After years of depressing statistics about the decline of churchgoing and religiosity, news of last year’s “Quiet Revival” felt like a long-awaited good-news story. Based on YouGov polling data, and turned into a report by the Bible Society, it was especially pertinent to my thesis that we are seeing a surprising rebirth of belief in God in the secular West.

But secular campaigners and some religious journalists soon pointed out that the remarkable figures for increased churchgoing did not reflect actual attendance numbers reported by church denominations. Similarly, the 2025 British Social Attitudes survey directly contradicted the data — showing a continued decline in church attendance across all age groups.

The picture was complicated. But the Bible Society continued to stand by its report. YouGov was a reputable polling company, used and trusted by hundreds of organizations, including secular organizations like Humanists UK. The Bible Society had sought and been given repeated reassurance of the quality of the data.

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Then came the bombshell. The Bible Society this week announced they were withdrawing the Quiet Revival report, having discovered that YouGov “failed to activate key quality control technologies that protect the sample from a wide range of errors and this undermines the reliability of the result”. It appears that the survey had been contaminated by bogus respondents.

This is an important wake-up call: that we should all be very wary of putting our faith in surveys and polls, especially when they align with our deepest desires. Confirmation bias runs deep. As a Christian I’ve been guilty of it, as are people on the other side of the aisle.

In fairness, the Bible Society has owned up to what went wrong, and will no doubt think carefully about how it publicizes any future research. For the moment, a dose of humility and introspection is in order, and perhaps an opportunity to build some bridges with critics whose concerns turned out to be fully justified.

Even so, the danger with a U-turn of this magnitude is that it can also lead to errors in the opposite direction. Humanists UK, freshly vindicated by the reversal, now states on its website: “We need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain.”

That statement is true. Yet it doesn’t do justice to the actual picture of what’s happening both here and in Europe. “Revival” is not the word we should ever have used for what’s happening — but “rebirth” does still feel appropriate. 

The same day that the Bible Society’s report was retracted, Le Figaro, one of France’s leading newspapers, published a full-page article on the continuing rise in adult baptisms. For the past two years, this famously secular country has seen the largest number of adult converts to Catholicism in living memory. This year’s Easter vigil is expected to set a fresh record, as over 20,000 people enter the Church.

Nor is France an outlier. Spain is reporting a similar trend. Something unexpected is also happening in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark; all reporting an uptick of interest, especially among young men. Likewise, many Orthodox parishes around Europe are dealing with a boom in young catechumens.

In the UK, meanwhile, the Catholic diocese of Westminster is about to see its largest intake of new converts for 15 years, while other parts of the country are recording similar spikes. Attendance at Alpha courses, an introduction to Christianity run by many churches across the UK, has also risen sharply in the past two years.

Commercial metrics tell the same story. Christian music streaming on Spotify has surged in recent years and, against an otherwise stagnant book market, Bible sales in Britain are at a historic high, rising from £2.69 million to over £6.3 million from 2019-25.

None of these figures amounts to a “revival”. But they are reliable data points and indicate that something is happening. 

How that plays out in future church-attendance statistics remains to be seen. At this point, my best guess is that any new converts are not yet offsetting the number of older religious people who are dying. That means the church is still shrinking, but that the decline itself may be slowing. This is underscored by figures from the Church of England. Recent modest growth comes in the context that Covid lockdowns had already decimated churchgoing. In the end, though, this is about more than mere numbers. 

A “vibe shift” is a hard thing to quantify — but there’s been an undoubted change in the way people publicly talk about faith in the past few years. That’s perhaps best captured by the list of influential converts that have popped up recently, including the former atheist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her husband the historian Niall Ferguson, and the sociologist Michael Murray. Even Prince William, after years of speculation about what the future head of the Church of England actually believes, has confirmed a “quiet faith”.

Of course, many of these celebrity personalities lean Right in their outlook. Likewise, it’s no secret that the religious vibe shift is overlapping with a wider political vibe shift. The result is sometimes dubbed “Christian Nationalism”. 

Yet whenever Christianity gets into bed with politics — either of the Left or Right — it’s a recipe for disaster. Being co-opted by cynical political actors like Tommy Robinson would be a far greater catastrophe for Christianity than a flawed report.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t be surprised when social tumult creates a messy picture. Religious renewals of the past have always been bred of cultural disruptions and mixed motives. Whether or not we approve of the Tommy Robinson crowd, the common thread is that people are searching for identity.

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The default secular humanism on offer today has manifestly failed to deliver on its promises. We are being atomized by technologies that are programmed to polarize us. AI is proving a dangerous substitute for real human relationships, while the identities and ideologies promoted by social media have created a generation of disillusioned, distracted and depressed young people. Little wonder many have started looking for a better story.

That’s why, as I’ve met with vicars, church ministers and youth leaders over the past three years, I’ve kept hearing the same thing: that spiritual hunger is leading more and more seekers to their doors. Besides, if a Christian revival ever truly gets underway, we won’t need a spreadsheet to tell us. It’ll be obvious. 

It’s probably apocryphal. Lewis writes that he “heard many versions of this vignette”, which was “all over Cambridge in a week, Oxford in two”. But it has a deeper kind of truth: one society’s elite, wearing a grin that might be a grimace, bowing to another’s. Because when the City of London was deregulated in the Eighties, culminating in the “Big Bang” of 27 October 1986, when a whole load of trading restrictions were wiped away at once, Britain’s brightest (or at least, most prestigiously educated) graduates put their noses in the air, and sniffed.

