How unemployment, addiction, and frustration are turning youth into society’s unwanted category.
Every modern society has two lists. The first list contains creatures it wants to protect, dogs, butterflies, pandas, dolphins, snow leopards, motivational speakers, billionaires pretending to be simple, and occasionally trees, but mostly on environment day.
The second list contains creatures it wants to crush, cockroaches, rats, mosquitoes, unemployed youth, angry students, addicts, poor protesters, and anyone who reminds the system that something is fundamentally wrong.
The fascinating thing is not the existence of these lists. The fascinating thing is how quickly human beings can move from one list to another. A butterfly that loses its colour becomes an insect. A student without a job becomes a burden. A frustrated young man becomes anti-social. A poor addict becomes garbage. Civilisation is full of temporary butterflies.
Modern society claims to believe in equality, but its real philosophy is much simpler, Human value depends on present usefulness. If you are productive, smiling, earning, entertaining, consuming, or clapping at the correct moments, society calls you talented. If you are exhausted, unemployed, mentally collapsing, or questioning the structure itself, society quietly begins moving you toward the cockroach category. At first it uses softer language, negative. Lost. Failure. Problematic. Then stronger language arrives naturally. Dangerous. Useless. Hopeless.
History proves something terrifying, before every society becomes cruel physically, it first becomes cruel linguistically. No civilisation wakes up one morning and suddenly starts hating sections of its people. It begins more politely. Through television debates. Through jokes. Through social media comments. Gradually, empathy becomes a luxury item. The rich receive explanations. The poor receive labels. A wealthy drug addict is described as battling inner demons. A poor drug addict becomes a menace to society. A billionaire avoiding taxes is financially smart. A hungry man stealing bread becomes morally bankrupt. A frustrated graduate shouting on the street becomes a threat to peace, while the corruption that destroyed his future is called a complicated issue requiring committee review.
Societies manufacture despair industrially, then act shocked when desperate people emerge from the factory. What exactly did we expect from generations raised on motivational speeches and unemployment statistics simultaneously? In many places today, earning a degree resembles purchasing a lottery ticket from a shopkeeper who has already fled the country. Youth spend years collecting certificates only to discover that vacancies travel slower than a tortoise.
Then comes the great national ritual, blaming the youth themselves. A society can forgive corruption more easily than frustration. It can tolerate inequality longer than anger. It can normalise exploitation provided the victims remain silent and hygienic. The real fear is not broken systems. The real fear is visible disappointment. That is why modern civilisation invests heavily in distraction. Keep people emotionally occupied enough and they may never audit reality properly. Give them endless scrolling, endless outrage, endless celebrity gossip, endless culture wars, endless short videos of strangers dancing beside luxury cars they do not own. A distracted population is easier to govern than a thinking one.
Even suffering today must become aesthetically pleasing before society notices it. Sadness now requires presentation skills. If your pain is poetic, educated, and Instagrammable, people call you, deep.
If your pain smells of poverty, addiction, unemployment, or rage, society sprays intellectual insecticide immediately. This is why the recent cockroach metaphor matters.
Cockroaches survive in neglected places. Their existence usually signals hidden decay somewhere else. Nobody enters a clean functioning house and suddenly finds an assembly of cockroaches conducting democratic elections near the refrigerator. The cockroach is never the first failure. It is evidence of earlier failures.
Likewise, addicted youth, violent frustration, collapsing mental health, social anger, and emotional numbness do not appear magically. They emerge from neglected educational systems, unequal economies, performative politics, exhausted families, and cultures that measure human worth almost entirely through income.
But societies prefer killing visible cockroaches over repairing invisible sewage. Repair requires honesty. Crushing requires only slippers. And slippers are cheaper than reform.
The tragedy is that many young people slowly begin seeing themselves through the language society gives them. After enough rejection, humiliation, and hopelessness, even intelligent minds start believing they are disposable. Nothing damages a civilisation more than convincing an entire generation that their existence is an administrative inconvenience.
No young person is born toxic. Human beings decay socially the way buildings decay structurally, slowly, silently, and usually while leaders are giving speeches nearby. Perhaps the final proof that we live in a cockroach society is this, modern civilisation has learned how to keep economies growing while souls shrink. It has mastered technology but forgotten tenderness. It has built smarter machines but weaker communities. It can track missiles across continents but cannot detect loneliness inside homes. It can identify faces using artificial intelligence yet fails to recognise despair sitting at the dinner table. And still we ask why the youth are angry. Perhaps because butterflies were promised gardens but inherited kitchens full of cockroaches instead.
https://countercurrents.org/2026/06/linguistic-cruelty-and-beyond
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After the truth-shower 