One of the reasons young people struggle so much with mental health nowadays is because there is a crisis of authority in society - no one actually tells them how to live well, with any suggestion of a normative or “right” way of doing things being deemed problematic

Instead they have nothing to guide them except deceptive inner monologues and colourful infographics made by San Francisco designers with no life experience telling them “you do you”, “it’s okay to be lazy”, “it’s okay to be selfish” on their instagram feeds

And so people end up making mistakes and suffering consequences that could have been prevented had they been given actual advice acquired over centuries of culture and tradition (Scruton’s “answers that have been discovered to enduring questions”)

But tradition alone is not enough - it needs to be embodied. We need teachers, counsellors, priests, etc. who are personally invested in our self-betterment and can tell us when we are doing things wrong from a place of love

Insisting that people will be happy if they just do whatever they feel like is not loving. It’s also a sentiment that has so obviously been exploited by capitalism since the 60s: a society that promotes unrestrained self-actualisation is the ideal consumer society