According to the research essay Youth Alienation in Post- modern Society written by James Mackey, there are different factors that contribute to youth alienation in the world today. According to him, statistics indicate that there is acceleration in the transformation of the younger generation from what used to happen in the past. Technological advancements have transformed social change that has seen many youth transform from the youth of the past to what is seen today. The author posits a number of attitudes that help define youth alienation and among them is personal incapacity, cultural estrangement and guidelessness.
Cultural estrangement entails the ability of the adolescents to separate themselves from predominant societal values because they do not value them any longer and according to them, they seem trashy, boring and cheap. Predominant societal values are those that society has set to gauge success and sometimes the adolescent feel as if these values are not good enough and hence drop or ignore them. They then go ahead and form theirs which are more of the opposite of the expectations of society.
Guidelessness amounts to the disproportion existing between the adolescent’s desires and their means for achieving the said desires. Adolescents will ignore the set rules and standards that are socially acceptable in the quest of achieving goals. The adolescent may be lacking in their effort to achieve the set expectations of society and this may prompt them to ignore these goals because they know they can not the expectations of the people around them.
Personal incapacity on the other hand generate from the inability or lack of skills to achieve what they want. Adolescents often think about the society and sometimes they get scared of the complexities exhibited therein. When they feel they are incompetent, they tend to feel helpless, dejected and lonely.
Reference
Mackey, J. Youth Alienation in Post- modern Society. PDF File
