By Elias Leventhal
The abysmal mental health of modern teenagers seems to be on a lot of people's minds. It's a constant presence in the news cycle, a disturbing rumble underneath the higher-pitched whines of the current crises du jour. Commentators have proposed scores of possible causes: social media use, academic pressure, fear of a climate-changed future.
I don’t dispute any of these explanations. But as a teenager who has made some forays down the rabbit holes of depression and anxiety myself, I also feel that they don't tell the whole story. There is another piece of the puzzle that is often neglected by the mainstream media: My generation has the highest rate of religious nonparticipation on record. We increasingly reject organized faith in favor of individual spiritual exploration — or nothing at all. I believe that this tendency is a direct and under-acknowledged cause of our unhappiness.
I'm an unlikely person to be making this argument. I was raised in a secular Jewish household, and for most of my life I inherited a skeptical attitude towards faith. I could understand the utility of religion for dispensing advice like "love your neighbor," "treat others as you want to be treated," and other aphorisms that look nice on throw pillows. I couldn't fathom, however, what would motivate someone to embrace metaphysical claims that weren't supported by science. If anyone had ever pressed me on the mystery of human existence, I probably would have mumbled something about quantum mechanics and evolution.
It wasn't as if I went around trumpeting my atheist worldview; more accurately, I rarely thought about existential matters much at all. But I couldn't avoid them entirely. Beginning in early adolescence, I had the vague but gnawing suspicion that nothing in my life had any real meaning. At my best, I distracted myself from these thoughts by immersing myself in schoolwork. At my worst, I felt paralyzed by them.
My tortured-philosopher streak followed me throughout my teenage years. I was hardly nonfunctional — I did well in school and even made some friends. But on a fundamental level, I didn't know what I was doing in the world.
Until, suddenly, I did.
In one of my unhappiest moments, I decided to pick up a regular meditation practice. My motivation was entirely nonreligious: I wanted to feel better about my life. But as meditation started to work for me, exposing some of the neuroses that had kept me trapped, I became curious about the Buddhist origins of the practice. I read instructional books from Buddhist thinkers like Thich Nhat Hanh and Alan Wallace. And then, curious for more, I began to explore the original Buddhist scriptures.
This was when the floor really fell out from under me. Reading the Buddha's analysis of the human condition felt like staring into a mirror. My life so far had been permeated by the exact same cycles of delusion, attachment, and suffering that the Buddha described. I didn't know what to make of the fact that a 2500-year-old Indian philosopher seemed to understand me better than I understood myself.
From the beginning, I was captivated by the Buddha's views on suffering and spiritual development. Still, my rational mind revolted at some of the other things he had to say. Was I really supposed to believe in reincarnation? Was I really not allowed to kill mosquitoes? Couldn't I pick and choose the elements of Buddhism that I liked, rather than swallowing the doctrine whole?
But after spending so much time reading Buddhist commentaries on deep and thorny questions — consciousness, morality, the nature of the self — I was starting to question whether I knew enough to pick and choose correctly. The secular, scientific framework that I had trusted to explain the world was incapable of answering these questions for me. In its absence, I no longer knew what to think.
That’s why today, I consider myself to be a Buddhist: because I still have no idea what to think. There is more mystery in the world than I will probably ever be able to wrap my head around, and it feels good to leave that complexity in the hands of someone wiser than myself. It feels good, too, to have a millenia-old moral code that I can measure my actions against. Nothing else has ever given me such a strong sense of purpose.
Additionally, I no longer feel the need to worry about whether my life has meaning or not. In Buddhist terms that question is irrelevant, because my life is not an individual entity. It's a link in a chain which stretches back for eons, and which aspires to stretch forward indefinitely until suffering no longer exists.
I think this is the greatest gift that faith offers — not just Buddhism, but all of the world’s major religious traditions. It allows us to set aside our myopic view of the world and get lost in something that is larger than ourselves in both time and space. It seems to me that my generation is badly in need of this kind of perspective.
A few weeks ago, I was paging through a commentary on one of my favorite Buddhist scriptures: the Diamond Sutra, a dialog between the Buddha and his senior monk Subhuti about the path towards enlightenment. I was in a bad mood as I read, having just come off of a flu that sent my mindfulness training out the window and made me question whether I had as much control over my suffering as the Buddha claimed. But then I came across the following line:
"Thus, those who practice this teaching without being attached to it are said to be like fish that enter the sea."
I can't explain why, but I think that's the most beautiful sentence I've ever read. I'm a long way from the sea. I still spend much of my time stuck in what I call “worldly mode,” worrying about things that don't really matter. But believing that the sea exists — that there is more to reality than my mind can fathom — has given me a profound reservoir of hope.
With this perspective, it pains me to see more and more young people coming to view religion as an antiquated oddity. I understand the factors that drive people away from organized faith: doubt, commitment to modern science, the misbehavior of some religious leaders. But I've also come to understand that belief in the unknown can be a rational reaction to an irrational world. Without it, I don't know how we can find the determination to keep swimming towards the sea.
Elias is a graduating high-school senior from Shelburne, Vermont. He will be a freshman at Yale this fall, where he plans to study math, physics, chemistry, and as much religion as he can fit into his schedule.