They followed the smell of money to the City, which was soaking up both the investment and the working culture of American firms. In-person trading and a clubby, old-school-tie vibe were replaced with walls of computer screens and punishing office hours. Britain’s elite sloughed off its ambivalence to moneymaking and paternalistic sense of public service, and joined a carnival of pinstripes, braces, champagne and mobile phones as big as bricks.

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Neither of those qualities have grown back. Banks, consultancies and corporate law firms still take a heavy tithe of Oxbridge graduates, even the airy-fairy humanities ones. But we’re not in the Eighties and Nineties anymore, when finance’s power to shape the world eclipsed that of democratic politics. Rather than being high-rolling, cork-popping masters of the universe, the modern banker is a sober, industrious creature. Money is not their liberator; it is something they need in abundance just to keep their head above water in London’s property market. The glamour has died but the drudgery of the day-to-day work remains. As once-solid upper-middle-class professions (teachers, doctors, etc) are being pushed into precarity, finance is in turn becoming a solid, even stolid, upper-middle-class profession. Banking is boring now.

When Donald Trump returned to the White House this year, much was made of a “vibe shift” in American finance back to old-school, red-blooded capitalism and its attendant cultural values. A bull market bellowed, and fig leaves of progressivism were blithely abandoned. JP Morgan swapped DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) for DOI (“diversity, opportunity and inclusion”). Deloitte told staff working on US government contracts to remove their pronouns from their email bios. “I feel liberated,” one “top banker” told the FT. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”

To be a fly on the wall of that banker’s office during Trump’s tariff shenanigans. Was the freedom to shout slurs across the trading floor worth the biggest stock market fall since Covid? Though the bond market might have disciplined the President into putting a 90-day freeze on most of his tariffs, he still freestyles market-upending proposals in public: a 25% duty on iPhones and 50% on all EU goods, at time of writing, but there’ll be a new batch by the time of your reading. The business world is locked in a perpetual frenzy of second-guessing. These days, “finance is obviously subordinate to politics”, says James*, a finance worker around 30, who I meet in a west London pub one listless Sunday afternoon to get a sense of the modern reality of things.

Our cultural conception of finance is a bit out of date, partly thanks to Industry, the TV series that follows a bunch of young finance guys and gals as they drink, snort, fuck and occasionally trade their way through London. The series’ creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both worked in finance in the early 2010s and have always maintained that the on-screen hedonism they cook up is generally accurate. But James says that in four years in banking, he has “never, ever heard [of] or seen anyone doing drugs in the office”. Even putting aside the fact you’d get “absolutely fucked up” by HR if you were caught, “no amount of coke can make you feel better” if you’re working 100 hours a week, as young finance foot soldiers typically are.

Which is probably just as well: he says that colleagues around 50, who very much lived by the “work hard, play hard” principle in the first decades of their careers, have noticeably more chronic health conditions (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc) than other professionals their age. Instead, finance’s ultra-competitive ethos has made it the ideal host for infection by the wellness craze. People run half-marathons at the weekend, and wear smart watches that track their health data rather than Rolexes.

This is a world almost entirely alien to the one that Jacob Phillips entered in 2000, aged 21. He hadn’t gone to university, and fell into one of the City’s “parasitic” ancillary industries, media monitoring for financial PR firms. It had a “rough-edged, Thatcherite kind of mindset”, he says. There were no meaningful HR processes. It was difficult to fit in without drinking at lunchtime. On Fridays, “it’d be pretty normal for people to be passing a wrap around and popping into the toilet towards the end of the day”. His bosses “were completely open about the fact that they only wanted to employ young people, because you can push them around”.

Finance is still powered by young people pouring their evenings and nights into numbing, repetitive work, but they are not quite as docile about the arrangement as before. In 2021, junior Goldman Sachs employees launched a high-profile campaign to carve out a sliver of guaranteed free time away from the lair of the vampire squid. James, similarly, says that Gen Z staff are “a lot more open to complain to seniors than we ever were”, which helps keep upper management in check even if it does mean his direct underlings are “very whiny” at times. Sarah*, another banker a few years into her career, sees a distinct culture shift with new Gen Z recruits. “They are very good at their jobs,” she says, “but don’t sign up to the narrative that you need to get in before the boss does and leave after.” This, she thinks, is down to there being “less scope to make lots of money over the next 20 years”. If you can get less out, you’ll put less in — it’s not an equation you need a quant for.

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This is the latest chapter in what’s been a deeply generational story. Along with wider cultural shifts, there’s an underappreciated and very specific factor driving finance’s death of largesse: banks, private equity houses and the rest becoming publicly listed companies. Goldman and BlackRock in 1999; Lazard in 2005; Evercore in 2006; Blackstone in 2007; KKR in 2010; Carlyle in 2012; TPG in 2022; CVC in 2024. These listings made a small group of senior partners fantastically wealthy, but invited in far more scrutiny from shareholders and the wider public. Salaries and bonuses have to be justified to outsiders; tightening expense accounts bounce employees from business-class flights to economy.

Essentially, boomers who had their fun in the buoyant Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s decided to cash out at the expense of their juniors. Where have we heard that one before? It’s a mirror of the generational distribution of wealth in society at large — in fact, the dynamics are even more distorted, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. Those who started work by about 2000, and so achieved a degree of seniority before the 2008 crash, are rich rich. Anyone younger is merely very wealthy. The guys in their 50s and 60s “come from a very different world”, says James, and the best anecdotes, like buying more than one Ferrari in a single year, are usually theirs. So why wouldn’t their Zoomer juniors quiet quit? The sadomasochistic contract written down the spine of the industry — work like a dog for me, and one day you’ll be as rich as me — is provably false.

