The result of the last few years of government policies has powerfully impacted many lives.

In today's episode I respond to a listener question about how we can help young people recover from the many losses to their educational and social lives.

The ideas I share here are applicable to all of us because they refer to what we need to do when power is taken out of our hands and life seems a series of unfair events and setbacks.

Many of the greatest men and women in history found a way to rise above their circumstances and find deep meaning in the hardships of life.

If you have ever experienced loss, powerlessness or despair or you know someone who has then this episode could make a big difference.

Grab a free copy of my book Bridging the Gap here:

https://go.jonathandoyle.co/btg-pdf

Enquire about booking Jonathan to speak:

https://go.jonathandoyle.co/jd-speak-opt-in

Find out about coaching with Jonathan here:

https://go.jonathandoyle.co/coaching

Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you once again, welcome

as always to the daily podcast.

So glad you're on board.

Got a great episode for you today.

There's going to be.

Stuffing here.

That's going to help all of us grow.

As we often say, we don't need a whole complex system.

A massive plan to change aspects of our lives.

All we need is one good idea.

That we are actually prepared to use.

It doesn't matter how much we know.

It matters what we do with what we know.

You can know everything you can know just about all there is to know.

But if you do not execute on.

Um, what, you know, then nothing happens.

There's no movement, there's no progress.

Right.

Welcome a board.

Uh, it is a maximum of seven degrees today here in a.

The national capital of Australia, where we live, it's going to be seven degrees.

And for my many sins, I'm coaching a under 16 division two soccer today.

So I will be spending part of my afternoon.

Braving hypothermia.

On the frozen wasteland Tundra pitches of, uh, of Canberra.

So that's my day ahead.

But, uh, this is going to be.

One of the best parts of my day, spending some time with you guys

and bringing some encouragement.

And today we're going to do what we love to do, which is a listener question,

which is always, I think the best content.

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Live.

To come and work with, uh, with your organizations or

friends, let's jump in today.

We have a really interesting question from a.

From a lady who holds a senior leadership position at a.

At a really a him.

You know, uh, influential, uh, school.

And, um, I had the pleasure of hearing from her over the years and, um, she

does great work there and she's really getting a close look at some of the

challenges that our young people face and.

We're going to talk about her question and then we're going to talk about.

How, what she's asking actually impacts all of us.

So.

You know, the lessons that we're going to share today really

extrapolate out to all our lives.

So here's the question she says, hi Jonathan.

As a teacher.

I am seeing more and more young people despondent after

lockdowns and interruptions.

To their normal routines, social interactions and rites of passage.

Any advice on how to handle that would be great.

All right, let's do this.

Let's repair.

Let's unpack the question.

Well, what we are seeing is a whole generation of young

people profoundly impacted.

By the, uh, how do I even frame this by the.

Reprehensible policies of many elected officials and, uh, public

health bureaucrats that, uh, have in my humble opinion for what it's

worth, you are free to disagree.

Of course.

Um, have done, uh, unspeakable damage to vast sections of our community.

I think it's actually to the very fabric of our.

Social cohesion across the developed world.

And I think history will look back and judge these people extremely harshly.

For what has taken place.

And so what this question is getting at is the incredible impact on young people,

the disruption of schooling education.

Uh, and of course, as this question frames for a seer, the, the rites of

passage, the graduations, the social interactions, and for me, coaching.

Teenagers at the moment in sport, you really see this, you

know, you really get to see.

Um, in, in many subtle and not so subtle ways, young people.

Uh, really struggling.

Were they struggling before COVID course?

I mean, you know, adolescence has never particularly easy time for anybody.

But, uh, I think even before COVID, there was so many things happening.

I think social media has had a huge effect and impact on young

people, their socialization.

I remember reading an article years ago that, um, Uh, young people.

Uh, you know, meeting in person less and less, they're actually their level of

social contact, you know, for most of us when we were young, you'd meet up places.

Right.

You'd get into all sorts of trouble.

Doing things you probably weren't supposed to be doing, but at least

you were doing them in person.

And you know, so often now young people are just not having, or even

before COVID, weren't having that level of social interaction, physical

movement, all that sort of stuff.

That was.

That was probably so common before that.

Now I don't want to sound like I'm, you know, the, uh, the 48 year old

dad of teenage kids here, sort of, you know, shouting at the clouds, as

they say, complaining about the world.

Uh, I'm sure all throughout history.

You know, there's, there's been challenges for young people, but I think it is a

different time that we're living in.

