David Brooks wants us to feel sorry for Harvard kids. Again.
In his latest column, “We Are the Most Rejected Generation,” Brooks wrings his hands over the plight of elite students — those sad, over-polished, ghosted, spiritually limp products of Ivy League ambition. He presents their problem as one of rejection. The college application rat race. The endless “no” from Goldman Sachs. The swipe-right silence. The club they didn’t get into. The seminar they weren’t picked for. (RELATED: The Children of Elites Are in Trouble)
But he’s wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
The crisis isn’t rejection; it is within — deep, deep within.
These kids aren’t breaking down because they’re getting told “no.” They’re breaking down because they were raised in a culture that told them they are the performance. That their value is in the likes, the LinkedIn post, the offer letter, the elevator pitch. That they’re nothing until they’re something. And “something” is always defined by someone else. This isn’t a culture of resilience. It’s a culture of fragile illusions. (RELATED: Message for Gen Z: The Future Looks Great!)
Brooks sees the effects, but he won’t name the cause. He gestures vaguely at “meritocracy,” “exclusion,” and “competition.” But he refuses to confront the deeper truth: these students aren’t suffering from too much pressure. They’re suffering from a system that replaced identity with achievement, meaning with metrics, and purpose with prestige. They’re empty, not exhausted.
Let me be brutally clear: Brooks is mourning the implosion of a class he helped shape. The NPR-class, the New York Times crowd, the brunch-and-balance brigade, who thought that stripping religion, tradition, and family from the moral center of society wouldn’t have consequences. That if you filled kids with enough TED Talks, summer programs, and mindfulness apps, they’d be just fine. (RELATED: Why are Liberal Women so Unhappy?)
But they’re not fine. They’re anxious, medicated, overqualified, and emotionally adrift.
They can code in Python and write a diversity statement, but they don’t know who they are. They’ve been coached to answer every question except the ones that matter. What is good? What is true? What is sacred? (RELATED: John Selden: Religion Sets the Boundaries of Decency)
Brooks watches this slow collapse and thinks it’s about rejection. As if the existential crisis at the core of the most credentialed generation in history is about how many Goldman Sachs internships they applied to.
And Brooks, ever the milquetoast moralist, never turns the mirror around.
No. What’s killing them is absence. Absence of rootedness. Absence of virtue. Absence of anything they weren’t told to want.
He says these kids are living in the “seventh circle of Indeed hell.” But who built it? Who built the culture where the Ivy League is a factory floor? Who told kids to specialize by 12, perfect their “narratives” by 15, and perform adulthood by 18? Who helped flatten childhood into a CV?
Who cheered the algorithmic economy that turned job applications into lottery tickets and dating into slot machines? Who clapped as faith, family, and tradition were stripped for parts and sold off for credentials, “freedom,” and five-star fellowship programs?
Brooks isn’t a bystander. He’s an architect. A soft-spoken architect of the very world he’s now lamenting.
He says students are haunted by rejection. But how else could it go when you raise a generation in a meaning vacuum? Strip the transcendent from their lives. Replace it with performance metrics and prestige tokens. And then act surprised when they fall apart the second someone doesn’t applaud?
He complains about students being cold, polished, masters of self-presentation. That they deliver perfectly pitched answers that “warm the cockles of your middle-aged heart.” But Brooks is describing a generation that he and his class demanded into existence.
Brooks touches on the mental health crisis. But again, he won’t say the quiet part out loud: this generation’s depression isn’t biochemical. It’s cultural. It’s spiritual. It’s what happens when you live in a world with no sacred center, transcendent horizon, or vision of what it means to be human beyond “be productive and be liked.” (RELATED: Christianity, Inc.: The Rise of Silicon Valley’s False Prophets)
He says the Ivy League kids are afraid their degrees are “weights around their necks.” That they’re embarrassed to list their schools on applications. That in the age of Trump, merit feels like stigma. Again: who fed them the lie that merit meant destiny? That Harvard meant immunity? That progress was linear and permanent and deserved?
The worst thing Brooks does is frame all of this as a tragedy of high achievers, as if the collapse of meaning is mostly about how tough it is to be rejected from the Crimson Key Society.
He says nothing — absolutely nothing — about the working-class kids who never even entered the game. Who were told by 8th grade that they’d never matter. Who didn’t have parents to bankroll gap years and therapy. Who got a trade, a truck, or a warehouse shift while the Ivy League set debated the trauma of not getting into their third-choice consulting firm.
Brooks asks, “Are these kids just whining through their privilege?” His answer: “Maybe a little.”
No. Not “maybe.” They are. But they’re also suffering from something very real. Not rejection. Not pressure. But starvation. Moral, spiritual, and emotional starvation brought about by a world that trained them to want everything except the one thing they need. And Brooks, faithful priest of polite secularism, won’t say it. He’ll mourn the symptoms. But never the disease.
There is an easier way to grow up, David.
But it involves telling kids the truth: that you are more than your résumé, that failure is not moral death, that some things are worth suffering for, that truth exists, that meaning exists, and that God is not a metaphor.
Until then, every rejection will feel like ruin. Because a culture that doesn’t give its children purpose will always send them begging for approval.
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