Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do some teenagers and young adults become mass shooters?“

It is a consequence of the internal pressure they feel.

We can say that today’s youth just seek attention and try to deal with the lack of their parents’ and society’s participation in their lives, which is also true, but the root cause lies much deeper.

What makes young adults commit massacres?

They simply don’t know what they live for.

If I have no goal, and my social environments, from the home through to society at large, give me insufficient importance of any specific direction that could really develop me and not just relate to me as a “user,” “consumer” or “customer” in its systems, then I start seeking my own ways to express what is inside of me.

Each and every child, and especially teenager, wants to be loved and taken care of.

Youth have to feel that the surrounding world values them and is ready to support them. Unfortunately, today, there is just an illusion of such a system of support. Moreover, even if it really existed, it wouldn’t be enough.

What is missing in society for today’s youth?

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, our desires have developed to a point today where all the pleasures and beauty available in the world fail to satisfy our inner requests.

Nothing provides us with a failsafe response to the question, “Why am I here?” or “How can I turn my useless existence into something great and valuable?”

There are various theories and approaches that provide different answers to such questions, but they all fall within the realm of achieving something corporeal in this world, or some kind of fantasy pleasure in the afterlife, and an increasing amount of people are waking up to the fruitlessness in such approaches.

This is simply because a new desire is awakening in humanity, which demands a new kind of fulfillment to everything we have ever felt or imagined until today.

Human nature is a continuously growing desire to enjoy. It develops through desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, control, knowledge, and the peak evolution of this desire is when it starts craving spirituality.

At that point, our desires to enjoy pleasures in our world reach a dead end. We become increasingly dissatisfied with life, either trying to dumb down the desire with drugs, medicines, video games, watching hours of Internet video, and many other such engagements; others gauge that dissatisfaction into extremist forms of hatred at society, which can lead to harming others.

What we lack is a method that can lead us to understand how and why this nature is working on us as it does, and how through increased awareness of nature, discover the concealed force of nature that can fulfill this most developed desire: the force of love and bestowal.

The younger generation, especially teenagers, feel this necessity the most. They subconsciously disagree with the world they are coming to terms with, a world where they are afraid to express their feelings, and where all kinds of manipulations stand behind a façade of care and concern.

They want something real and genuine, but have no comprehension of what is real and genuine, since there is no example of anything like that in the surrounding society.

Such helplessness pushes some to commit rash acts, even though they are neither stupid nor criminals—it is just how the inner pressure affects them.

Moreover, we as a society are responsible for it.

Therefore, if we want our future generation to live happily and fulfilled, without engaging in antisocial and destructive thoughts, ideas and actions, we then have to take care of our society.

We need to teach both adults and youth how to exit the false paradigm of this world, how to understand reality, how to correctly relate to the myriad influences of the information age, and discern, from within all the noise, the ultimate meaning of life: the entrance to the upper world, a higher level of existence where our currently tense and divisive relations become replaced with positive, supportive and encouraging ones due to the revelation of the higher force of love and bestowal in our connections.

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