“Disoriented, wandering, directionless.” Many people today, particularly young people, would describe their lives and futures using these terms.
However, these words were actually used to describe the young adult generation living a century ago, in the 1920s. Feelings of directionless desperation were so pervasive that Ernest Hemingway referred to his contemporaries as “the Lost Generation” in his book The Sun Also Rises. The term became iconic and synonymous with that period in history.
Why did that generation feel so lost? And are there parallels to the generation coming of age in the 2020s?
How a Generation Became ‘Lost’
Last century’s feeling of lostness developed as young people lived through consecutive crises, starting with the Great War. As the war began in the summer of 1914, many young men were eager to enlist to fight for their country. However, the “Great War” was brutal and inhumane. Prevalent weapons such as machine guns and poisonous gas caused many soldiers to return home with shell shock after hearing the constant barrage of artillery shells firing. Following years of fighting in muddy trenches, the deaths of 8.5 million men, and the maiming and injury of over 21 million, many veterans returned home disillusioned. So many lives lost, for what?
The second crisis in a generation began as the war still raged. The Spanish flu pandemic began among soldiers in battle. The influenza eventually spread around the world and killed 50 million people.
Life at the time felt apocalyptic. Poet T. S. Eliot evoked life’s seeming futility and desolation in “The Waste Land”: “Unreal City / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn / . . . I had not thought death had undone so many / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.”
Lost Generation 2.0
Living in 2022 may not be as woeful as living in 1922, yet it still evokes the disillusionment and disappointments of a “wasteland” for many. The disruptive devastation of COVID-19, rising political division, and social media’s cruelty leave many feeling cynical and lost. Might we be seeing the emergence of a Lost Generation 2.0?
In 2021, Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old inaugural poet, captured the mood when she described contemporary life as a search for light in a “never-ending shade.” The pandemic didn’t create this feeling, but it exacerbated it—with schools closed, plans canceled, and young people further distanced from relationships that were already fragile. Mental health issues were already on the rise before the pandemic, but problems like depression and anxiety increased even more—by more than 25 percent globally—during the pandemic.
The disruptive devastation of COVID-19, rising political division, and social media’s cruelty leave many feeling cynical and lost. Might we be seeing the emergence of a Lost Generation 2.0?
Screen time undeniably contributes to lostness. A November 2021 study published in the Pediatrics journal of the American Medical Association found a significant correlation between hours spent in front of screens and the mental health decline, lack of resilience, and elevated stress experienced by young people. On average, teenagers doubled their daily internet use (outside of their online schooling) during the pandemic from 3.6 hours to 7.7 hours—further aggravating the adverse mental and spiritual effects of excessive screen time.
For hours every day, addictive algorithms present young people with a dizzying amount of options, temptations, and misinformation. News of rampant injustices, abuses, and disasters of varying degrees come at them constantly via social feeds from all over the world. A ceaseless litany of online outrage, debate, emotional discourse, and images that inflame insecurities deplete users.
On top of technology use, this generation is dealing with an epistemological crisis (“post-truth”) in which experts and authorities are ever less trusted, institutions have proven to be broken or unreliable, and our secular age has rendered faith a peculiar (or even naive) option. For many young people raised in the faith, deconstruction is now pulling apart the scaffolding that once secured their spiritual structure.
Given all this, it’s unsurprising many young people today would feel lost in ways not dissimilar from their forebears a century ago. Yet there is hope.
Hope for the Lost Generation 2.0
Hope can be found by looking back. The greatest history book—the Bible—accounts for God’s faithfulness from generation to generation (Josh. 24; Ps. 119:90; Luke 1:50) and informs us that while a generation may feel lost, ultimately all forms of lostness are not connected to a war, or pandemic, or technological change. All lostness is downstream from the original crisis of man’s sin and his resulting separation from God.
But into that lostness, biblical history gives us the great hope of God’s redeeming work: Jesus left heaven and came to find and save man, who didn’t realize how lost he was without him. In so doing, Christ split history into two. The BC era ended and the Anno Domini (AD), the year of the Lord, arrived. “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10), dying on the cross so those who place their faith in him can be eternally cured of lostness.
God’s seeking and saving work was evident in the Lost Generation of the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, evangelists such as J. Gordon McPherson, John Sung, and Billy Sunday preached the gospel around the world and thousands came to faith. Lost Generation 1.0 also included C. S. Lewis, who survived the trenches of the Somme and lost dear friends in the war. Unlike some of the writers of the period, Lewis channeled his disillusionment into desire for God and eventually into apologetics for the Christian faith. Martyn Lloyd-Jones also knew hardship and tragedy in this period (he lost his brother to the Spanish flu), yet he helped spark evangelical revival in his later life.
Sometimes the times of greatest anxiety, fear, and despair create the most fertile ground for the gospel.
What the Lost Generation 2.0 Needs to Hear
Jesus’s work to “seek and save the lost” didn’t stop in the Lost Generation 1.0, and neither has it halted in Lost Generation 2.0. If you’re feeling lost, there is hope. Read the Bible, go to church, listen to the testimonies of believers who have seen the goodness of God amid tragedy, and seek God through prayer. His promises are true. His Spirit is able. His hope is not a fool’s hope.
Sometimes the times of greatest anxiety, fear, and despair create the most fertile ground for the gospel.
And if you’re already a Christian, share your “Amazing Grace” story openly and often: “I once was lost, but now I’m found.” What has that looked like in your life? The Lost Generation 2.0 needs to hear your story.
In a world of anxiety, may the church rise up to be a non-anxious presence. In a world of cynicism and despair, may we be heralds of good news and hope. And may we pray that the Holy Spirit would bring revival and save countless lost, wandering souls.