What Happens When a Generation Grows Up Without Reality – Jaco van Zyl (#13)
15 May 2025
With Jaco van Zyl
culture-and-ideology
Psychotherapist Jaco van Zyl argues that Western culture's turn from duty toward personal gratification has quietly eroded the psychological foundations young people need to develop well. His conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts asks whether the widespread embrace of 'my truth' — inside and outside gender discourse — is a symptom of a deeper cultural failure, and what parents, institutions, and therapists can do to restore a shared sense of reality.
Jaco van Zyl is a psychotherapist who has spent his career watching young people struggle not just with individual problems but with something harder to name — a cultural environment that seems to encourage escape rather than engagement with reality. In this conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts, he traces that pattern to a fundamental shift in what Western culture now asks of its members. Where previous generations were shaped by obligation, duty, and a sense of responsibility to something beyond themselves, today's young people are encouraged above all to pursue personal satisfaction and to trust their own feelings as the primary guide to truth. That shift has consequences that extend well beyond any single political controversy. When a culture teaches that inner experience is self-validating — that what feels true is true — it removes the friction that psychological development actually requires. Van Zyl explores how this affects the way young people learn to cope with difficulty, tolerate frustration, and build an identity that can withstand pressure. Without that process, adolescents are poorly equipped to distinguish between genuine self-knowledge and transient emotional states. The phrase 'my truth' sits at the centre of this analysis. It has become a commonplace expression in Western discourse, but van Zyl treats it as something more diagnostic than rhetorical. When institutions, families, and therapists affirm rather than engage with a young person's self-conception, they may believe they are being compassionate. What they are actually doing, he argues, is withholding the reality-testing that healthy development demands. This is directly relevant to gender identity: an ideology that insists a felt sense of gender must be accepted as literal truth, and that questioning it is harmful, belongs to exactly the therapeutic and cultural framework he is examining. The episode gives particular attention to gentle parenting — a philosophy of child-rearing that prioritises emotional validation and the avoidance of conflict. Van Zyl does not dismiss the impulse behind it, but he questions what children lose when adults consistently smooth the way rather than allowing them to encounter and navigate difficulty. The capacity to tolerate disappointment, to accept that the world does not conform to one's wishes, is not a luxury; it is foundational to mental health. What makes this conversation significant is that it approaches the crisis in youth mental health from the inside out. Rather than focusing on any one policy or institution, van Zyl asks about the underlying culture that makes certain ideas feel compelling and certain practices feel kind. The turn toward gratification, the elevation of subjective experience, and the retreat from shared reality did not emerge from nowhere — and understanding how they developed is essential to thinking seriously about what comes next. The hosts press van Zyl on what better practice looks like, for parents and for therapists alike, making this as constructive a conversation as it is critical.
