How do we know what we want to become? It’s not uncommon to ask a child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We nod smilingly when they say “doctor” or “teacher” or even “astronaut.” Children aren’t trained to say things like “a person who lives kindly” or “someone who is generous.” But where do children get their ideas about the kind of person they want to become?
Our culture has certain acceptable “scripts” that children imbibe from an early age. We hand on stories that showcase what a good life really entails: stories of real people to emulate, or fictional heroes and heroines who overcome the oppression they’re living under. Through movies, books, TV shows, TikTok videos, the people we study at school and witness in our communities, we learn what it is we want to become.
As girls begin to grow up, they are handed a particular narrative about what a successful life entails: getting good grades, getting good degrees, establishing their career as independent women, then—and only then—getting married and having two lovely children. Their twenties, they are told, are for gaining experience in the world. But for some who were raised with this script, it may be losing its stronghold. Can we learn anything from their questions?
Author Lillian Fishman explores the narrative of experience-as-queen as it was portrayed in the hit TV series Girls, which ran from 2012–2017. She describes how one of the main character’s “object in life is to take in experiences, and the object of Girls is to delight in the vast breadth of thrilling and harrowing events which can befall a willing girl in her early twenties in New York.” The message is clear: It doesn’t matter what the experience is, it’s having it that’s important. And if you marry young? You’ll miss out.
But after reading Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, Fishman wonders if perhaps this narrative isn’t quite right. Though different from a TV series, books can be hugely influential among young women. “Rooney’s novels were among the few pieces of art about young womanhood that were consumed or at the very least argued over by just about every woman I knew between 2018–2022,” she explains. “Of course, Beautiful World, Where Are You is not a simple romance. . . . A primary concern of the book is that, for the young secular woman, the pillars of faith, marriage, and children have been emptied out.”
Is it possible that “the pillars of faith, marriage, and children” have been emptied out precisely by the emphasis on experience-as-queen? Fishman found herself surprised to be asking such questions.
This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us—a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist—might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.
Fictional characters’ conversations and experiences can be powerful enough to make a real woman question the cultural narrative she’s been living with her entire life. Maybe experience doesn’t have to be queen. Maybe a youth built to serve independence isn’t the only road to happiness. Maybe early commitment is actually a good thing. “What if,” wonders Fishman, “‘they’—the Christians, the anti-intellectuals, the primacy-of-motherhood folks—are right?”
“We don’t dislike marriage, we doubt it. It will never work, so why try.”
Fishman’s reflections on the potency of narrative conveyed through fiction is a compelling witness to the influence of stories. Stories have the power to shape our vision of what a happy, successful, satisfying life is. They have the power to make us wonder if what we’ve always assumed is worthwhile really is. And they have the power to make an “other” way of living feel less foreign—and possibly even attractive.
But if another way of living is attractive in fiction, where can it be found in real life? The girls of this generation are being shaped by a cultural narrative of doubt. They might hear of something like community, friendship, or lifelong marriage, but they do not know what these things are, what value they have, or that they are, in fact, actually possible. Gen Z journalist Freya India writes, “The sexual revolution destroyed trust and now we better be doubtful, how else can we protect ourselves?” She is “just not persuaded that so many young women object to having families for ideological reasons. We don’t dislike marriage, we doubt it. It will never work, so why try.”
Our culture, argues India, runs on doubt. The “it will never work” message continues to be peddled by companies (advertising on social media) who want to keep the problem alive in order to sell us a solution. What else could keep us hooked on dating apps, dubious “medical” solutions, AI-driven machines with all the answers? But it’s also shared by everyone in this culture who is feeding off the doubt. We not only doubt ourselves: We doubt whether objective morality exists or even whether anything matters at all. She describes the modern disposition: “doubt that it would matter if you threw it all away.”
This doubt culture described by India reveals itself as the direct fruit of the experience-as-queen culture described by Fishman. If all that matters is gaining experience for its own sake, then it can be gained without boundaries—in fact, more so, sometimes. Experience not only promise keeping but promise breaking, not only romance but mutual use, not only friendship but betrayal—it all counts. Indeed, the most important thing in gaining experience is simply not to get caught, not to be trapped in something that would stop you from being able to gain more experience (which in this narrative is the same thing as “happiness”). What matters is not the outcome but the experience itself, and anything that gets in the way of it deserves to be doubted.
More than a generation’s worth of fear-based messaging has done its job. “Girls grew up being told that an empowered woman is always willing to walk away, until this is the only habit we have,” writes India. After all, there’s always another experience waiting around the corner.
“We want change but won’t look at why young people are this way, won’t lead by example, won’t encourage what it actually takes.”
But like Fishman, India questions this cultural narrative: “Have we ever considered that the most dangerous ideology might not be the one asking us to have faith through hard things but the one training us to doubt what is good, to see something that should be treasured as a trap?”
Instead of citing fiction, India points to the value of real-life witnesses in fostering these important questions on a cultural level.
And this is why it kills me when people argue that we all have complete agency and can’t talk about culture. What, the children who grew up on graphic online porn are suddenly going to know how to love someone for life? What, the generation taught to always put their freedom first are suddenly going to be great spouses, not feel terrified and trapped and restricted? What, the generation raised to swipe through each other like objects, consume each others’ lives like content, that won’t affect their character at all? Their ability to love? What, girls who never saw a glimmer of affection between their parents will grow up and magically let their guard down, feel fine to commit and start families? We want change but won’t look at why young people are this way, won’t lead by example, won’t encourage what it actually takes.
The good news is that there are people who are actually living differently: They are committed to chastity, willing to take vows, and live self-sacrificially. These people are in our neighborhoods, at our parishes, even reading this website. These people are practicing Christians who are by no means perfect but keep trying anyway.
The world needs these witnesses. This generation of girls needs to be invited, not necessarily to a formal lecture on the nature of love but into homes where couples pass each other the baby alongside the butter amidst the happy chaos of a table full of children; into gatherings where an older woman quietly asks them genuine questions about their lives over a cup of tea; into places where singles who would like to get married have normal conversations with eye contact over the chips and salsa, nary a phone in sight. They need to witness steadfast religious people who remain cheerfully paradoxical to a world unfamiliar with poverty, chastity, and obedience. They need to know women who embrace the cross of singlehood or infertility without succumbing to the siren song of IVF. They need to see families willing to care for their aging loved ones rather than yielding to the pressures of so-called “assisted dying.” They need the fatherly care of priests who stand in persona Christi, ready to lead by service. They need the reality of real people living real lives.
How else can a generation who has grown up with nothing but doubt about the possibility of lifelong marriage, about the need to die to self in order to truly live, about the joy found in service to neighbor, find hope?
“The Church represents the memory of what it means to be human in the face of a civilization of forgetfulness, which knows only itself and its own criteria,” said Pope Benedict XVI. The Church is the Body of Christ, made up of members living on earth and in eternity, and this witness is crucial in a culture shaped by an obsession with experience and a compulsion to doubt.
The saints are living witnesses to the importance of faithful love—love of God, love of neighbor, love of the Church, love of friends, love of enemies. Their stories need to be retold to a generation that doubts just about everything. These girls need to hear about women who choose to give up wealth and power in order to serve the poor; who remain faithful to an unfaithful spouse; who use their education to help others rather than climb a ladder of worldly success; who enter the silence of a monastery not to escape but to lay down their lives in prayer and suffering for a world that needs it; who seek not experience itself but the God who made all things.
Stories, be they fictional, legendary, biographical, or some combination of all (as with so much hagiography), are important because they offer a vision of what is worthy and what is possible. They help to shape our identities: In the life of another, we can often see more clearly what we do or do not want to become.