Let’s get this in proportion: no one here is on less than six figures, and if you do well, your salary will probably start with a 2 or 3 by the time you’re 30. But the cost of London property, plus the sky-high cost of everything else, leave psychological scars that embed an “upper middle-class mindset where you are very rational with the money”, says James. “I know people who take home over a million pounds a year and absolutely stress over the temperature at which their flat is set up. If I earned a million this year, my lifestyle wouldn’t change at all.” People, in general, aren’t flashy — what’s the finance bro obsession with outdoorsy brands like Patagonia and Arc’teryx if not a performative disavowal of finery and frippery? And there’s always the axe hanging overhead. “Banking workforces are constantly getting squeezed,” says Sarah, “so there’s concern the money train won’t last forever, which holds people back from spending.”

When Phillips was in the City, he says there was a pervading, “subtle sense that markets rule everything”. He left after five years, in 2006, and has since become a writer and academic. But when he first read the accelerationist writer Nick Land, his mind was taken back to his old career. “It really rang true with this sense there that the market was this strange, complicated, sinister, untameable beast which could ravage anything in its way. You either rode the tiger or you’d be destroyed by the tiger.”

Now, “governments matter”, says James. “What we had in the Nineties and 2000s was an anomaly.” In a funny way, we’ve gone full circle. Before the Thatcherite revolution, finance was a stable, comfortable career. In Liar’s Poker, his book about his years at Salomon Brothers, Lewis meets a minor City grandee who tells him he disapproves of workdays longer than eight hours, because “you then arrive at the office in the morning with the same thoughts you left with late the night before”.

Work patterns are now very different, but finance is, once again, an industry where the overriding attraction is stability rather than possibility. You’ve heard the stats, or a variation on them, before: in 2002, the house price to median earnings ratio in London was 6.9; in 2023 it was 11.9. For day pupils, average private school fees as a percentage of the median national salary have increased from 30.6% in 1999 to 48.2% in 2024. If you want an upper-middle-class life, can you afford not to go into banking, or similar industries like corporate law and consulting? This leads to a vicious cycle — prices go up as London becomes more and more globalized and financialized — and a brain drain, as all the pin-sharp Oxbridge STEM graduates are tempted away from the laboratory. If the government can make a meaningful dent in the housing crisis, and build the Oxford-Cambridge Arc to let loose Britain’s life-science capabilities, maybe there’s hope of all this human capital flowing elsewhere. But as many politicians have found, breaking the tight, wrinkly grip of boomer “stakeholders” is no light task.

James, as we reach the dregs of our Morettis, is candid. “If I was born in our parent’s generation, I would have probably not worked in finance. I enjoy being quite comfortable, having a fat savings buffer, but back then, if a London Zone One flat was £300,000, £200,000, I would’ve happily worked in a general corporate job — maybe even marketing [or] journalism. But because we are where we are today, and how uncertain the next 10, 20 years look like, I want to absolutely max out on income.” It’s hard to blame him, or all the other bright young things in their down-padded gilets streaming through the grey dawn into central London every morning.

*Names have been changed

I used to think that this character was a staple of fiction because he was too ridiculous to exist in real life — but that was before I became aware of Laura Loomer. Loomer is a 31-year-old self-described “investigative journalist” who rose to a narrow sort of fame as the architect of political stunts that combine the ethos of Project Veritas with the subtle elegance of MTV’s Jackass. Her first foray into the genre was a video in which the then-21-year-old Loomer secretly recorded herself asking authorities at her university for help forming a student organization in support of ISIS.

The video itself caused little stir, because it wasn’t actually all that exciting — but it did get Loomer suspended and charged with a third-degree felony for recording someone without his consent, which is pretty much typical of her oeuvre.

Over the years, Loomer has periodically broken into the mainstream news cycle with some stunt which is ostensibly meant to own the libs, but which so invariably backfires that it’s hard to believe she isn’t doing it on purpose. Like any self-respecting buffoon, Loomer’s various attempts at political engagement — from storming the stage of a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, to handcuffing herself to the door of Twitter’s headquarters, to her two failed runs for electoral office — tend to draw less attention to her cause, whatever it is, than to Loomer herself, squawking with righteous indignation as she’s escorted out by security guards.

The thing is, this was fine. You might not like Loomer (indeed, most people — even those on her side — seem not to be fans), but like the Wile E. Coyotes and Cosmo Kramers of the world, she was doing her part to keep the cultural ecosystem in balance, even if it was just by acting as a living signpost for the place where absurdity tips over into irrelevance. It takes all kinds to make a world, after all, including the buffoons — who are harmless enough, as long as they keep to the sidelines, where their antics may make for an entertaining spectacle but they can’t hurt anybody but themselves. In the circus of American politics, people like Loomer were understood as one of those novelty acts you’d find in a dilapidated tent furthest from the midway, hanging out in between the guy who bites the head off a live bat and the off-duty clowns smoking cigarettes in their underwear.

At least, that was the understanding. But lately, one can’t help noticing that Loomer seems to be getting awfully close to the political mainstage, and awfully cozy with some of its biggest players. Loomer has not only been the subject of approving commentary by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X, where she has upwards of a million followers, but Donald Trump himself welcomed her to the White House earlier this month — not just as a supporter, but as an adviser. Loomer reportedly waltzed into the Oval Office bearing a list of National Security Council members who she identified as insufficiently loyal to the President; some days later, several of those same officials were fired.

