, Camus, Hesse or Stoker long before vertical video existed. The disagreement arises when seeking the cause. Some attribute it to the human condition; others to a mind conditioned by impossible expectations; and some point directly to the algorithm that feeds on our attention.

From Salinger to Dracula: the void predates the mobile phone

The catalog discussed is not from yesterday. The Catcher in the Rye portrays a teen who sees no sense in anything and dreams of stupid tasks; The Stranger, a cornerstone of existentialism, tells the same story with another voice and date. To these two are added Dracula, a 19th-century best-seller criticized for a rushed ending —a detail admitted not to lose readers—, Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, A Confederacy of Dunces, which won the Pulitzer, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book said to be worth underlining entirely. Two Rooms in Manhattan also appears, depicting big city loneliness.

The conclusion drawn is that the inner gap does not distinguish between centuries or formats: the scenery changes, not the script. An uncomfortable comparison emerges, that of Lord of the Flies, whose 1963 film is cited as a mirror: today’s twenty-something would equate, in attention capacity, to a twelve-year-old of that era.

Why do those who have everything feel empty?

The answer given is literary before economic. In Siddhartha, the protagonist has everything and one night, sitting at the foot of a mango tree in his garden, asks if it is fair and necessary for someone to own a mango tree. Immediately he abandons the mansion with its luxurious clothes and heads into the unknown. This pattern repeats in real life, according to this current: artists and celebrities who had everything and self-destructed, citing the 27 Club deaths as examples of success without direction.

Against this, the proposed remedy is deliberately modest: small pleasures. Watching a movie, eating good cheese, going for a walk when it starts getting cool. There is a formulation summarizing the stance: freedom depends on the state of consciousness and not on surrounding circumstances, because people tend to confuse life with their living situation. The nuance is important: whoever has everything without purpose ends up destroyed.

The algorithm that learns from you and gives nothing back

Here the analysis becomes both economic and technological. Short-video platforms function as systems that learn from users: they record tastes, retain attention, and return immediate stimulus in exchange for hours. The comparison made in the conversation is explicit and inelegant but describes the mechanism well: continuous, superficial, addictive pleasure. What knowledge is acquired after two hours of scrolling? Practically none, even when content is useful, because nothing is retained.

Added to this is the underlying malaise attributed to this generation: raised to feel unique, special, and untouchable, they step out into the street and find the labor market. Most work is brutalizing torture, argues one of the most repeated theses, and we are educated since childhood that those who don't work are useless. The result is a gap between expectation and paycheck that no screen can fill.

Lockdown, a garden, and a daughter: remedies cited

Another line of discussion goes down to specific cases. Pandemic lockdown forced many to look themselves in the face without background noise, and that silence scared them. Against anguish, solutions appear that do not involve books: one says everything dies in a vertical garden set up on the terrace, with afternoon sun and plenty of light, joking that even a plastic cactus would wilt; another has started carving wood with background music and describes total tranquility. Another summarizes it in an image: a plant sprouting four days after planting the seed.

And then there is the most resounding answer, the one that admits no argument: the void was filled the day he held his daughter in his arms, and the rest became very unimportant. Loneliness and self-knowledge appear as the common denominator of almost all proposed remedies, above gurus, self-help best-sellers, and promises of quick salvation.

And at 50? The void knows no age

The question runs through the exchange from top to bottom: if you have this at 30, what happens at 40, at 50, when you are retired? The majority response is that the void respects no ages. Those who recount it assure having closely felt the idea of suicide recurrently in times considered normal, and remember kids who did so then. It is also recalled that 19th-century romanticism turned that tragedy into a nearly accepted, even viewed favorably, literary subgenre.

From this comes the defense of religion as a historical answer: if belief has always existed, they argue, it is because humans are incomplete animals needing something to hold onto. In the spiritual realm, Buddhism and Kabbalah are cited as paths to inner peace and purpose, with the warning that neither holds absolute truth and all would be versions of the same thing. The phrase that best closes that part is textbook: results don't matter, the path does.

With this bibliography on the table, the forecast remains open. If the void has been documented for millennia, one can expect the next generation will find it too, with or without an app. The doubt is whether they will read about it in a book or only in a fifteen-second comment. No one dares sign off on it yet.