Based entirely off my kids and their teenage friends that come through my house (which is to say a significant amount of them), I can say that woke is dead. It feels like there was a kind of micro generation, maybe from about age 20-35, for whom these values still show up, but for all the youth that hang out here, precisely zero of them worship the sacred cows of the ideological progressives. The teens are cynical in the extreme, and ridicule freely and openly the values of the extreme progressives.

But as they live without sacred cows, so too do they live without the sacred. Increasingly, though, I see them yearning for meaning and for truth, but don’t know where to find it. We’ve torn down or eaten from the inside or simply abandoned the institutions that might guide them to find some meaning outside of themselves (the university and religious institutions). Where do they look? They’re not brainwashed, most of them, by the internet, being cynical and skeptical of that, too. They want meaning in a lost world, and faith in a faithless one. Strangely, the Church is alluring to them because they have no baggage attached to it, having had no contact with it for a generation or two. To be religious seems weirdly punk rock.

Am I the only parent/educator finding this? Curious to check the pulse of the 12-18 year olds in places other than the hangout vibe of my own basement.