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Trump claimed that the proximity of these two events was a coincidence, which seems unlikely, but also doesn’t really matter. The extent of Loomer’s influence is for other people to debate; what’s inarguable is that she has been an unwavering supporter of Trump’s political agenda for over a decade, and that for whatever reason (but probably that one), he likes having her around. And in this, Loomer’s White House welcome is also emblematic of a broader feature of the second Trump administration, which lately seems to double as a jobs program for the kind of troublesome person whose antisocial tendencies would ordinarily disqualify them from working at a Cinnabon, let alone in a position of government authority.

Consider former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who is currently serving as the Secretary of Defense despite allegations of sexual assault and a documented history of problematic day-drinking. His own mother even called him “despicable”. Or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who went from conspiracy theorizing about vaccines and leaving bear carcasses in public parks to heading the Department of Health and Human Services. Consider the Department of Government Efficiency, run by an intemperate billionaire whose hobbies include space exploration, internet trolling, and impregnating his female followers for sport — or the official White House X account, which currently appears to be run by a 12-year-old edgelord who someone hired directly from the bowels of 4Chan.

Some of this is not new. Trump has always attracted a coterie of loyalists as ridiculous as they are devoted, from Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell to that guy who sells pillows on infomercials. But the people who surround the POTUS now are something more than mere fans: this is a professional coalition of the aggressively undignified. Many of them hold positions of authority within the Federal government; some of these no doubt have top-secret security clearances.

Most important, all of them occupy a position, official or otherwise, that was previously held by someone significantly more competent — and this is perhaps the biggest difference between Trump’s first and second terms. As chaotic as that first term was, it was at least somewhat mitigated by the comforting sense that the President’s advisors were serious people, even if the president himself was not, and that they would form a protective barrier between the country and its impulsive Commander in Chief.

Today, the serious people have left the building; in their place, the President has sent in the clowns. And even if you believe (as I do) that this is a problem but not a catastrophe — that the Constitution was designed to withstand precisely the sort of assault represented by someone like Trump, and as such will always be more powerful than any one tyrannical executive’s desire to subvert it — it is nevertheless true that things feel different. A White House full of sycophantic buffoons will necessarily lack the gravitas of one that is buffoon-free, and the downstream effects of this on the culture and discourse are already observable.

Clearly, not everyone is bothered by this. For Trump’s most fervent supporters, a world in which the official White House account tweets Studio Ghibli memes of deportees weeping in handcuffs is just another encouraging sign of the much-heralded vibe shift — even if one can’t help but notice that the only thing shifting is the proverbial face-stamping boot from Orwell’s 1984, from the Left’s foot to the Right’s. As such, those in favor of our new authority figures tend to respond to criticism with the same dismissive scorn as the most sanctimonious scolds of the woke era: we’re trying to change the world here, and you’re complaining about the tone? As the meme goes, what did you think Making America Great Again looked like? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

And yet the tone, the vibe, the fundamental dignity of the office, are all things that matter. And not only that: this is the one sphere in which the American president enjoys virtually limitless power — where he can hold court like a king. The Supreme Court may constrain Trump’s ability to make policy or issue orders, or a successor may reverse them. The culture, on the other hand, has no such guardrails for those politicians who are capable of corrupting it.

It’s unsettling to realize what this may portend for the next four years — and how much the workings of our government rely on the willingness of officials to honor not just the letter of the law, but all the unwritten social norms that signal politeness and the intention to play well with others. And while Congress can decide who gains admission to the president’s cabinet, it gets no say over who sits at his lunch table. Trump can fill the seats next to him with fools and flatterers; he can invite the Laura Loomers of the world to picnic on the White House lawn every weekend. He shouldn’t, of course. But he can. The uncomfortable truth is that the Constitution has nothing to say about decorum, except insofar as it enumerates the freedom of the American people, including the president, to be as indecorous as they want.

And while I’m not personally ready to panic about this, I also understand why some people are. Donald Trump may not be able to destroy the country, but he can definitely transform the milieu in which we conduct our national business for the worse; he can definitely drag the discourse down into a mire of vulgarity until the only people still willing to engage in politics are the ones who love to roll around in the mud as much as he does. American democracy is resilient. Our social norms, on the other hand, are only as durable as people’s willingness to sustain them — and once shattered, they aren’t easily replaced. And it is this, the replacement of propriety with coarse buffoonery, which I suspect will be the true legacy of the current president. I also suspect it will be a regrettably durable one.

On the day he resigned, August 10, 2021, Cuomo was famously photographed, coffee cup in hand, entering a helicopter alongside his daughter Michaela. His mayoral campaign launch visually called back to that moment. It’s a testament to how rapidly the cultural atmosphere has shifted: though Cuomo remained largely unapologetic, at one point blaming his handsiness with women on his Italian heritage, he did resign. Now, a little more than three years later, the ex-governor is more brazen, expecting forgiveness for his sexual lapses.

He isn’t alone. In 2017, the comedian Louis CK was accused of masturbating in front of female comedians. But since being canceled, he has toured the country, appeared on several podcasts, and sold out a show at Madison Square Garden. Today, tickets to his upcoming Los Angeles performance are going for several thousands of dollars. #MeToo, it seems, is sunsetting along with the woke era.