And, um, you know, even today, Karen, still away with, uh, with our daughters.

In Queensland.

And so Aiden and I are at home and he's got some friends coming over today.

And normally what these guys try and do is, um, Is sit in front

of Minecraft and stuff all day.

So I've already organized.

The day to take them out to a gymnastics park, uh, straight

after I get out of here.

And then I'm going to take them on a long hike up a very large hill.

And, uh, if they're still moving at the end of that, we'll, uh, we'll, we'll

allow some screen time, but I just think, um, before I rip deeper into this great

question that, uh, you know, we have to be so active and proactive, I think

with young people at the moment and creating environments and situations.

Where they can interact and move and be physical and build

and try things and do things.

So.

So let's talk more about this question, this despondency, how

do we get despondent in life?

How do young people get despondent?

I think it ties into the psychological principle of learned helplessness.

So many of you be familiar with the concept of learned helplessness,

which is it'd be sort of, it came from actual labs studies on rats.

They put rats in a cage and from memory, the original learn helplessness, uh,

experiments involved, mild electric shocks to rats, and they could.

Press a lever to turn the shocks off and they tweak the experiment.

So eventually one group of rats realize that nothing they did.

Change the circumstance for them that the shocks continued.

And of course what happened.

Is the, the rats that could change their circumstance.

Uh, sort of had much better levels of health and all that sort of stuff.

And obviously they were testing all the chemicals and hormones.

Uh, in, in the animals and the ones that could control the

circumstance to some degree.

We're doing okay.

And the ones that couldn't, um, ended up having all sorts of extremely negative

physiological outcomes, because they had this experience of learned helplessness

there, this experience that why bother, why try and nothing, nothing happens.

There's nothing we can do to change the situation.

I think this is the heart of the despondency.

That many young people have been experiencing.

It's like, That they are put into situations where their agency and their

power has been removed profoundly.

And they'd be very isolated.

So let's extrapolate the principle for all of us in life.

If we have had experiences of nothing, we do works.

Why bother trying?

We move into this learned helplessness modality.

Which I think there's also a deeper.

Physiol a philosophical underpinning to this, which would be nihilism itself.

So nihilism is essentially.

I would argue the underpinning.

Philosophical social cultural, current underpinning society.

Um, when you look at the loss of faith practice, Especially

in the developed world.

You know, As the philosopher famously said, David Hume that, you know,

nature, abhors a vacuum that once people were practicing faith less, we didn't

press on into this magical secular.

Utopian unicorn fairy land.

What we have stepped into is a kind of nihilism that there is no meaning

to anything that, that there is no underpinning order or purpose to reality.

And nihilism would also argue, of course, that meaning is just socially constructed.

So if you're listening to this going, hang on, what are we doing here, Jonathan?

You're you're you're you're sharing all this different stuff.

Yes.

But I think there's a, there's a coalescence here.

I think COVID has effected the agency of young people and broken their hearts.

I think in many ways,

But underpinning that.

And even before it was this nihilism, what is the meaning of life?

What is the purpose of life?

You know, For throughout history, I guess young people, they wouldn't think

too deeply about these questions because until maybe four or 500 years ago, As a

young person, your job was kind of too.

To marry, to reproduce and to work.

That's kind of what you did.

There was, you didn't think too much about the meaning of purpose of life, because

it was just constructed immediately around you, the, the village, the tribe

required you to step into that current.

So.

Can you see the kind of fragmentation that's happened?

Eh,

And I think this does extrapolate further.

It extrapolates out into.

Into many of our lives.

Um, Karen and I have felt it in the last few years with a lot of her

family moving away and we've felt this kind of isolation and, and

looking for these bonds of connection.

That's why I've been such a big fan of the philosopher, Paul

Kingsnorth because I think his work.

On how these broken connections and look at, even I'm just on that.

Look at Johan hurries book, lost connections.

That's a really interesting book to read.

About mental health.

And I think it has a lot of implications, both for young people and for all of us.

That's so much of the mental health epidemic, he would argue.

Is, you know, it would be difficult to suggest that the

vast changes in mental health.

Uh, purely neurochemical or environmental.

Now I think they're environmental in the sense, because we live in these

more complex urbanized environments.

But to suggest that humans have suddenly undergone this huge neurochemical change

that's driving depression and anxiety.

I mean, he would say that.

It's a, that's the title of the book lost connections that there's

a broken connections, broken social, familial, tribal connections.

It's one of the reasons why.

You know, some people are still obsessed with sport and their team

because it's one of those few kinds of tribal connections we still have.

