We Need Moral Direction

We’ve forgotten the word morals and replaced it with boundaries

Screenshot: TikTok, @margarita.nazarenko

There’s a lot of advice out there about anxiety, especially for young people. Anxious people need to do breathwork. We need to meditate more. Repeat positive affirmations. Almost none of it works.

I think this is because we now use the word anxiety to describe two different things. There’s the anxiety that makes young people scared to answer the phone or order in restaurants. But there’s also a deeper, ambient anxiety I see so many of us wracked with—a sort of neurotic paralysis. Not knowing which path to take in life. Not knowing what decisions to make. Not knowing who we are. It’s this constant second-guessing, examining every decision to death, agonising over the right thing to do. When young people talk about how unbearable their anxiety is, the relentlessness of it, I think this is more what they mean.

For this anxiety, mainstream mental health advice doesn’t cut it. Maybe it helps in the moment, but the anxiety always comes back. I think that’s because it isn’t about how we feel, or what we want. It’s about how we act. The answer to this anxiety, I’ve come to believe, is living by strong moral values.

Which is not something we hear often. If we feel anxious today we are advised to analyse our past and problems and relationships, rarely our own character. We are asked what would make us happy, never what would make us honourable. We are told to love ourselves, with little care for how we conduct ourselves. We are reminded to find self-respect and self-esteem, forgetting that these things are earned. Self-development is more about ice baths and breathwork than becoming a better person. Living authentically is more about buying products. So much talk about mental health and so little about morality—how we orient our lives, our private code of conduct, whether we even have an overarching sense of good guiding us.

Nowadays we’ve forgotten the word morals and replaced it with boundaries. Boundaries, a popular term in therapy, basically mean the lines we draw in relationships to define what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. In a new romantic relationship, for example, you first need to set boundaries. Boundaries can “be anything, include anything, and change depending on the person/situation/time.” “All that matters is that they feel good to you”! In other words there’s no common moral ground anymore so we are each left to make up our own arbitrary standards, present them to our partners, and hope they find some reason to respect them. We can’t base it on our morality, that’s judgemental, we can’t base it on God, we’ll get laughed at, so instead we base it on our mental health or happiness or some childhood trauma, which makes it feel like an us problem. And we’ve created this messed-up situation where the person in a relationship with a stronger moral instinct often ends up feeling guilty, or seeming the most insecure.

The other problem with everyone setting their own personal boundaries is that we are all getting very confused. Heartbreakingly confused. Look at the relationship forums. Look at all the contradictions. Date someone new now and not only do you need to learn their likes and dislikes but their version of right and wrong. Everyone’s boundaries are entitled to respect and all are equally deserving of respect. Set too many and you’re controlling. Cross theirs and you’re toxic. Everything is up for debate! Which is why I think we’ve ended up with all these young women online complaining about having to explain “basic decency” to their boyfriends. Well yep! That’s what happens when everyone makes up their own morality, when we suspend moral judgement. We end up in separate worlds. Turns out if everyone lives their truth we lose grip on the truth, the ultimate truth, moral truth. Turns out if everyone respects everyone’s boundaries we end up fenced off from each other.

Because of course in our individualistic culture we call it boundaries, another thing that closes us off from other people. We don’t teach young people a framework of moral values to live by, only how to cut themselves off from behaviour they don’t like. Now we enforce boundaries and move further apart. We use it as another reason to retreat from people. Just look at all the young women online saying they protected their peace so much they ended up alone, or cut out so many toxic people there’s nobody left. We got the first part—walk away from disrespect. But our culture fails to follow up with walk toward something. Hold yourself to high standards! Attract and invest in good people! Setting limits on everyone else is no way to live. Don’t just draw a boundary; live your values.

Besides, I don’t know about you but I don’t want a partner who doesn’t betray me because I declared it a boundary of mine, some weird personal hang-up. I’d rather we have the same moral code! A similar conscience! I think it’s a mistake to make morality something we dictate at the start of a relationship in delicate therapy-speak rather than something we search for in people. Surely there’s an argument for not explaining what loyalty is but quietly looking for it. For not teaching people how to treat you. For leaving it unsaid. I have a hard time believing we all feel empowered when someone respects our boundaries, rather than disheartened we had to ask. I don’t want my boundaries to be respected; I want to be bound together in the same moral universe.

But our culture fails to give young people clearer moral guidance, I think, for fear of imposing. Parents are our best friends now, they don’t want to nag us about little things like right and wrong. Friends don’t tell each other how to behave. That’s not education’s job. Therapists don’t want to overstep the line. Some might say something vague about values but won’t dare to suggest what those should be, and probably celebrate whatever we offer. So if you’re young and anxious and looking for actual adult guidance you’ll usually get something like do what makes you feel good, you know yourself best, you do you! And the anxiety gets worse. What do I want? Why do I want that? Who am I?