It would be tempting to look at this turn of events and conclude that #MeToo failed completely. It would also be wrong: the movement succeeded in dethroning big-time, violent abusers and in raising barriers to the sort of harassment that used to be routine in many workplaces. However, the path to redemption created by the movement has been less than satisfactory, especially for accused men without the benefit of money and fame.

The re-election of Donald Trump and events since his inauguration have confirmed the decline of wokeness. For many people, that means no longer living in fear of the Left’s lifestyle and language police. While #MeToo is in some ways a different phenomenon from woke, the two were blended in the public mind, as part of the same culture of accusation and interrogation. But no more. Comebacks like Louis CK’s and Cuomo’s will proliferate amid the vibe shift, even as the collateral of the #MeToo movement is still settling.

Seven years since the movement first emerged, the men accused in #MeToo fall into three categories: the imprisoned, the forgotten, and the forgiven. Those who have been accused, tried, and convicted of the worst crimes, such as Harvey Weinstein with his numerous assault charges, have been managed and dealt with. The forgotten include men who weren’t all that relevant to begin with, like the actor Scott Baio; men only relevant to niche corners, like the former Paris Review editor Lorin Stein; or men we don’t even recall being accused of in the first place, like Morgan Freeman. However, it’s the third category, those whom we’ve “forgiven” — or at least, those men allowed back into the public eye, men who continue to be afforded opportunities, visibility, and money — that we continue to reckon with.

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Most of the biggest villains of #MeToo, those accused of drugging and raping women, remain either in custody or entirely shunned from society. We felt the ripple effects of those men in more recent exposés about Neil Gaiman and Sean “Diddy” Combs. But for some of the rest — those who perhaps made unwelcome advances upon women, made them uncomfortable, exploited their position of power for otherwise consensual sex, etc. — the cultural and political gates have re-opened.

When we look to how our culture has reintegrated men whose transgressions have largely been nonviolent and semi-consensual, perhaps we can begin to trace #MeToo as a broader project, one that remains unfinished. As a movement, #MeToo has succeeded thus far in reorienting how we view both perpetrators of sexual violence and victims. It is indeed harder now for men in positions of power to quietly continue hurting people thanks to that power. For this, #MeToo should be considered a triumph.

Which brings us to the downsides of #MeToo. In some cases, these have been either been overestimated or largely remedied — with some critical exceptions. There is a dominant cultural narrative among #MeToo’s critics that the movement’s biggest impact has been in making young men more fearful of approaching women and pursuing romance. According to Gallup data, however, this has not panned out: young men report being unaffected by #MeToo, while the share of women who “often or sometimes” worry about being sexually assaulted has risen 15%.

As Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life explained: “#MeToo effectively undercut victim-blaming narratives that perpetuated the idea that sexual assault is the result of poor decisions, miscommunication, or unlucky happenstance…. In the wake of #MeToo, there was recognition that sexual assault and harassment were pervasive problems in American society. Many have come to believe it could happen to anyone”.

This, too, is a triumph, but one that requires more interrogation. Women are now more fearful of sexual assault. Are they right to be? Has the awareness element of the campaign made us any safer? Are we ultimately any less likely to be assaulted, and are those who commit assaults any more likely to be caught?

Our legal system rarely convicts rapists, and reporting your boss for sexual misconduct is very different for someone without the resources of some of Weinstein’s famous accusers like Gwyneth Paltrow. But the kind of justice found outside the legal system, in the social isolation of being cancelled, has had awful consequences for normal people, like the Oxford student Alexander Rogers, who took his life after being ostracized for a bad sexual encounter.

Stars with the platform to do so can rebuild their image. In certain cases, like Louis CK’s, their cancellation can even serve as material for their redemption. A politician like Cuomo, meanwhile, will no doubt persuade some voters to overlook his personal shortcomings to save their city from its crises. Whether Cuomo has a good case to make in this regard is a different question. As it is, his pitch amounts to: forget about my personal lousiness — Gotham is going to hell.

Not everyone is so lucky. #MeToo traveled a long way beyond the rich and famous. In our anti-woke era, we have mostly turned away from the routine of cancellation the movement brought out, but the instinct from which it emerged — our desire to uncover and arbitrate the most personal details of someone’s life and to place them under moral scrutiny accordingly — endures. It isn’t just women of Hollywood who experienced sexual violence or threats of it, and it isn’t just famous people whom we place under this culture of surveillance. Perhaps celebrities can be uncancelled now. But what about the nameless?

There has been important research done by social scientists, most prominently Jonathan Haidt, outlining the catastrophic effects of social media on teens, particularly on teen girls. I am not here to argue that the smartphone has been a net positive or even a neutral technology in the life of teens. As a teacher, I can see that it is bad for young people, as it is for me. But the past year has made me far less anxious about the cell phone’s capacity to make teens anxious. The “vibe shift” we’ve all noticed, moving away from extreme progressive ideologies towards more “populist” (popular) attitudes, has made the ubiquity of social media far less worrying. Youth culture has changed. What was once cool on social media is now cringe. These days you wouldn’t be seen dead posting social justice infographics. And therapy talk, thank god, is no longer a trend. This has happened quicker than social scientists might have been able to collate in data points, perhaps. I am not blaming them for that. Teen trends happen in an instant.

To understand teen trends, we need to remember that the teen is essentially a pack animal. Movies since The Breakfast Club, which is now 40 years old, have told us what the packs are: the jocks, the princesses, the nerds, the rockers, and the weirdos. Teens attach themselves to their group. Even the loners are part of a group: the NPC one. Ever since Judd Nelson courted Molly Ringwald, we’ve been told to break down the barriers, move outside our cliques, see people for who they are on the inside. It never occurs to us that the groups are formed in the first place because teens do see each other as they are on the inside, and that the groups are formed accordingly.