So where are we in this question?

Let's listen to the question again, I'm seeing more and more young people

to respond enough to lock downs and interruptions to their normal routines,

social interactions and rites of passage.

Rites of passage is such a good statement there.

Because, yeah.

I mean, as humans, we are a deeply.

Ritual and symbol, ritualistic and symbolic people.

We, you know, you look at.

Go back to Jordan Peterson's original Genesis lectures, 13 lectures.

I mean, regardless of your faith perspective, he does a phenomenal job

at looking at the deep symbology in the essence of what it means to be human.

So rites of passage, I guess, for young people, graduations a sense of

moving from one thing to another, to one phase of life, to another, which

is such a central human experience.

Even in prehistory, you know, their initiation rights and all those

processes by which young men and women transitioned into the adult world.

And the COVID overreaction has obviously fractured that.

So what I've done so far is I guess, outlined some of the problems

learned helplessness, nihilism.

Elaine agency a sense of why bother.

So here is the second part.

Everybody.

What do we do?

Um, what do we do before I answer that?

I do want to just finish that extrapolation all of us, whether we're

young people affected by COVID or not.

All of us in life, I would imagine have had experiences of despondency.

Of.

You know, depression possibly, or why bother or I keep trying

it, this and it doesn't work.

And why bother?

So I want to give you a few thoughts on that.

I think one of the best places to go.

Is to look at the third Viennese school of psychology.

So Freud founds, the first VNS school, young founds, the second Viennese school.

And.

Uh, Victor Frankel is seen as the progenitor of the third Viennese school,

which is logotherapy logo com logo therapy coming from the word logos.

Meaning, well, logos is hard to translate, but it means the

word, the story, the narrative.

So Frankel's theory was very much around the story that we

tell ourselves about reality.

Now, most of you would know Victor Frankel of course, was a Jewish psychiatrist.

Who was captured by the Nazis in the second world war and

prisoned in outfits saw.

Um, many family members die and, uh, his master work was that.

He as a psychiatrist watched very, very closely what happened to

all the people there and people's responses to the suffering and

especially to the nihilistic abstract, arbitrary nature of that suffering.

So we're talking today about young people who've gone from.

You know, Uh, a sense of agency and control to losing it and

experiencing despondency, but imagine the loss of agency and

control you would feel if you are a.

Prosperous member of society you're arrested by the Nazis and your entire

life is just utterly destroyed.

Your agency is completely removed.

And you're experiencing these radical circumstance.

This is the essence of what Frankl focused upon.

It was, what do people do under these circumstances?

What, what are the responses people make and broadly he came down to a

bifurcation, uh, Uh, kind of delineation between two groups of people.

You know, the first group of people were the ones that could find no meaning.

They could find no purpose in their suffering.

They could find no.

Essential logos behind it.

It was arbitrary and random a bit like the rats back in the

learned helplessness experiments.

How do you leave if you are suffering terribly and it just seems to you that

there is no meaning and purpose to it.

And he said, these people just disintegrated.

He said they would, they would die very quickly.

They would die of strange, unusual conditions.

They would, they would take their own lives.

I think you've got to the point where that I come over, there was

50, or that there's 500 people a day.

I think it was 50 who would throw themselves on the electric fences

just to end their suffering.

So he said that under these conditions, there was these groups

of people that could not find a purpose or a meaning to it.

And he said, conversely, there was a different group of people.

The decided that there was a meaning to what was happening and they

had to construct that meaning.

So what Frankl did.

Is he constructed a meaning.

He said, I have been placed here.

The meaning of my suffering, the meaning of me being in this

environment is that I'm here.

To be a witness to this.

And to teach it, I'm going to survive.

I will survive somehow.

And then I will teach the world about what's happened

here and what I've learned.

And he would visualize himself in a future sense, teaching in universities

and explaining things to people.

And then of course he wrote his phenomenal book.

Man's search for meaning.

So this is the essence of logotherapy, which means.

For our students and for ourselves under adversity and difficulty,

we must find empowering meanings.

So what happens for most people as well?

There isn't one and people just.

Exit the arena.

They just go there.

Isn't one.

There's no meaning to this, that, how could they possibly be?

Why am I suffering?

Why is life like this?

And what Frankl said is, um, a couple of key points.

One of them he said is when we cannot change our circumstances, we

are compelled to change ourselves.

When we cannot change our circumstances, we must, we are

compelled to change ourselves.

So this is a deeply unpopular notion in the postmodern secular world.

