My personal take on this is that, at least here in the sates, we've been fed a steady diet of "The world is dying and only YOU can save it! Won't you take up the mantle and save the world from X?". Fill in X with whatever social/political/ecological/whateverical "problem" you want. So you take a generation or two or three of kids growing up hearing that the world will end if they don't do something, the subtext of that is when people get hurt from X then it's your fault for not stepping up and doing something, get them rabid to change X and then when fuck all happens because of X, An Inconvenient Truth's message that the east coast would be underwater by 2010ish (I can't remember exactly) if we didn't do radical change comes to mind, now you got a bunch of blue balled people who've been told from birth that X is a problem and only they can save the world from X with no hope for release.
Come to find out, no, you cannot change the world. All your activism, marches, protests, petitioning does jack shit because the world is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too big for one person to affect it. And the kicker is the one place where they could actually make real change is their local community which they'll abandon and ignore to impose their will on everybody. Whether this is hubris or ignorance I don't know.
There's also the issue of the growing number of childless people. Children are the greatest, easiest, and most time proven way to leave a legacy. There are people who will never have children because they're too busy living out their fantasy of still being a kid but with an adult paycheck, see Bob, or they kill them out of convenience, see Lindsay. Either way they've have severed their metaphorical and very tangible biological future. Where do they go from there?
All of this stems from a lack of purpose or higher calling. I'd say a good chunk of these activists are, at the best, agnostic so there's no higher power to answer or be accountable to, nothing to help guide them or show them what their purpose is, so they create their own god. Just look at the fervor that people have just talking about the coof and trusting the science. Because this is their religion they must spread the word of their god to all corners of the earth and make believers out of everyone. Unfortunately for any apostate, you disbelief doesn't just send you to hell but will take others with you so you MUST be changed or stopped.
I'm not a smart man so sometimes it difficult for me to put into proper words what I'm thinking so I'll summate myself with a quote about this from C.S. Lewis
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis,
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