The truth is that the teenagers like their groups. They have very little interest in moving outside of them or abolishing them. The groups give them a sense of belonging, and they like to belong. Belonging helps one to feel less alone, and it enables a teen to understand and form judgments about the world around her. The teen typically adopts internally the external markers of her group so that she can find a way to fit into the world. We have been told that identity, particularly gender identity, is socially constructed. But of course it is! Teenage years of development are difficult and confusing. The social groups offer one a sense of coherence about the world, and a template for forming oneself to fit it. The teens conform to each other; even (or maybe especially) the “non-conformists” conform to one another.

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By Marilyn Simon

That the teenager wants to fit into the world is a good thing, and a necessary one. As the teen fits into the world she also changes it so that it fits her. The Gen Z teen is doing this playfully, for instance, with language. They’ve resurrected old words, “cooked”, and made up new ones, “opp” and “slaps”. They break words apart and put them back together: “unalive”. These words spread quickly, thanks to social media, and using the words signals belonging to a culture — with the extra caveat that the new words all must be said with just the right amount of ironic self-mockery. The ultimate code for belonging to teen culture is to signal that it’s lame to look desperate to belong to teen culture.

Their language games and early adaptability to new words show that the teen is both a natural rebel and a natural conformist. Almost universally girls want first to fit in with other girls. The teen girl moves in a pack, and she thinks with her pack. And while it is true that during the teen years girls start to become focused on boys, their main focus remains, almost universally, on their acceptance with other girls.

What the teenaged girl wants most is to be judged as an insider by the other teens in her group. She wants to feel secure enough in some girls’ approval so that they can collectively give disapproval to other girls, as well as to the guys. In other words, she wants to feel good about herself, which happens by evaluating herself, her values and personality, relative to her peers and to find them wanting. This might make being a teen girl sound like an extended Mean Girls movie or something, but I don’t think it really is. We all judge other people, all the time. (Many readers no doubt judged me as a bad mother when I said I enjoy sharing social media with my kids. I am not hurt if you have.) Judgment is necessary. Our judgments aren’t just our values, but also the way we experience our values. Through judgments the norms of the group become the feelings of the girl. The girl-packs help teens make sense of this and socialize them into it.

Over the past decade or so, the rebel-conformist qualities of the teen girl have coalesced in the conformity of the non-conforming teen. The “rebel” in her fights oppressions, combats “norms”, and is an “individual”. But she is an easily recognizable stereotype, subject to what Matthew B Crawford describes as “the sameness of mass solipsism”. The mass-conforming non-conformists have held undeniable power over teen culture, and their influence have coincided with the advent of social media. We know that social media coincided with a rapid increase of teenage anxiety, mental illness, and general unhappiness. But it also coincided with peak MeToo, peak cancel culture, peak therapy culture, peak social justice culture, and peak trauma-dumping culture.

I am not here to diagnose correlation or causation. The rise of social media and the rise of teenage unhappiness and anxiety are a kind of chicken-and-egg phenomenon; I don’t know what came first. But I do know that the kinds of messages coming through social media have changed, and that this change is correlating with a change in teen attitudes. Five years ago, during the start of the pandemic, one of my daughters fell under the influence of social media messaging on mental health. She was 11, and thanks to lockdowns, isolated from normal face-to-face teenage interactions. And she suddenly developed some sort of depression/anxiety/self-harm habits, as well as a nervous tick. Trauma was really “in” at the time. (This is not to say, and it’s a little embarrassing that I might need to clarify this for some readers, that some kids/teens/adults don’t suffer from mental illness and from traumatic experiences. I am talking about a trend, a zeitgeist, and not legitimate illness nor the traumatic horrors that beset many innocent victims. Some individuals are truly afflicted, and others use it as a persona. Both things can be true at the same time.)

The more afflicted a teen was by trauma, the more street-cred she got for being an authentic victim, or for being an ally. A few years ago, I had a university student in a Shakespeare class raise her hand to tell me that I shouldn’t talk about death because it could “trigger a trauma” in some students. She was there to “educate” me about being trauma-sensitive. That death is traumatic for all of humanity seemed to escape her notice entirely, as did the fact that it would be really difficult to teach Shakespeare without mentioning death. She seemed to think she was protecting at-risk students from something she had supposedly discovered about mortality. What a whiz. (There is an FX series, English Teacher, which satirizes this type of student. She suffers from “asymptomatic Tourette’s”, which can only be self-diagnosed, and she is triggered by the mention of any kind of illness in literature class. I haven’t seen the show. I only know about it because my teens share reels of it with me through, *clears throat*, social media.)

Five years ago, weakness was the goal. This not only relieved the teen of the emotional burden of learning how to take responsibility for her own insecurities, it made her feel more included in the teen group that judged affliction itself to be a virtue. But the real emotional satisfaction came in the form of judging anyone who didn’t validate her self-diagnoses. Oh, the rush of feeling morally justified in looking down at those who lack the ethical lens needed to breathe life into your traumas. Trauma-affirmation bonded teens to each other. With friends like those, who needs enemies?

