Podcast: Pierre Valentin’s New Book on Generation Z Malaise
French essayist Pierre Valentin identifies six factors driving Generation Z's mental health crisis, including digitalization, COVID lockdowns, uncertain futures, and ideological militantism.
Pierre Valentin, author of the newly released “Malaise dans la génération Z” published by Gallimard, has conducted an extensive analysis of why today’s youth appear to suffer at rates far exceeding those of earlier cohorts, including the baby boomer generation. According to Causeur, Valentin previously authored “Comprendre la révolution woke,” a foundational work examining progressive ideology, and runs the YouTube channel Transmission, which features intergenerational conversations.
Six Pathways to Isolation
Valentin’s research identifies digitalization as the first major culprit. Screen addiction and social media platforms create an illusion of genuine social connection while trapping young people in authentic loneliness, as Causeur reports. Parents frequently compound this problem by encouraging relative isolation in the name of overprotection.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents the second factor. Government-imposed lockdowns reinforced protective tendencies, transforming isolation into a civic virtue. Valentin notes that some young people continue wearing masks in public spaces as a symbol of this phenomenon, leaving many with pathological relationships to others.
What Valentin terms the “collapse of the future” constitutes the third element. This does not reflect simple pessimism—polling shows many young respondents self-identify as optimists. Rather, their personal futures have become unreadable. Prospects for stable employment, home ownership, and family formation have diminished dramatically, even as artificial intelligence threatens to upend employment markets further.
Ideology as Affliction
Ideological militantism forms the fourth factor. Woke and Islamo-leftist ideologies, ostensibly designed to advance social progress, actually serve as sources of distress for their adherents and propagators, according to Causeur. These movements encourage purely digital engagement rather than real-world public action, creating only superficial feelings of belonging.
Individualization represents the fifth pathway to malaise. Young citizens find themselves increasingly severed from traditional sources of communal life: religion, family joys and obligations, and conventional democratic institutions that, despite their imperfections, have proven their worth historically.
Psychotherapy culture completes Valentin’s analysis. Many suffering young people explain and justify their distress by claiming mental health afflictions. Diagnoses in this domain are exploding, and therapeutic vocabulary has invaded everyday language. Whether these problems are genuine or not, authority figures rarely dare question the authenticity of reported disorders, thereby encouraging avoidance of shared life responsibilities.
Return to the Womb
The general tendency emerging from these factors is a desire to return to the womb—a search for a maternal cocoon protecting the individual without paternal authority intervention, as Causeur reports.
Yet Valentin insists younger generations must not be abandoned. Acknowledging that not all young people face identical circumstances, he proposes solutions. First, paternal authority must return. This restoration, already supported by many citizens, appears almost inevitable but must not lead to excessive security measures or authoritarianism.
Second, society must rediscover the common values previous generations drew from religion. Among youth, a modest resurgence of religious belief is already occurring, particularly within the Catholic Church.
“Malaise dans la génération Z” functions both as analytical work illuminating current affairs and as a manifesto indicating the direction forward, according to the French outlet.
With information from Causeur