And the problem is, when you don’t pass moral values onto your children, the world does it for you. It imposes its own values. Values that are ever-changing. Progressive values that endlessly evolve. Sexual values that only become more permissive. Corporate values, consumer values, whatever suits the market. The adults around us stayed lovingly neutral but the world isn’t neutral. Adverts are designed to affect what we value; influencers are there to influence. Think of traditional morality what you like, but we tore away at it because we didn’t want to be constrained, we didn’t want to be controlled—and now we’re free! Free to be exposed to billions of adverts telling us what to believe. Free to be lectured by faceless companies on what is right and wrong. Free to consume constant information, to access every possible worldview, to get muddled about even basic morality. Is cheating always wrong? Is it okay if he betrayed me since we weren’t exclusive yet? Wait what if we were exclusive but not yet official? Do I deserve to feel hurt then? Who knows!

I’m not saying that living by strong moral values makes every decision easy. But it gives guidance. It helps the constant doubt and confusion. From what I can see, a major part of anxiety today is feeling like we can’t trust ourselves to make the right decisions. We rely on all these experts—influencers, therapists, dating coaches—to tell us what to do. And the more we turn to them the less we trust ourselves. There are healthy young people who don’t trust themselves to navigate life without a therapist. They don’t know if they’ve been hurt without asking an online forum or checking with an AI chatbot. They don’t know the kind of love they deserve without watching YouTube videos about what’s healthy and unhealthy, exactly when to have the exclusivity talk, scripts for how to set boundaries. And we’re told we’re lucky for all this. Lucky to be a generation so educated and enlightened about love and relationships. Lucky to be so emotionally intelligent. But here we are, educating ourselves on how to gain basic respect. Needing workbooks and forums and experts to teach us how to love one another. We overcomplicated it and it’s heartbreaking.

But by living by a moral code, over time you trust yourself more. All this noise about what to do, who to be, what to accept in a relationship, only becomes overwhelming if there’s nothing stronger guiding you. Put honesty, loyalty, virtue above all, orient your decisions around that, and you can shut out so much outside influence. You can close down some of the endless decisions, options and ways to turn. There’s a reason we call it a moral compass, and when people abandon it we say they have lost their way. It’s supposed to be a guide. You can’t navigate the whole world with a compass, but it narrows your path, points you forward, shows where to take the first step. Then you can trust in your own inner strength and integrity. You can know that you are at least living consistently and predictably in a world that is inconsistent and unpredictable. That you make decisions based on what is right. And it might cost you some friends, some opportunities, some paths to go down along the way. But you won’t pay with your peace of mind.

That, to me, is actual empowerment. Not the parody of empowerment girls are growing up with, where being a strong woman means hiding how you feel, never fully investing in anyone, cutting people out and pretending to be fine. I think this is why we have this paradox now: a loud feminist message about how women don’t care combined with crippling anxiety among young women. It’s as if the more anxious we get, the more they insist women don’t care, which makes us more anxious. Because it’s a caricature. Because it’s impossible to live up to. Strong women don’t give a fuck! Well it’s human to give a fuck. It’s human to care, to love, to attach. Now we have girls convinced that there’s something wrong with them if they are sensitive and emotional, thinking that’s insecurity or low self-esteem. It’s not true! A strong woman has strong values. You can be strong and feel things deeply. You can be soft and kind but firm with your values. My guess is that young people think if they try to be good and do what is right the world will walk all over them. It’s the exact opposite. The world walks all over you when you have no ethical code, no moral conduct, you don’t take a minute to reflect on how you’re treating people, you let it decide for you what’s right and wrong.

And while we’re at it, it’s funny to me that insecurity—you’re just insecure!—has become the chief insult in the modern world, rather than a fact of it. Yes I’m insecure! There’s nothing secure in this world to hold on to! Show me some shared values, some solid ground, anything to safely attach to. It’s normal to be insecure in a situation that is not secure. Seems to me an entirely natural response to living in a morally ambiguous world, where norms and customs and commitments constantly change. Where we have a progressive movement intent on breaking as many societal boundaries as possible, only to insist we put our own back up and try to defend them. Where we were never given a consistent moral code, and can’t trust that anyone else has one either.

So, as for the anxiety advice. Maybe we don’t need to relax more. Maybe we don’t need more time to ruminate. We need a framework to follow. We need moral direction. Not just arbitrary boundaries to avoid being hurt, but something to live by. Because all this anxiety advice is worthless if you are aiming the wrong way. Do all the breathwork you want, repeat all the affirmations you like, but without strong morals you will keep stumbling into situations and relationships that make you anxious and miserable. Try loving yourself, but I doubt you’ll get far if you don’t do anything to earn it. Without moral direction, our lives seem to be a mix of anxiety and guilt and shame that we can’t make sense of, and maybe we’ll get diagnosed, maybe get some medication, maybe talk to a therapist. But the anxiety will not go away. The world will continue to feel out of our control. We won’t trust ourselves. Let alone get anywhere near loving ourselves.

I write a lot about not falling for things in the modern world. But we also need to ask ourselves: what do I stand for? Not only what do I want to walk away from, but what am I walking toward? Not only what do I want to protect my future children from, but pass onto them? Boundaries are not enough by themselves. We need something to aim at. To attempt to be better, again and again. That, I think, is where we will find relief. We might find self-respect, too, even stumble across self-love. We might find our way to better people, better places, onto a better path. In any case, it’s the closest to peace of mind we can get. So don’t be indifferent about right and wrong, be indignant. Don’t let anyone convince you that your moral instincts are insecurity. Decide what kind of person you want to be, and hold yourself to it. Decide before the world does.