The Generation That Optimized Itself Out of Living

A trend that has recently been showing up in my Instagram Reels feed presents an almost comic contrast between two ways young people live. Today: two hours before work, a morning run, meditation, or a weightlifting session. In 1996: a party that refuses to end, a bottle passing from hand to hand, a reckless car ride, and uninhibited dancing on the floor. Dozens of creators place these two images side by side to show just how much has changed.

On the surface, this looks like progress: less recklessness, less drinking, less risk, more balance. Doesn’t it?

Professor Scott Galloway, in an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher, framed the question provocatively. In his view, one of the biggest problems facing young people today is the anti-alcohol movement. The danger of liver damage, he argues, is smaller than the danger of social isolation, which can lead to depression and anxiety. Human connection is one of the most important things in life, and it is hard to build. Alcohol, for better or worse, has long played a role in creating friendships, romantic relationships, and human bonds.

In his book Notes on Being a Man, Galloway clarifies that “drink and dance again” is not really a call to alcohol itself, but shorthand for something larger: reclaiming a human rhythm, a sense of community, and the physical spaces where people connect, fail, and grow. One does not have to take his prescription literally, and certainly should not turn alcohol into a solution. But behind the provocation lies a serious question: has our heightened awareness of health, and our drift toward balanced living, left us living less?

Connor Leahy, an AI researcher and entrepreneur, points to the other side of the same coin. During a panel on digital technology and capitalism at the Nexus Institute, he argued that the physical space itself, the club, the street, the party, no longer feels safe for experimentation. Every moment can be recorded, preserved, and shared. No one dances anymore. No one approaches anyone anymore.

The data does not prove simple causation, but it paints a picture that is hard to ignore. According to CDC figures, in 2023, 40% of American high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness; among girls, the figure was 53%. According to Gallup, the depression rate among young adults aged 18 to 29 has more than doubled in eight years, from 13% in 2017 to nearly 27% today. The decline in sexual activity carries into adulthood too: University of Chicago General Social Survey data show that weekly sexual activity among American adults fell from 55% in 1990 to just 37% in 2024. Meanwhile, according to Gallup, the share of young Americans who drink alcohol has dropped from 72% to 62% over twenty years, and in the UK, roughly a third of nightclubs have closed since 2020.

This, to my mind, is the crux of it. What may have emerged is not just a healthier and more self-aware generation, but a generation that has learned to be wary of life itself. It is a generation that understands more, analyzes more, and speaks the language of the psyche more fluently than any before it. Yet precisely because of that, it finds it harder to act.

This is not an argument against awareness or healthy living. It is an argument against the moment awareness stops being an engine of freedom and becomes a sophisticated mechanism of avoidance.

Jonathan Haidt offers one possible explanation. In The Anxious Generation, he describes the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one. But the deeper point is the shift between two modes of operating: discovery mode, where a person is curious and willing to risk failure, and defense mode, where the internal system treats every new encounter as a threat rather than an opportunity.

A play-based childhood trains a person to live in discovery mode. A screen-based childhood accustoms them to reward without real friction: without embarrassment, without rejection, without another body standing in front of them. If defense mode becomes the default, the patterns around us begin to make more sense: avoiding parties, fearing social risk, struggling to approach, to speak, to try, to begin.

Dostoevsky, in Notes from Underground, adds a deeper layer. To be too conscious, he writes, is a disease. The Underground Man is neither foolish nor indifferent; he is so sharply self-aware that it paralyzes him. He dissects every motive, anticipates every possible insult, and refuses action in the name of reason. Excessive self-awareness, for Dostoevsky, is not necessarily moral depth. At times, it is simply a defense mechanism against risk, rejection, and failure.

Galloway, Leahy, Haidt, and Dostoevsky are, each in their own language, describing the same mechanism. One points to a movement built on a real and legitimate goal: health. But as a side effect, it may pull people away from the spaces where connection used to happen. Another points to the fear of being recorded. When every space is a potential camera, approaching someone stops being a private risk. A third shows how a screen-based childhood can train the nervous system to default to threat instead of curiosity. A fourth reminds us that this is not entirely new: a mind too aware of itself can reason its way out of ever acting at all.

Together, they point to something specific. Awareness, left unchecked, breeds fear. Fear breeds inaction. And inaction, sustained long enough, may help explain some of the anxiety and depression the statistics above are measuring. This is not offered as a single explanation. The forces behind these numbers are complex. It is offered as one significant piece of the story, worth naming on its own.

This is a call.

Awareness matters. So do boundaries. So does self-regulation. But somewhere along the way, we let them become an elegant way of avoiding life itself. The moment they did, they stopped being freedom. They became fear, wearing freedom’s clothes.

Failure, embarrassment, rejection, the wrong word said at the wrong time: these were never obstacles standing between us and a full life. They are part of what a full life is made of. Refusing to risk them is not wisdom. It is a quiet way of stepping outside of life, however healthy and justified the reasons may look on paper.

So go out into the world. Dance. Talk to the stranger. Say something you have not rehearsed. Not because failure is good, but because refusing to risk it means refusing to actually live. A healthier generation was supposed to be a happier one. It is not. Maybe it is time to stop optimizing ourselves out of the very things that make life worth living.

As Avicii put it in The Nights: “live a life you will remember