I can't give you an evidence based explanation like an expert probably can but my educated guess is that it ties to a few things:

- Young people, being more durable and brain-elastic, are always volumetrically much more attracted to exploring novel ideas, concepts, thoughts, behaviors, et cetera. Jazz and race equality since the 20s, weird adult animation since the 40s, smoking weed and rock and roll since the 60s, fast bikes, R-rated movies, and sex with contraceptives since the 80s, nu metal, juggalos, and video games since the 2000s, and gender identity, publicly broadened sexuality, tik tok dances, and concerted critiques of capitalism since, well, now. This isn’t a laundry list obviously (more of a Sparknotes if anything) but I think you may be able to understand what I'm getting at.

- As time goes on, we learn more about what *actually* destroys families and people and shit: poor economic conditions, unsafe and unhealthy labor conditions, insufficient opportunity, lack of education, systemic prejudice, consumerism, man-made emissions, excessive inflation, gentrification and urbanization, pollution, the meat industry, overpopulation, et cetera. But those are problems a) we largely all agree on and b) about which almost none of us can do anything to solve, so they're not flashy and constantly making the news like all the other things listed above which are of much lesser consequence but are much more clickbaity to wagging fingers.

- Few of these large-scale issues actually affecting us also relate directly to all the trendy topics outlined above BUT, conversely, all of the things young people are into critique all of these destructive aspects of society, so yeah, it's easy for the moralists of the time to point fingers at the self-expression of the youth as a sign of the decaying times when it's actually historically been nothing more than its rallying cries.

- Having learned more about the body, the mind, history, society, and what actually hurts us as a species, young people gravitate toward things they can explore and change in their immediate environment to be the best version of themselves that they can be in an effort to come closer to solving all these real problems. Does it work? Fuck if I know, but anecdotally, I have never seen a more conscious, more aware, and more generally helpful group of people than all the people between 15 and 25 that I meet these days.

As a 30 year old, do I find the self-expression and multidimensional gender thing a little weird? I am not sufficiently affected by it to even gratify that with an answer, but it's inconsequential compared to the actual problems listed above. Young people know about these problems and they care so, so, so much more than literally any other generation before them and they're much less afraid as a result to go to the fringes of the human psyche in their quest for self-discovery and saving humanity from itself because, unlike all the generations before them who had silver platter upon silver platter of privileges both small and big their future looks bleak, so they have nothing to lose.

This is nothing new: of course it's trendy, of course all the young people are doing it, of course almost no one above 40 understands or condones it, and of *course* it looks immoral and bad and makes society look destructive. You go and tell me that hasn’t been a thing since the dawn of the industrial age for LITERALLY every decade and every generation (look up Vsauce’s Juvenophobia video on it—great summary of what I mean). But that doesn’t mean the trendy thing young people are doing is bad for us. And if it is, it’s a little scrape on our society at worst, and every actual problem I’ve described is an IV drip of pure radioactive waste into the circulatory system of the collective human body in contrast.

Sorry to go off like that. Moralism just makes me mad because it’s always about the wrong thing. Obviously it’s impossible to make every concession as a single human to be net zero emissions and net zero drain on our collective resource pool but if you’re going to be mad about one problem, be mad about ALL the problems, you know? Not just the ones that will get you upvotes from edgy redditors who think it’s cool to shit on children with different pronouns than them.

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