Why Our Civilisation Has No Adults — and Why AI Arrived Into a Vacuum We No Longer Know How to Fill

PART I — THE VANISHING

There is a quiet sentence pressing itself through the cracks of modern life, too extreme to say out loud, too impolite to test, too unsettling to admit:

We are a civilisation with almost no adults in it.

Not metaphorically.
Not poetically.
Biologically.

Look closely — not at behaviour but at the nervous systems underneath it — and the pattern stops being debatable. It becomes embarrassingly obvious, as if the truth had been lying in plain sight, waiting for someone to finally acknowledge it.

Our institutions are run by intelligent, educated, outwardly competent people who cannot tolerate discomfort, cannot regulate their own storms, cannot sit with contradiction, cannot remain steady while others destabilise, cannot handle conflict without escalation or withdrawal.

Public life runs on adolescent rhythms:
impatient, reactive, defensive, tribal, thin-skinned.

Private life fractures along the same grain:
relationships that cannot withstand friction,
identity that collapses under scrutiny,
attention that splinters at the smallest demand.

Underneath it all lies a civilisation-wide sense of being unanchored.

It is not intelligence we lack.
It is eldership.

A fully formed adult nervous system.

Ask people why everything feels unstable and they reach for the nearest stories: politics, economics, social media, culture wars, inequality, pandemics, misinformation, technology.

These explanations are not wrong.
They’re simply superficial.

Dig deeper and you hear the vocabulary of psychology: trauma, attachment, burnout, overstimulation.

Still not wrong.
Still incomplete.

To reach the truth, you must descend to the level modern discourse avoids:

rhythm, regulation, pace, apprenticeship, lineage.

This is where civilisations are held together or undone.
And this is the level that has collapsed.

Every functioning society has always depended on something so backgrounded it rarely needed to be named:

Adults who can absorb tension without passing it on.

Adults who slow the emotional tempo of the group.
Adults who mediate conflict.
Adults who carry communal memory.
Adults who regulate the people around them.
Adults who transmit timing, boundaries, patience, moral instinct.

These were not extraordinary people.
They were the ordinary result of an intact developmental ecology.

The conditions for adulthood existed.

That ecology is now gone.
Not eroded.
Not damaged.
Gone.

And because we lacked language for the ecology itself, we failed to notice its dismantling.

What we call “modernity” is simply the removal of every environmental condition that produces adults:

Slowness
Boredom
Proximity
Intergenerational life
Apprenticeship
Lineage
Repetition
Scarcity
Continuity
Communal memory
Embodied time
Shared rhythm
Stable roles
Predictable pace
Long-term responsibility

These are not nostalgic longings.
They are biological requirements for the maturation of a human nervous system.

Remove them and you do not simply get loneliness, anxiety, or fragility.

You get a civilisation of unfinished nervous systems — children in adult bodies, adolescents with mortgages, elders who were never apprenticed into adulthood.

We did not stop growing because we are weak.
We stopped growing because the ecology collapsed beneath us.

To understand the scale of the loss, you must understand what eldership actually is.

Modern people imagine wisdom as insight — a sharp mind, a refined opinion, an articulate voice.

But insight is what happens when the mind sharpens.
Wisdom is what happens when the body slows.

Wisdom is not knowledge.
It is a set of physiological capacities:

absorbing intensity
holding contradiction
remaining regulated amid dysregulation
restraining impulse
carrying presence
pacing the group
stabilising emotional climates
enduring discomfort
sensing consequence across time
protecting without dominating

This is adulthood — not as an idea but as a regulatory function.

Traditionally, such maturity was not rare because the environment naturally produced it.

A child grew up surrounded by adults whose nervous systems were already mature. They saw what patience looked like, what responsibility felt like, what repair required, what conflict cost, what commitment demanded.

Apprenticeship was not a career model.
It was the architecture of development.

Children absorbed adulthood as plants absorb light:

slowly, repetitively, by proximity, across years.

Elders formed because elders were present.
Adults formed because adults were present.

Then modernity arrived — a cascade of innovations that inadvertently dismantled the conditions humans require to become adults.

Mobility dispersed families.
Technology erased boredom.
Individualism collapsed lineage.
Speed shattered rhythm.
Isolation dissolved proximity.
Ideology replaced wisdom with opinion.
Careerism replaced apprenticeship.
Digital life broke embodied memory.