But there has been a colossal sea-change in Gen Z culture since then. It’s been like turning a huge ship on the sea, slow, but there is now momentum behind its critical mass, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change course. It is now decidedly lame to be mentally fragile, an “iPad kid”, someone who spends all their time online, who has followed the trends of trauma-dumping, and of being non-conforming. This is now “cringe”. (My own daughter’s “afflictions” have become a running joke with her. Yes, she knows I’m writing about it. No, she is not offended.) Teens, let’s remember, are both rebels and conformists. As soon as teen brittleness became, as they would have said, “normalized”, teens began to rebel against it. And now it is the norm to rebel against safe-space culture, which is increasingly top-heavy anyway. Once your vice-principal, your Phys-Ed teacher, the mainstream media, corporations, and politicians get behind a teen zeitgeist, it loses its “rizz”. The rebellion has taken the form of ridicule. What was once sacred is lambasted for its sanctimony. And so now the teenager recognizes her position as an insider of the group if she is privy to the scandalous jokes told about the dominant culture. The tyranny of “alt-girl” is over. Her downfall was that she was too fragile to be funny.

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But what is going to fill the vacuum left by the nonconforming teen? Recently, in anticipation of its third season which begins this month, I rewatched the very first episode of HBO’s The White Lotus. Its opening sequence portrays in microcosm what seems to be emerging on the broad cultural scale. We see two older teens/young women, both gorgeous (played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady), talking in secrecy to each other on a boat, gossiping about the other guests. From their perch under the boat’s awning, they judge all the other passengers, discerning their innermost characteristics. And they are not wrong in their judgments. The two beautiful girls have powers of perception because they are so often on the receiving end of others’ scrutiny.

But the show’s real moment of insight is when these two teens meet one of these boat guests, the young newlywed bride, at the hotel pool. The bride is friendly with the two teens, but they act coolly superior to her (one is pretentiously reading Freud and the other casually flipping through Nietzsche). The young wife quickly realizes that behind their smiles the two girls are mocking her. She turns away from them to go for a swim, taking off her beach cover-up to reveal a truly stunning physique. Sweeney’s character instantly looks disappointed and humiliated. “Oh shit,” she says. The natural order reestablishes its Darwinian hierarchy. Survival of the hottest. How cruel.

Of course, Sydney Sweeney’s own perfect physique may not qualify her for this role. But then again, maybe her own sexiness makes her the perfect person to play the disappointed teen: she would obviously be aware of the power hotness wields, which is why she is humbled by beauty. Her response is not generous, but at least she does not persist in arrogance. The teenage girl who is not hot frequently holds onto more resentment and moral vanity. She would feel proud to be ugly next to beauty because it makes her seem like a beautiful person on the inside. That is her claim to superiority. It is oftentimes a compensatory, rival pride that she feels in her own unattractiveness. The moral vanity goes so deep that she doesn’t typically recognize it as vanity — especially when our culture celebrates this kind of pride as a virtue.

This Sydney Sweeney syndrome, part arrogant self-righteous teen and part neo-pagan hot-goddess, occupies a large amount of digital real estate on social media. Both of these vibes no doubt add fuel to the feelings of pride and insecurity we have seen in teens. But we can’t ignore either the sense of fun that’s been emerging in Gen Z. The new cool is to ridicule what was cool a few years ago. This means that the fragile, easily offended teen (who used this identity as a power-play to elicit sympathy and affirmations from others, as well as to raise her status as one who could educate others in higher-order morality) has now become a meme rather than an aspiration. The laughing new teen has a healthier way of being, and my hunch is that we will see a corresponding decline in mental health issues from youth. One tends to become what one pretends to be.

But this is not to say that the new teen is good. She may tend toward arrogance and cruelty in the same way that the cancel-culture teens did. There is a unique opportunity, if one has an interest in these things, in filling the void left by the now cringy “alt-girl”, with something beautiful, strong, and glorious. My hunch is that this may take the form of a return to a more vital way of being embodied – more Nietzschean uber-teen than afflicted victim. The trick will be to make the glory of this teen also honorable, and to make her strength also generous.

We young people do not do this anymore (television? sitting room?). The sodality of these collective experiences is lost to us, streaming alone in our bedroom-cells. But atomised as we are, generational mood is not completely lost to us. And over the past year, I realised we were all watching Seinfeld. It came around on the Netflix churn in late 2021, arriving like a fresh breeze across the plain of contemporary streaming. Its comic furniture was clearly old — the canned audience laughter, the answerphone messages, those airy flannel shirts tucked into belted jeans. But, in its essential pulse of irony and irreverence, it felt so fresh, so crisp. And, at a time of stultifying, hand-wringing sincerity, something as small as a nasty joke can feel like a punkish, even revolutionary act.

Seinfeld is a faulty sitcom. It doesn’t move properly; it’s missing key parts. It’s “about nothing”, goes the trite assertion. Its triumph is, therefore, one of absence, of refusal. Too incapable to act, Jerry Seinfeld plays himself: stand-up comedian, New Yorker, neat freak and mid-afternoon cereal-eater. But even as a lead he is not the wisecracking protagonist of too many American sitcoms. Instead, he and his apartment often just serve as a planetary centre for his three friends, George, Elaine and Kramer, to orbit. Between them, they exhibit all the vices of man: deceit, spite, narcissism, self-pity, sloth. “No hugging, no learning,” was the mission statement behind the show.

The emotional tenor is therefore pre-Darwinian, any possibility of human mutation, development or evolution flatly rejected. Characters only circle each other, pursued by a supporting cast of cranks, eccentrics and misfits. All motives are low; all manners undignified. Sex is a relentless yet elusive necessity to be pursued through any means, but romantic relationships are too complicated or just embarrassing to maintain. “Sex, that’s meaningless,” says Jerry. “But dinner — that’s heavy. That’s like an hour.” Girlfriends are always new; breakups always imminent. When George does get engaged, he spends the bulk of a season regretting it and trying to break it off.

