Going Numb and Letting it Rot

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A Tale of Two Superpowers

By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” —Galatians 6:9

“It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something,” writes Catherine Shannon. [https://substack.com/@catherineshannon/p-126203576]

She is describing an experience we can see for ourselves. The lack, or the loss, of the small but meaningful personal gestures that have always knitted together community and relationships. Not necessarily a community in the civil sense, but community in the personal sense. Shannon is bemoaning the lack of meaning that she ascribes to the younger generations today, even in giving flowers. Broadly speaking, she may well be describing anyone under fifty, both men and women—but speaking from the perspective a younger woman. She calls this “numbing out.”

You don’t send me flowers anymore.

Giving my wife flowers is something I used to do much more frequently. I don’t as much now I’ll admit. It’s something I regret, because it’s still as meaningful to her now as it was when we were young. Oddly, it took a perfect stranger to remind me of this. It’s not true that life just happens.

People are worn down, and there is a lack of “palpable ambition and vitality.” She writes, “there is a stunning lack of life force in the world.” Life force. How would any of us describe that?

We might ask Tony Robbins, who has been around a long time giving advice and counsel, and who is now the co-founder of a company actually called, Lifeforce.™ (Evidently, all it took to trademark it was by conjoining the two words.) His solution is to offer biomarker testing, blood testing, and continuous testing. This also includes a plan of nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress coaching, and FDA approved pharmaceuticals and hormone therapies. [https://www.mylifeforce.com/]

At a monthly membership of $149—after the initial membership fee of $349—this program may be beyond the reach of those of us who failed to achieve enough ambition to amass a meaningful personal fortune. [https://www.mylifeforce.com/landers/membership]

Shannon confesses it took her a long time to write about the absence of meaning in her life, because, as she describes it, “This whole phenomenon is, in a way, its own kind of absence.”

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While such a situation may sound familiar to some of us, it’s something which especially affects the Millennial and Gen Z cohort particularly hard. Nevertheless, I can see the truth in Shannon’s observations for myself. We are not alone in this issue, because…

so too, are the young people of Communist China also giving up on life. There, they have decided to just “Let it Rot.”

The Chinese term for this phenomenon is called bai lan. It started out as a gimmicky online fad, but in short order, bai lan has gained more and more traction among the country’s youth to become a kind of peaceful but effective rebellion against the CCP’s governance. It’s spread so much in fact, that it’s actually affecting both the nation’s economy and its future. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER8D2Pgr-BU]

What do these disparate developments have in common? A disengagement from life, an abandonment really, with no desire to find meaning because all they are seeing, hearing, and experiencing can never be found in a materialist paradigm.

Young people need the same thing all peoples have strived for down through the ages: transcendent truth. That, and at least the opportunity to seek some kind of meaning in the thing they prepared to do with their lives. If there is no transcendent truth, life might at least be bearable in their work and their careers.

While truth alone may not be the answer to finding real purpose in life, living a lie, and being forced to live out that lie, has produced something no one was really prepared for: complete apathy, almost worse than hopelessness.

For China, it began in 1980 with the infamous one child policy. Fearing overpopulation at a time of limited housing and resources, China forced families to have only one child. This would result in creating serious unintended consequences: There are now far more older people in China than young.

Xi Jinping

Then, Xi Jinping decided China’s tech giants were too powerful, and he cracked down hard. This resulted in a devaluation in hundreds of billions in dollars… and millions of high tech jobs as well. Many new job prospects disappeared, along with the massive private black market tutoring “industry” that the approved institutions couldn’t offer.

Now, China is facing what they feared 40 years earlier: the inability for its population to progress. The COVID pandemic only compounded the problem.

Likewise, in post COVID America, the slow economic recovery, massive, reckless government spending, and the strange new phenomenon of so many people slow to return to work and careers, has only now begun to show some signs of improvement.

We shouldn’t be surprised that communist dictators are terrible at managing people’s lives and livelihood. But how is our own federal government much better at it?

It should be obvious that the last four years have been more than a little turbulent all around the world, but if you’re a superpower, it’s been catastrophic.

Politically, it’s unprecedented. Indeed, no one can honestly cite any other time in modern American history quite like it. That’s because much of the change has been forced on us—not unlike China, and the change has created this “numbing out.” And, not unlike bai lan, it’s existentially affecting younger people more than any other cohort.

There is linkage with numbness and bai lan. So too with the West and China. It comes down to this: This is not a crisis of faith. It’s a crisis of no hope in anything at all.

In America, so many young people have no faith in anything. They are popularly referred to as the “nones” because when asked what faith or religion they associate with, they will say, “none.” So in what, then, does their hope lie? To whom do they turn? Themselves?

Anyone can see the problem with that.

“But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” —Isaiah 40:31

It’s no accident that our political elite make everything seem political, or politically driven. But curiously, the intelligentsia are now stumbling upon religious faith as if it’s some kind of phenomenon.

For example, the popular Jordan B. Petersen and super billionaire Elon Musk seem to be inching toward a faith in God. Even Richard Dawkins, one of the so-called “four horsemen” of the New Atheists and longtime implacable foe of Christianity, has admitted, “I call myself a cultural Christian.” Of course these intellectuals aren’t attending church or frequenting tent revivals, but they and many others are, at least, talking a lot more about it than ever before.

So what? To reach a dying generation requires the honest and sincere effort by true believers to demonstrate to such people a faithful life lived with hope, with a love that actually is supernatural: agape love. This is the true superpower.