THE "STRUGGLE" JUNKIES. THE MODERN PROTESTER IS STRUGGLING WITH STRUGGLE

THE DRUG IS STRUGGLE AND THE DEALERS ARE EVERYWHERE.

“We’re the middle children of history, man.”

“Our Great War is a spiritual war.”

“Our Great Depression is our lives.” TYLER DURDEN

A world where having a job mattered more than having a title. Where a roof over your head and food on the table were achievements, not assumptions. Where dignity was tied to effort, and gratitude was not considered naïve. A world in which parents worked, saved, and sacrificed with a simple hope: that their children would live better, safer, and happier lives than they themselves had known.

That hope was not foolish. In fact, by any honest measure, it succeeded.

The nation you helped build became one of the great success stories of modern history. Prosperity expanded. Hunger receded. Opportunity widened. Violence declined. Comfort, once rare, became common. What had been the privilege of the few became the baseline for the many. This was not an accident. It was the product of discipline, continuity, restraint, and faith in the future.

And yet, looking around now, many of you feel something that is difficult to reconcile with that success.

You see anger where there is abundance. Bitterness where there is safety. Hatred that seems untethered from deprivation or tyranny. You see institutions that once represented aspiration treated as symbols of oppression. You see young people who inherited stability speaking as though they had been robbed, and prosperity spoken of as moral corruption.

You are told this rage is justice.That this rejection is progress.That this contempt is enlightenment.

But it does not make sense.

How does a civilization that succeeded so thoroughly in reducing hardship produce such deep resentment toward the inheritance itself? How does a generation spared the struggles of survival come to define itself almost entirely by struggle? How does gratitude disappear so completely?

To understand what is happening now, it is not enough to say that the young are ungrateful, misled, or angry. Those are descriptions, not explanations. What we are witnessing is not a rebellion against hunger or poverty as earlier generations knew them. It is a rebellion against inheritance—against the idea that a stable, ordered world is something to be preserved rather than torn down.

In a strange and tragic way, the very success of the society you helped build removed the traditional sources of meaning that once guided people forward. When survival is no longer at stake, when material need is largely met, when danger is distant and abstract, the human impulse toward struggle does not disappear. It looks for a new outlet.

And it finds one.

Not in building, but in opposing.Not in stewardship, but in negation.Not in responsibility, but in grievance.

This is where “the struggle” enters—not as a tool to overcome hardship, but as a way of life. A permanent posture of resistance that supplies identity, purpose, and moral certainty to those who feel unmoored in a world that asks little of them materially but much of them inwardly.

The struggle, once a means to an end, becomes the end itself.

Those caught in it do not seek resolution, because resolution would force a question they have been trained not to answer: Who am I when there is nothing left to fight? Without conflict, the identity collapses. Without outrage, the meaning drains away.

This is how struggle becomes addictive.

At first, symbolic opposition is enough. Protests, slogans, denunciations. But like any addiction, tolerance builds. Yesterday’s outrage no longer delivers the same sense of purpose. Louder rhetoric is required. More confrontation. More spectacle. Eventually, disorder itself begins to feel righteous.

Peace becomes suspicious. Stability becomes suspect. Continuity is framed as complicity. And restraint—once understood as maturity—is rebranded as cowardice.

Older civilizations recognized this pattern by another name: hubris. Not pride in achievement, but contempt for limits. The belief that all inherited order is illegitimate, that judgment is oppression, and that destruction is morally clarifying.

In healthy societies, meaning is earned through work, family, mastery, sacrifice, and service to something that outlives the self. In decadent ones, meaning is seized through conflict. Anger becomes a substitute for virtue. Struggle replaces character. The fight itself becomes the proof of righteousness.

This inversion explains something many older Americans struggle to articulate: why collapse is not merely feared by some, but quietly welcomed. Why talk of “leveling the scales” is spoken with satisfaction, even as the institutions that feed, protect, and stabilize society are undermined.

What is being sought is not justice. It is nullification.

If everything burns, no one has to answer for what they failed to build. If the inheritance is destroyed, no one must explain why they squandered it. Collapse becomes a way of erasing obligation—to the past, and more importantly, to the future.

This is why violence, once unthinkable, becomes tolerable, then understandable, then justified. Once restraint is mocked long enough, excess does not remain symbolic. Language hardens. Rituals become obscene. Authority is despised for existing at all. Bloodshed is reframed as “revealing truth.”

This is not revolution in the noble sense. It is moral collapse masquerading as courage.

Every generation that destroys its inheritance tells itself the same lie: that it is clearing the ground for something better. History is merciless in its reply. Those who burn rarely build. They leave ruins for harder, more ruthless men to claim. The scales are never leveled. They are shattered. And the weakest always pay first.

The old myth of Atlantis was never a fantasy of equality lost beneath the waves. It was a warning. A story about a society that became great, prosperous, and ungrateful—and forgot that complexity requires discipline, freedom requires restraint, and abundance requires stewardship.

Civilizations do not fall because they are imperfect. They fall when they lose the will to preserve what makes improvement possible.

This movement is not rejecting the West as a place or a people. It is rejecting civilization itself—any civilization that demands self-control, responsibility, gratitude, and a duty to the unborn. That is why no alternative is ever offered. Only negation. Only struggle. Only fire.

The struggle junkie is not the enemy. He is the symptom.

The real question is whether enough people still remember that what they inherited was built with sacrifice—and that destroying it is not bravery, but a failure of stewardship. A society survives only so long as enough of its people believe it is worth saving, even when it is flawed.

To those of the younger generation who refuse to mistake noise for numbers and chaos for consensus: take heart. The destructive voices you see amplified daily are not the majority—they only appear so because outrage is rewarded and restraint is ignored. Most people still want order, dignity, opportunity, and a future worth handing down; they are simply quieter, busier, and less theatrical. Do not let media distortion convince you that decency is rare or that sanity is losing. It is not. The moral far outnumber the destroyers, and always have. Civilizations are not overturned by mobs alone—they fall when the steady decide they are alone and step aside. Keep your footing. Keep your standards. Refuse the lie that history belongs to the loudest. When serious people remain serious, when they stay engaged rather than intimidated, the illusion collapses. You can make a difference not by shouting, but by standing—patiently, visibly, and without apology—for what is worth preserving.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

— Jesus Christ, Gospel of Mark 8:36 (King James Version)