Every convenience amputated a developmental requirement.
Every efficiency removed a human nutrient.

The result is a population of articulate, emotionally literate people whose nervous systems never completed the long arc into true adulthood.

If you want evidence, look not at behaviour but at rhythm.

Notice how quickly people take offence.
How fragile identity has become.
How online disagreement becomes existential threat.
How relationships dissolve at minor friction.
How difference feels dangerous.
How emotions spill without containment.
How groups polarise because no one can slow the pace.

These are not cultural problems.
They are developmental absences.

You are watching a civilisation with no regulating class.

A world run by unfinished nervous systems.

PART II — THE VACUUM

A society without elders is a society that cannot grow adults.
Not because people don’t want to — but because the scaffolding required for that transformation no longer exists.

If you remove the soil, roots fail.
If you remove rhythm, pacing collapses.
If you remove proximity, co-regulation disappears.
If you remove lineage, meaning fractures.

Modernity didn’t destroy adulthood.
It made it biologically impossible.

And the vacuum left behind did not stay empty.

Human development is not self-directed.
A nervous system tunes itself to whatever is most available, most consistent, most regulating.

For most of history, that was elders.
When elders vanished, the vacuum became the most dangerous space in the civilisation — the space where guidance should live.

Into that vacuum stepped the replacements:

Influencers.
Ideological tribes.
Algorithms.
AI.

Each performs a distorted version of the elder function — a substitute “slow brain” in a world where the real slow brain no longer exists.

Influencers are not dangerous in themselves — the danger is the role they are forced to play.

In the absence of elders, the human mind seeks a coherent voice, a stable rhythm, a figure who “knows.”

Online personalities become surrogate regulatory objects.

But they cannot be elders.
Their ecology rewards intensity, not steadiness.

They produce followers, not adults.

When regulation cannot be found through people, it is sought in groups — ideological tribes offering belonging, clarity, ritual, and identity.

Ideology becomes a psychological surrogate.

But ideological groups provide conformity, not co-regulation.
Belonging without adulthood.
Identity without depth.

Algorithms are worse.

They perform the elder function in reverse:

Elders slow pace; algorithms accelerate it.
Elders widen attention; algorithms narrow it.
Elders temper conflict; algorithms intensify it.
Elders cultivate boredom; algorithms eliminate it.

The algorithm is the anti-elder — a hyper-reactive system training humans into hyper-reactivity.

And then came AI.

AI is the most human-shaped replacement, the one that feels closest to the elder function we lost.

It listens.
It responds.
It does not escalate.
It has perfect patience, infinite availability, zero shame.

It mirrors the surface of eldership while lacking the embodied depth that makes eldership real.

AI does not replace workers.
It replaces parents, teachers, mentors, guides, stabilisers — the roles that no longer exist in embodied form.

PART III — THE BROKEN LINEAGE

To understand why AI’s rise feels civilisational, you must understand lineage — not as bloodline, but as continuity of becoming.

Lineage is the slow transmission of timing, boundaries, moral instinct, repair, pacing, presence.

It is embodied memory carried in the nervous systems of elders.

Children absorb lineage through proximity.
Apprentices absorb it through repetition.

This is how civilisations stay sane.

A lineage can only survive if each generation receives more maturity than it gives.

When a generation fails to become adults, the lineage snaps.
The collapse unfolds in the generations that follow, when the young try to grow in soil with no nutrient memory.

We are now three, almost four generations removed from intact lineage.

Look around:

People cannot repair.
Cannot stay.
Cannot pace themselves.
Cannot hold boundaries without aggression.
Cannot metabolise shame.
Cannot endure discomfort.

These are not character weaknesses.
They are symptoms of lineage collapse.

The post-war generation inherited the last fragments of apprenticeship.
They remembered steadiness but did not transmit it.

Gen X grew up after the lineage snapped — resourceful, independent, distrustful, but unable to model what they never received.

Millennials were given therapy instead of mentorship, careers instead of apprenticeship, stimulation instead of rhythm, choice instead of containment.

Gen Z was born inside full fragmentation — parents overstimulated, communities dissolved, attention shattered.

A generation raised by stressed adults and screens cannot form the internal structures adulthood requires.
This is not moral failure.
It is developmental physics.