Such paraphernalia of the predictable sitcom are aggressively boiled away to leave only the relentless imposition of irony: that crushing recognition of the gap between our perspective on things and their bald reality. Consequently, the world can be faced with a shrug or a cackle, too absurd and pointless to take seriously. Jerry can’t even take it seriously — often his mouth simply corpses into a leery smirk halfway through scenes.

The eyeroll, the irreverence, the irony, the stasis, the self-reference — all of this made Seinfeld into the great saga of popular postmodernism. But by the time of its finale, this was a cultural movement many lived in fear of. David Foster Wallace articulated a particularly terrified critique: television, he believed, had bred perilous levels of self-awareness into its viewing public, puncturing our sentimentality and leaving only “flatness, numbness and cynicism”. The critic James Wood agreed, identifying a literary fashion for long absurd novels full of irony, two-dimensional characters and conceptual play. He called it “hysterical realism”, and Seinfeld can be slotted into this genre, a “systems sitcom” in the vein of a Don DeLillo novel.

Between them, Wallace and Wood pointed the way toward the elevated, moralising path that culture has taken ever since. On television came Friends, immediately displacing Seinfeld as the popular chronicle of young America, and later becoming the great millennial sitcom. And, while imitating Seinfeld’s New York, group-of-mates setting, Friends is its irritating, naïve younger sibling, never escaping the frothy fountain of its opening credits. Its Manhattan is a brownstone dreamscape, where you live across the hall from your best friends, renting (where possible) from a monied family member.

And, like a particularly protracted and simplistic Austen novel, it submits tamely to the demands of romantic teleology. Essentially: hang around with your university mates for 10 seasons, and chances are you’ll end up marrying or having kids with at least one of them. Seinfeld’s singletons are achingly self-aware; the Friends friends don’t even know they’re in a TV show. They have shapely, winning flaws, not sordid neuroses. Optimistic, improving, they do silly things to cheer each other up like put turkeys on their head. They move to the suburbs to start families. There’s a lot of hugging.

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Friends was symptomatic of the mood of sincerity which has since overcast much of the culture. For the past two decades, the cultural stock exchange has been led by a boom in conveyed emotion and self-conscious virtue. We listen to heart-baring, confessional-romantic anthems. We read novels about toxic love quadrilaterals. We watch Ted Lasso conquer English football by baking biscuits. But in more recent years, even this has calcified, slipping from the pure emotional sincerity of Friends to a more overbearing preoccupation with moral sincerity.

Irony has come to be seen as a dereliction of our human and political responsibilities. In fiction, the critic Becca Rothfeld gives a name to this millennial middlebrow: “sanctimony literature”. In these books and outside them, writers and their characters exhibit an inquisitorial obsession with “goodness”. They stress over structural racism and their carbon emissions. They mull over the power imbalances of BDSM. And they are attracted by wholesome, generous, unbelievable people, whose complications come in the form of redeemable scars and wounds, not profanities or sins.

Thanks to the politicisation of everyday life, which accelerated in the late 2010s, this is now representative of an entire sanctimony culture. It demands the iterative performance of goodness across everyday life. We do it on social media, striving to display virtues personal (wealth, sociability, romantic success) and political. We willingly upload and surrender our personal lives, commodifying the very emotions that we seek to display. We buy self-care and wellness, a new marketplace which serves this desire for authentic fulfilment. We inspect artists and writers for actionable wrongdoing.

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When art and entertainment are run at such a hysterical temper, irony, detachment and withdrawal are an escape. And, therefore, so is Seinfeld, which makes no such gestures towards value or judgement. Its priorities are visible even at a structural level: for most of its run, each episode began and ended with a stand-up set by Jerry. All narrative momentum, any dramatic peril, dissolves and is then transformed into a framing device of pure humour. In this, Seinfeld is arguably the most straightforwardly comic comedy ever made. Morality is no consideration; politics are only ever an opportunity for social embarrassment. “You don’t have any black friends,” Jerry chides George, “Outside of us, you don’t have any white friends either.”

In this world of ethical grandstanding, where every word and gesture is freighted with political significance, a show about “nothing” is a little revelation. And there are other signs of this backlash. The one truly original form of digital-cultural expression, meme culture, is savagely ironic and two-dimensional, populated by wretched caricatures and vicious stereotypes designed to satirise and undermine the self-righteousness of society. Seinfeld has already become an integrated part of this universe, thoroughly pastiched through clipping and quotation, and it’s no surprise it fits so well. The style of online humour is pithy and generally dark, even existential. And there are a dozen such George lines per episode: “I’m depressed. I’m inadequate. I’ve got it all!”

If irony is back, it is a tool as well as a condition. Seinfeld came at the end of a long tail of postmodern art, which was interested in capturing and critiquing mass media. Our own transactional information age — far more intrusive and involving than even David Foster Wallace could pretend television is — has made a mockery of a generation which sought to use it sincerely, treating their personal lives with the cruelty of a reality TV show producer. The clarity of irony is its strength, burning through pretensions and leaving a behind a reality which is sometimes cold but always honest. This is the mood that is starting to circulate among Gen Z, a vibe shift still in inchoate infancy. And at the generationally-regenerative distance of 25 years, Seinfeld is part of our voice — and our rebellion.