Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

Addiction to thanatophilia among some young people generates concern

Francisco Miraval

Every year, around this time, I like to repeat something I learned many years ago: I don’t care about people who once a year wear a costume to pretend to be a monster, but I am disturbed by those monsters among us posing as human beings day after day.

Those monsters pretending to be human wear such convincing and effective customs that we blindly take them as “good people” when, in fact, they are constantly and systematically dedicated to only one task: destroying our hopes, our efforts, and even our future. It seems to me that a growing number of young people are being affected by that expression of thanatophilia (addiction to death.)

For example, five students were expelled from their school in Colorado after creating a social media site promoting neo-Nazi ideas and warning they were about to kill people from different minorities. Local police reports say one of the founders of the group committed suicide to show his extreme commitment to an extremist group.

At another school, also in Colorado, two teenagers were expelled from school and interrogated by local police after authorities discovered they were planning an attack of some sort against their classmates. And I read about the case of a local teenager who tried to kill himself because of a relatively minor discussion with her boyfriend.

After the massacre at Columbine School (near Denver) in April 1999, the thanatophilia among teenagers was made evident to everybody in our society. Obviously, only a handful of young people choose death (their own or other’s). But, it seems to me (with no basis on any scientific research) that number is growing.

I read some time ago that we work so hard to leave a better world for our children that we do very little to leave better children for the world. Amid our confusion about our priorities, we have taken the nihilism proper of the end of modernity and of postmodernity to such an extreme that for some people death is the only possible alternative.

Yet, at the same time, young people at other places in the world, places where death is an everyday occurrence and life is never easy, struggle every day with all their might to live one more day, keep their faith and hope, and build brick after brick not just a better future, but a different future no based on the past, a future where they are also welcomed.

I wonder if the devaluation of life many young people express - mostly in “First World” countries- has to do with having everything or almost everything already resolved so when a relatively minor problem arises that problem grows to such a proportion that it seems only death can “solve” it.

Then, monsters pretending to be people and calling themselves parents, teachers, preachers, counselors, or therapists, unmask themselves to show their obscene monstrosity. But people, far from turning away from such a repugnant sight, enjoy each tragedy. That is scarier than any custom or horror movie.

Go Back