We have been highly conditioned to find external.

Um, Causes of difficulty pain, suffering, and unpleasant, and an

unpleasantness and unhappiness.

It's a victim culture.

It's the minute something's happened to me, somebody must be

responsible and it's their fault.

And I don't have agency.

Now.

I cannot act because of this bad circumstance.

So immediately, once you do that, You externalize your

power, you surrender your power.

You give your power away to whatever.

You know, government program, system, whatever it is, whatever, wherever you

find the source of suffering and whoever's doing it to you, you will empower them.

And I know some of you are listening, going well.

What about real justice?

What about when people are doing bad things?

Exactly would that that's we need to, we can definitely fight real injustice

in the real world, but we begin by realizing that we have enormous

agency, at least in the chant, in the sense of how we choose our response.

So you look at people like Gandhi.

You know, who realized that nonviolent re resistance.

Gave them enormous strength.

They didn't hate their enemies.

They didn't empower their enemies with hate.

They realize that they could take a higher moral position.

They could find a meaning and a significance behind

things that were happening.

And act in highly moral ways.

And as we see in history, it can often take a long time, but people like

that tend to really change reality.

So this first principle from Franklin is that, uh, when we cannot change our

circumstances, we must change ourselves.

I've been teaching this to my teenage daughter lately.

Who's already in that thing of something's happening.

And she's like, oh, I can't because of X.

And I say no, but you can choose your response.

You can focus on a different path.

You can try a different strategy, you can do something else.

You can come up with a creative solution.

And they don't want to hear it.

Right.

Like, she's great.

Like she's open to it eventually, but teenagers and many of

us don't want to hear that.

We don't want to hear someone, you know, when we're, when we're in a

sort of, what is it, a pity party when we're in that sense of the world is

terrible and we can't do anything.

We don't want someone to say to us, well, look, I get it.

I understand.

But you know what.

That's the reality, where are we going?

So Frank is telling us that when we feel we can't change things, then

we have to change ourselves, our perspective, our attitude, our energy.

We have the power to do that.

And he calls this the last of the human freedoms.

So in the book, he sort of says the Nazis could take everything from you.

They could take your wealth, your position, your family, your health,

your capacity to go to the bathroom.

Everything could be stripped from your clothes.

You could be left naked, you could be beaten.

But he said there was one thing they could never take.

And he referred to this thing as the last of the human freedoms.

It is the last freedom that every human possesses that can never be taken

away, which you said was simply this.

The ability to choose our response.

The ability to choose our response.

In any given circumstance.

Now.

Again, I don't think many of us like to hear this.

We, we like to believe that our unhappiness is caused

by an external agent.

And that if we could just get justice against this external

agent, our life would be better.

I get it.

I understand there's a, there's a logic to it, but what Frankl

reminds us of, and this is, I really want to land this plane now.

Um,

He talks about the fact that.

We are being questioned by life.

He said, what happens for most people is that they look at the things that happened

to them and they feel that there is.

Some mystical force that wants, that wishes them ill.

And bad things are being done to them.

But Frankel's perspective is he said, we must realize at all times that

we are being questioned by life.

We are being questioned by life than in the adversity and the difficulty we

are being questioned by life itself.

So this goes to very deep questions about the nature of suffering and the nature

of reality does God punished as God.

Test people.

Why would that happen?

Well, my only insights would be that as a parent.

I know that.

Allowing my kids to experience difficulty and boredom and unhappiness

and challenge and discomfort can be a really good thing in the right context.

You know, my son and I who's 12 and a half, like we've been walking.

Uh, these mountains here lately, I do it with heavy pack.

He does it with a lot of one, but just, you know,

I got him a good set of boots.

And now he's just in this habit of like walking and doing hard things.

And I keep teaching doing hard things, teaching him that he's

being tested and questioned.

So as a parent, I responsibly placed him in difficult

circumstances so that he grows.

So let's keep coming back to the original question here.

What am I saying to these students?

What I'm saying to students who are, who have been deeply affected by COVID.

Would be to say this step one, acceptance.

It has happened.

It has happened.

I still feel a lot of bitterness and anger about a lot of what's happened,

but I have to accept that it is reality.

So the first step is acceptance.

This is the raw material of life that we have been handed.

If you are a student,

And you feel that life has been turned upside down.

I agree with you this, but this is the raw material we have to work with.

The second thing I'd say to students.

And again, to all of us is that.

Under these circumstances, we must choose our response.

What is the compelling meaning?

Well, here's one.

