Spend enough time online and it’s hard not to notice the cultural shift.

Younger generations are growing up in an environment where information is endless. Despite the abundance of content, there is evidence that we no longer struggle through the fog of complex questions – instead, we seek easy answers, flattening nuance. Many ideas gain traction mostly because they’re polarizing.

What we’re left with are half-baked, clickbait soundbites that lead to “salad bar extremism” – contradictory beliefs that lack coherence.

The result? For a growing number of Americans: outright nihilism.

In one multi-country survey conducted before the arrival of mainstream AI, more than half of young people said they believe humanity is doomed. Three-quarters said the future feels frightening.

Simply put: an entire generation is questioning whether there’s anything worth striving for.

The Lost Battleground of Ideas

I graduated from Rutgers University (Newark) in 2011.

Fun fact: At the time, it was recognized as the most “heterogeneous” student body in America.

I recall my classrooms being battlegrounds of ideas – Marxism vs. free markets in Econ, debates on affirmative action in Management, and even heated discussions about violence in the Quran during Middle Eastern Literature.

In general, college felt like a place where my biases were regularly challenged.

That said, I fear that spirit has faded.

Disagreement, once treated as an opportunity to learn, is now treated as a personal affront – or worse, a threat.

A younger college grad relative once told me, “words are violence” – a comment that gave me pause and felt like the opposite of the ethos captured by Voltaire:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The recent killing of political commentator Charlie Kirk underscores this drift.

Regardless of where one stands on his views, the tragedy is not political – it’s cultural. It reflects how disagreement has shifted from debate to dehumanization, and how we’ve lost the muscle of arguing ideas without attacking people.

Audit Your Inputs

The good news: none of us needs to surrender our minds to the chaos.

Just as our bodies reflect the food we eat, our minds reflect the information we consume. Too many of us treat our information diet like junk food:

• cheap
• addictive
• engineered to keep you hooked

Algorithms don’t care about our wellbeing; they care about our attention. Left unchecked, they hijack our biology and convince us that doomscrolling is a civic duty.

Remember – we have agency over our inputs!

We can:

• Curate our feeds and unfollow accounts that drain more than they give.
• Set boundaries on when and how we consume news.
• Balance passive scrolling with long-form reading, podcasts, and real conversations.

Attention is finite. Spend it wisely.

From Macro Anxiety to Micro Acts of Love

There will always be macro events beyond our control – wars, financial meltdowns, elections, global crises and beyond.

Over-indexing our emotional bandwidth on any of these only breeds (at best) helplessness and (at worst) anger.

Where we do have control is at the micro level. And paradoxically, this is where the most meaning is found:

• Saying good morning to a passerby.
• Complimenting a stranger.
• Checking in on a friend.
• Going out of your way to make someone else’s day a little brighter.

These may seem small, but they are acts of resistance against nihilism.

They remind us that it really does feel better to give than to receive. The more kindness we put into the world, the more we’ll see it reflected back.

A Better Scorecard

The antidote isn’t to unplug completely or retreat into ignorance (though a short-form information “fast” may be worth trying).

It’s to moderate inputs, reclaim attention, and measure life not by how much outrage we absorb but by how much kindness we create.

Noise will always exist. The choice is how we respond: with nihilism, or with love.