Extreme privilege and fame have never been a recipe for emotional stability, but today’s Hollywood offspring seem especially unequipped to face reality.
Case in point: Ramona Sarsgaard, the 18-year-old daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, who was arrested this month for criminal trespass during a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
This wasn’t her first foray into activism. Sarsgaard has been a committed climate crusader since childhood.
At just 13, she gave a speech at Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience award ceremony in honor of Greta Thunberg.
Like Thunberg, Ramona has built her identity around the belief that climate catastrophe is not only inevitable but imminent.
Sarsgaard marched in the Youth Climate Strike in New York and, according to her mother, is among the many children who “aren’t able to push out of their minds the dire situation that we’re in.”
She’s not alone: An entire generation has been raised to believe they are living through the end of the world — and their mental health reflects it.
Just this week Violet Affleck, 19, daughter of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, published an essay in Yale University’s “Global Health Review” describing a heated conflict with her mother earlier this year.
“I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,” she wrote — in fights triggered by Garner’s shock at the devastation.
“As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of Generation Z,” Violet explained, “my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when.”
She went on to call climate change an “existential and accelerating” crisis.
It’s clear she wasn’t just debating a hot topic with her mother — she was evangelizing a worldview that sees environmental collapse as a given.
If that mindset sounds extreme, that’s because it’s being carefully cultivated.
Affleck’s worldview was deliberately drilled into her by climate activists, who have groomed an entire generation to join their crusade.
At institutions like Yale, climate anxiety is treated as a developmental inevitability.
An advice column in a Yale newsletter a few years ago instructed parents and caregivers to lead even the youngest children through therapeutic climate exercises, like imagining their favorite animal being impacted by climate change and speaking from its perspective.
Just imagine launching that conversation with your 4-year-old: “Think of Peter Rabbit. Now imagine Peter has run out of food and dies because he’s too thirsty, has no grass to eat, and no shade to take refuge in as temperatures soar.”
You couldn’t come up with a more traumatic lesson for a young child to engage in if you tried —yet the “experts” at Yale recommend it as a therapeutic template to explain to children that the world is ending.
The consequences of this approach are measurable.
A global 2021 study on climate anxiety found that in 31 of 32 countries, distress about climate change was linked to poorer mental health.
In another survey of 10,000 young people across 10 nations, three-quarters said “the future is frightening,” and more than half believed that “humanity is doomed.”
And yet the same activists, media outlets and global institutions that amplify climate alarmism are now wringing their hands over the youth mental-health crisis.
A pair of Stanford University psychiatrists, discussing the 2021 anxiety study on the World Economic Forum website, sought to normalize what they called “climate distress” — defining it as a troubling blend of dread, sadness, powerlessness and anger.
It’s “a normal and appropriate thing to feel,” they claimed, in the face of “hurricanes, droughts and floods, and clear evidence that our planetary boundaries are being overshot.”
But let’s be honest: These experts are reporting on the very fire they helped start.
And they need that fire to keep the recruits engaged and energized to stay in the fight.
Sarsgaard, Thunberg and Affleck are the natural products of a culture that’s fed kids a steady diet of existential panic.
Raised in privilege, surrounded by wealth and educated at elite institutions, these young women nonetheless see themselves as doomed.
The first two already boast criminal records — and Affleck, by her own account, has become so unbearable a scold that her family may opt to shelter in place next time disaster threatens, rather than crowd into a cramped hotel room with her truculent presence.
They’re fighting an existential battle to save the planet — one they’ve been convinced is rapidly coming to an end.
And as Sarsgaard demonstrates, they’re easy prey for those pushing the next leftist cause du jour.
They represent an entire generation driven off the deep end by their own manufactured anxiety.
We told kids the world was ending. They listened.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