I'm not saying it's the right one, but if I was.

If I was coaching or speaking to a group of students, I'd say,

yep, you didn't sign up for this.

You did not sign up for it, but here's the point?

What are you going to do?

Maybe this happened to make you tougher.

Maybe this happened to make you work harder.

Maybe this happened because you're going to have to seize life by the shirt front

and shake it for everything it's got.

Maybe this is just the test.

Maybe you just have to grow and push and change and be proactive.

And reach out more and organize more meetups with friends and do this and

do that and push and push and push.

And of course, most people don't.

Why not because it is so much easier to blame.

It is so much easier to stay in despondency.

It is much more difficult and that's what Frankl teaches us.

It's why there's so few people that do this.

That we have to press on.

We have to find the meaning.

So if I was standing in front of a group of students, I would,

I would honor their experience.

I would teach them principles of acceptance.

Because once you accept, then you are.

You can become more free of the bitterness and despondency.

And then I would say to them, what now?

What now?

What would you teach someone in the same circumstance?

What would you teach somebody?

I'd say to the students.

Okay.

I imagine 30, 40, 50 years from now, something like this has happened again.

What would you teach people?

What would you do differently?

What would you tell them?

You learned.

Because otherwise we just stay stuck or worse.

We go backwards.

And I'd say another thing, one of the last things is.

I would say to young people and again, through them to all of us,

when you are trapped in despondency.

Tri service.

When you feel really stuck in life and you don't know how to move forward.

It's very easy to shrink our world to our own reality.

It's very easy to shrink our world to our own pain and sense of injustice.

But as we begin to move out of that, as we choose to move out of that

and focus on the needs of others.

There's a strange.

Cosmic reality, that takes place often our pain and uncertainty is lifted.

The more that we seek to serve those around us.

I would say to young people find a way to radically serve.

I would say, find a way to meet the needs of other people.

Find the way to honor your teachers find the way to care for your own family.

Find the way you want to get an a T I'd say this, you want to get revenge.

You want to get revenge on the people that did this to you.

Well, here's how you do it live well.

Here's how you get revenge live.

Well, the way that you get revenge on the wickedness, that's been

perpetuated on so many young people in so many of us is to live well.

Is too.

Find ways to make something of ourselves find ways to overcome

what has been done to us.

That is the sweetest.

Revenge, not bitterness, not hatred, not punishment.

But the sweetest revenge is to make something magnificent of your life.

Under these circumstances.

I mean, I'll look at Frankel.

And I look at a guy who just suffered terribly.

And had every reason to be full of bitterness and rage, but what did he do?

He made something extraordinary of his life.

He built a life radical service and communication and blessing

and wisdom and insight.

And I would say to every young person, these are the choices you face.

You can spend the next five to 10 years blaming the system for why

you didn't get into this course or why you struggle with this thing.

But I look at a guy what's his name?

Ben Carson ran for us president.

The first guy in the world to separate conjoined Siamese

twins at the brain level.

One of the greatest neurosurgeons in, in human history.

And a guy who grew up with huge learning difficulties in a single parent

home in a Detroit housing project.

And taught himself to read in public libraries and went on to

operate at the highest levels of culture and influence why, because

that's how he got his revenge.

He looked at everything that had been done to him and everything that had

been handed to him and somehow by the grace of god and his own cooperation

with grace He chose a higher path So i'm going to stop now because i'll

just keep going on and on and on.

But i thank you for this question It is true that our young people are facing

despondency after all these interruptions but the story doesn't have to end there

So i would say practically to every young person Identify what you want Identify

what you want to contribute and who needs your help and then go and make something

of your life get your revenge by making something magnificent of your life It's

going to be hard you have to do hard things we all have to do hard things

if you want to grow It's much easier to live in blame my friends it is the

religion of the day Nihilism and blame And i'm not playing That game i'm not

living in that place i'm just not doing it i want more from my life I want more

for my family or more for you all right please make sure you've subscribed go and

hit that subscribe button now this is.

Uh if you've liked this episode i'd love you to share it just flick it onto a few

friends and say hey listen to this send it to their kids we weren't going to get

some kids listening to this Um please jump across to the youtube version leave a

comment there if you like or you can email me direct jonathan jonathan doyle.co.

Uh, Check out the links here Book me to speak get free access to my book bridging

the gap of god bless everybody i want you to get off this podcast now i don't want

you to take some small steps forward and i want you to go out and make something

magnificent of your life god bless everybody my name's jonathan doyle i'll