The commons was once scoped, even in the early days of the internet because the world wasn't turned on. Now the world is the commons. So you have a million impressions and they trend toward the apocalyptic, even though the life of an American today (I will scope my observations to Americans because it's the US and Denmark I know natively) is vastly improved from, say, an American GI drafted into Vietnam or the kind of character portrayed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Teens are feeding on this firehose and thinking the world is ending and it's not just geopolitics. Now their memetic competition is global. The whole world's customs must be cast off and wholly rejected. Sex and identity too turn apocalyptic.

I think it's interesting that in a time where most of our deliberation is being mediated through disembodied media we are becoming disembodied, quite literally. We no longer identify as Male/Female/Human because the activities we take part in are physically formless. Our Internet identities are fungible, easily swapped unlike those in the embodied world. From this vantage, it's easy to sympathize with the desire to recontextualize identity in sex and gender to match the inner experience.

But from a Buddhist perspective, taking refuge inside another identity holds the same promise of suffering as the identity previous. And that's primarily what I'm seeing: self-immolation all across the Net. All of us burning privately and publicly to become the empresses and emperors of our own identity mountains. It's a race to the bottom and it's divisive. We are abandoning strata that are more inclusive ("we are all workers") for strata which are more exclusive ("we are black but you aren't black enough", "we are queer but you aren't queer enough”, "we are women", "no we are women", etc.)

I have more to say on a grand unified theory scale but I wouldn't be answering your question any more if I continued so I will stop here.

I think you're looking at it somewhat backwards. Teens are welcome to experiment with identity - that's what teens do and have always done - but I know a shocking number of adults who didn't truly understand their own gender identity until well into their 30s, 40s, even 50s. Part of the reason for that is that without the internet, there was no place to find discussion about it beyond the typical binaries.

I remember many peers going HARD into goth or punk territory as teens, and most went on to become a much more whole and complex version of themselves as adults with that goth or punk side informing but not dominating their identity. They cherish it though, for what it gives them emotionally, psychologically, and aesthetically.

With a richer available expression of gender and sexuality now available, I suspect it's reasonable to expect that many teens will lean into it to the same degree, but in this case understanding that gender and sexuality are both spectrums will help them feel like more complete versions of themselves later in life.

I wish my peers (and older generations) had access to this when they were younger, because it would have saved them decades of confusion and suffering.

The conclusion I tried to shine a light on is that the hunt for an identity is ultimately fruitless, unsatisfactory, without end. I "was a punk" insofar as one can be what was a dynamic process in the 80s.

The richest expression of identity, one that doesn't fit into the cookie cutters of music genre enthusiast or political firebrand (and the path of least resistance) is ultimately where one drops labels and responds naturally to the world as it is, moment by moment.

If we're all going to be turned on to the world and co-exist peacefully, equitably, well that's a world that stops drawing party lines and starts opening to an experience that isn't a scorecard of labels under your Twitter bio.

If that's going at it backwards, bring on the retrograde.

I think you're suggesting that the hunt for identity never ends so why bother? That's ridiculous. Just because we can always be trying to find ourselves doesn't mean we can't do things that get us closer to the ideal version. The point of gravitating towards extremes during our youth gives us experience and context for what those things can offer us for identities later in life.