I believe that societies generally strive to align with truth and reality, but being mortal, we inevitably get some of it wrong. It takes time, but eventually we do catch on to these errors, but unfortunately it is then our tendency to overcorrect in the other direction, and another generation goes by before we realize it. Letting go of the last generation’s mistakes is so pleasant, that we do not recognize the new harm we’re causing until we’ve already passed it on to the next generation.

I see this very keenly with my own millennial generation, which recognized the folly of mandatory morality, but which overcorrected into licentiousness. Mandatory morality can also be described as “perfectionism.” It was the pattern that many millennials were raised with, where we were given this notion that we had to do all of the good things. We had to go to church. We had to get married and have children. We had to grow up and act responsible. And yes, all of these are objectively good things, the very things that every society should have as its top priorities. The problem, though, was that “had” that came with them.

Millennials hated that had. We balked at the notion that our agency was being stripped from us, and we were hellbent on proving that we didn’t have to do anything that we didn’t want to. And prove it we did, by abandoning all the best things of society. We became atheists, we deconstructed the nuclear family, we refused to leave our adolescence. All to prove a point to the prior generation, we ruined our own sense of purpose and happiness, and demanded that the next generation should also be raised with no duties or obligations.

It would have been a great sign of wisdom and nuance, if we could have instead corrected the error while still preserving everything else that was good. I do wish that millennials had said, “you’re wrong, we don’t have to do the good things, but we do choose to.”

Of course, it’s not as if my generation’s story is over. Perhaps we went astray, but we may still have time to get wiser and set things right.