Weltschmerz and Anomie: The Life and Times of Students With Gifts and Talents in the Early 21st Century

20 Plus Years of Malignancy

In 1999, two high school students terrorized a large suburban school in Littleton, Colorado. They shot and killed 13 students and teachers before killing themselves. This became known as the Columbine shootings, or merely Columbine. Time stopped as this event unfolded, and for months it was the primary focus of many news outlets. American society was mesmerized, outraged, scared, and sorrowful. TV commentators and on-the-street interviews sometimes seized upon the fact that one of the perpetrators, Dylan Klebold, had been identified as a SWGT, which led to pernicious speculation that his murderous behavior was a function of his giftedness. Many high school SWGT across the U.S. were negatively affected by these ill-informed ideas. The upset of these students led to the formation of online groups to discuss their lives as SWGT in high school circa 1999. One of these, the “Voices from the Hellmouth” forum (https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth), offered heartbreaking descriptions of the students’ experiences of being a SWGT in the U.S.

Soon after Columbine, the U.S. experienced 9/11. Just those three numbers elicit upset, fear, worry, anger, frustration, and more. For months after the terrorist attack, the U.S. was plunged into an all-encompassing climate of fear and distrust. How could we protect Americans at home and how far were we willing to go to recapture our lost feeling of security? Ostensibly to that end, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan less than a month after 9/11. For the next 20 years, we fought the longest war (“on terrorism”) of any conflict in the U.S. The estimated financial cost of this war was $300,000,000 per day for 20 years (Helman & Tucker, 2021). Not yet realized, however, are the millions of dollars per day we must and will continue to spend to try to help U.S. soldiers recover from physical and mental traumas caused by the war. This, too, is expected to continue for decades, costing Americans over a trillion dollars. The choice to fight this controversial war for 20 years has cost our country many lives, caused innumerable serious psychological injuries (moral and post-traumatic stress) to veterans, and over a trillion dollars. Meanwhile, there are school districts that cannot afford to replace their 20-year-old textbooks (Richmond, 2019).

Several years after Columbine, a young man shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School with an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle created for wartime. Twenty first-grade students and six teachers and staff members were killed, all of them shot multiple times in less than 5 min. The effects on Americans were unlike we had ever seen, and it was clear that we could not stand by and continue to let our children be slaughtered in and outside of schools. Some gun safety legislation would obviously come from these increasingly common events. It seemed that we were in agreement and talk in that direction was encouraging. But then something very familiar happened—the political powers and the groups that make money from gun and ammunition sales applied pressure to prevent any legislation that threatened them. Ludicrous ideas from some of the groups began to appear on television, offering alternative solutions: for instance, requiring all teachers to carry guns while in school. Between the Columbine shootings in 1999 and as we write this in 2022, there have been more than 230 school shootings in the U.S. (Vigderman & Turner, 2021), plus the many large-scale shootings outside of schools. When our politicians decided to not enhance gun safety laws, but to force schools to train their faculty, staff, and students to practice survival skills for when an inevitable shooter strikes, that is when we lost our soul and hope as a nation.

During this same time period, the fact that many African American men were dying at the hands of police officers, in many cases for nonviolent offenses or even no offenses at all, came into full view. The visibility of the deaths of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Jr., and many others has finally awoken the majority of the U.S. to the dangers faced by Black Americans due to uncaring, prejudiced, negligent, and outright hostile authorities. This has been constant in our country’s history, but the ubiquity of cameras in smartphones has spread consciousness of it to virtually our entire community. Innumerable videos, sometimes from the police officers’ own cameras, provided vivid and incontrovertible evidence of the murders of African Americans. In a short period of time, numerous African Americans were also killed in their own homes with no-knock warrants, young teenagers shot while playing with plastic toy pistols, and on and on.

In 2017, an event occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. A right-wing march that included White Supremacists and neo-Nazis was held and escalated to the killing of a counterprotester. News coverage included videos of the marchers carrying torches and chanting anti-Semitic slogans, and of a car driving directly into protesters from the opposing side. All Americans, including young people, could not avoid these powerful images. The social norms that once guided most Americans were being shaken to the core.

Behind the scenes in the same time period, an epidemic of opioid abuse has killed over one million people. Investigations in recent years have uncovered collusion among pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, doctors, and other groups who could make large amounts of money from these drugs reaching the streets (Meyer & Smith, 2017). Small pharmacies in West Virginia were identified as having brought millions of opioid-based drugs into tiny communities, for the purpose of distributing en masse and fostering addiction. The aggregate effect across communities is so immense, it is difficult to describe. Within the individual families, it is no less devastating.

Every one of these issues––the frequency of school and mass shootings, the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the deadly effects of systemic racism, the violence of hate groups, the explosion of deaths and suffering due to massive opioid production––helped set the stage for the COVID-19 pandemic. On a global scale, the past 2 years have seen dominance by political actors consciously weaponizing disinformation for their own gain. This can be seen in anti-science politics that deny the effects of climate change; in the lies spread about the United States 2020 election and the subsequent attempted coup on January 6, 2021; and most recently in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While for the first time, many of our politicians are agreeing on the need to assist the people of Ukraine, still a small group of TV commentators and some politicians are siding with Russia, as its war crimes unfold right before our eyes. Disagreement about what is true is rampant.

Making Sense of 20 Plus Years of Strife and Disagreement

Let us organize and consider these events according to Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System’s Theory, as described above. In the microsystem, believed to be the most influential system as it includes the family and school, we have issues of the pain and suffering of people due to the murders of children by the 230-plus shootings in schools, the deaths from opioid-based drugs, fear of contagion, political strife within families, and so on. All of these affect the growing child, and interactions with other children experiencing the same context magnifies and complicates the influence.

The mesosystem is often described as a “system of ecosystems.” A child’s experiences in the mesosystem include the child’s and parents’ interactions with outside figures, such as school personnel (teachers, counselors, principals and so forth). The mesosystem adds to a secure base of safety and security or increases stress and uncertainty. The recent increase in hostility aimed at teachers and school board members can add significant stress to the students in the schools.

In the mesosystem, as well, is social media. Social media has grown in scope and depth to the point that it dominates the lives of some school-aged children, adding, among other things, unhealthy pressure to conform to views of beauty, concerns around social class, religion, and so forth. While it can enhance their knowledge base, friendship base, and sense of agency, it can also connect students to bullying and other forms of undesirable social experiences and pressures. Social media, a relatively unmanaged space, is also where many young people are getting their news (Wronski, 2019).

The exosystem includes less direct experiences. For example, the child’s neighborhood, parent’s workplaces, parents’ friends, and social media are often indirect indicators of the child’s own experiences. The disruption of neighborhoods by opioid addictions and deaths, school and neighborhood shootings, plus the ongoing deaths of African Americans by police officers along with the protests against unfair and unsafe treatment add chronic stress, fear, doubt, and death to the children’s local communities.

The macrosystem includes cultural elements such as socio-economic status, wealth, poverty, and ethnicity. These elements of the macrosystem are outside the control or even direct influence of the child. Some could be considered chance variables for the child. Systemic racism, racial police violence, market forces and social attitudes exist here.

The fifth system, the chronosystem, represents the time in which an individual is developing. This system would include the virtually all the examples described in this column, which are unique to this generation.

The Long-Term Impact of the Unique Experiences of Our SWGT Since 1999

The long-term impact of children witnessing, hear about, or having direct experiences with any one of the events and circumstances described in this column could be traumatic. The impact of trauma can be so powerful that it changes a child’s future or damages their normal functioning. Try to estimate the impact on children as they grow from newborns to young adults, should they have experiences with any two events described in this paper, or more than two. Now add the effects, which we are still trying to fully understand, of our children interacting with social media, which is impacted by algorithms, many of which were created to guide them into places that have adverse effects on their psychological well-being. Now, add aggression targeting educators and school board members. Now, add the prevalence of disinformation and its use in political violence. The complexity of all these influences increases in ways and to degrees that we have very little professional experiences assessing.

How Have the Students of This Generation Been Affected by Their Unique Time in History?

While it is difficult to measure, we believe that this generation lives with greater degrees of anxiety than previous generations. We do know that hospital emergency room visits for mental health concerns have risen among females during the pandemic, but not for males (Radhakrishnan et al., 2022). Anecdotally, we have discerned that many young people today experience a loss of hope about their futures, their respect for adults has waned, and their overall attitude about the future has changed. When societies are in such a state of flux, when ideals and norms are changing or nonexistent, the psychological result is anomie (Durkheim, 1897). This is a logical outcome of the past 20 years of events, circumstances, and behavior experienced by our children. The underlying experience can be described by the single word Weltschmerz. Translated literally from the German, Welt means world and schmerz means pain. There is a world of pain in the chronosystem of children today.

One defining characteristic of the 15–24-year-old age group has been the increase of 30% in their suicide rate, since 1999 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). While any forensic psychologist will avoid drawing too many conclusions from a single set of statistics, I believe that our SWGT are likely to be struggling with matters created by adults, growing up in a world impacted by traumatic events and circumstances unlike any generation before. In a conversation with a high school aged, gifted student, I asked: “What do you think will be the tagline for your generation?” They pondered this for a minute and said: “Well, at least we learned how to hide from a school shooter when he inevitably comes.” If young people feel no hope, then we can only seek to understand why if we wish to leave them a better world.

What to Do?

How do we support our SWGT in this time of anomie? First and foremost, this is a time to check our values. Understandably, we seem to have moved away from values of growth toward values of self-protection (Schwartz et al., 2012), prioritizing values such as security and power over benevolence, self-direction, and stimulation. At a time of upheaval, it makes sense to retreat to our bunkers, follow the leaders, and protect ourselves. What is needed more in these times, however, is to increase our ethic of care for one another, and to deal with the changes in our times––technological, medical, social––with innovation and creative solutions. We need to promote an acceptance of change if we want to improve the life circumstances of those affected by systemic racism, drug addiction, mental illness, and hopelessness. At the start of the COVID pandemic, there was an outpouring of support for everyone––stimulus checks, eviction bans, food lines. We could afford these steps toward a more caring community in the face of grave danger to everyone. Over time, however, concern for others faded as a willingness to change our behaviors for others’ safety was replaced by a desire for individual “freedoms.” The backlash has been severe, affecting every institution and every corner of society.

Today’s global society is in turmoil, but we can make progress toward stability by focusing on what our children need. They need us to create a secure world for them, a safe place that puts care for their positive psychological and physical well-being first. Here are important steps we can take to make this happen.

1. Prioritize children’s well-being––ALL children’s well-being, not only a subset. By developing policies and implementing practices that prioritize all children, there will not be the mistrust that comes with social inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Unstable individuals will be embraced by a caring community and the thought of killing peers or coworkers or turning to drugs for solace will be a thing of the past.

Taking these steps can focus our individual and collective lens on what will benefit our children and away from less important matters, muting the sometimes deafening caterwauling of those who put their personal wishes ahead of society’s children’s needs. They can provide a heuristic for decision making in these times when the path forward may not seem clear. They can help secure our future as a human race, by focusing the light on both short-term needs of the children in a very direct manner, and at the same time allowing us to consider and plan for long-term issues for our families, communities, country, and world.