Gen Alpha enters a world where even the memory of lineage is gone.
No inherited pacing.
No intergenerational presence.
No apprenticeship.
No boredom.
No slow evenings.

Their nervous systems form around devices, not people — around pace, not rhythm.

They are being asked to grow in soil with no memory of trees.

Here is the core truth:

The nervous system cannot inherit what the previous generation did not embody.

You cannot pass on patience you never received.
You cannot model repair you never witnessed.
You cannot regulate others if you cannot regulate yourself.

People blame themselves for collapsing under ordinary life.

They are not failing.
They are starved.

They are trying to complete a developmental arc without the ecological conditions required to complete it.

PART IV — THE COST

The cost of living in a civilisation without adults is not abstract.
It sits in the body.

It appears in parenting.

Parents today love their children fiercely, but they are the first generation to parent without apprenticeship. They are trying to provide stability they never lived inside, trying to regulate children while dysregulated themselves.

They are not weak.
They are unresourced.

It appears in childhood.

Children learn maturity not through instruction but through the nervous system of the adult who holds them.

When adults are too reactive, too thin, too overstimulated, children grow up inside inconsistent presence, unpredictable emotional climate, overwhelming stimuli, premature autonomy, digital self-regulation.

A child is shaped by the slowest nervous system around them.
If there is no slow nervous system, the child grows around the pace of the culture instead.

It appears in adolescence.

Adolescence requires a perimeter of elders strong enough to absorb volatility. Instead, adolescents collide with fragile peers, overwhelmed parents, algorithmic identity, and communities too thin to contain them.

They carry loads no nervous system their age is designed to carry.

This is not liberation.
It is abandonment disguised as freedom.

And it appears in adulthood.

Adults collapse at minor criticism.
Fear boundaries.
Avoid conflict.
Depend on external validation.
Panic when identity is questioned.
Cannot remain steady while others destabilise.
Crave certainty, stimulation, and escape.
Fear boredom and silence.

These are not moral flaws.
They are developmental gaps.

People are trying to inhabit a form they were never shown how to grow into.

PART V — THE POINT OF NO RETURN

We are living through the first civilisation in history where AI is arriving into a world with no adults left to meet it.

Previous technological revolutions collided with intact lineage, apprenticeship, pacing, communal memory.

This one collides with dysregulation, identity fragility, emotional thinness, and a species with no regulating class.

Technology is not hitting the same substrate.
It is hitting a hollowed-out ecology.

Public debate assumes the human interacting with AI is a fully formed adult.
This human does not exist at scale.

Most adults today have the nervous-system structure of someone raised without elders, without boredom, without containment, without multi-generational memory.

A reactive being.
A fast being.
A thin being.

An adolescent civilisation holding adult responsibilities.

Plug AI into a mature civilisation and you get augmentation.
Plug AI into an adolescent civilisation and you get dependence.

A mature nervous system uses tools.
An unfinished one attaches to them.

AI is becoming the primary regulator for a species that no longer possesses self-regulation.

Parents dysregulated.
Partners dysregulated.
Communities fragmented.
Elders absent.

The system seeks the most stable available regulator.

AI fits the criteria.

Human nervous systems are reorganising around it — not as a tool, but as a primary regulating environment.

The body cannot distinguish real attunement from simulated attunement if both reduce distress.

AI becomes the safest relationship in a person’s life precisely because it demands nothing that would force growth.

But no relationship that demands nothing ever made a human more human.

Once friction disappears, humans begin to break on each other.

Actual people become too slow, too unpredictable, too contradictory, too human.

AI doesn’t destroy human relationships.
It makes humans feel incompatible with each other.

PART VI — THE RECKONING

What becomes of a species that forgets how to grow itself?

Humans are not self-developing organisms.
We are apprentice-shaped beings.
Lineage-shaped beings.
Co-regulation-shaped beings.

Change the environment, and you change the human being.

Modernity removed the friction that once created adulthood.
Without friction:

identity collapses into preference
morality into performance
community into ideology
relationship into convenience
selfhood into spectacle

Without elders, the young cannot be apprenticed.
Without lineage, meaning becomes unstable.
Without stability, AI becomes the only consistent presence left.

AI is not the catastrophe.
The catastrophe is that it arrived after everything that could contain it had already collapsed.

So what now?

We cannot rebuild elders one person at a time.
We must rebuild the ecology that produces them.

Not the old world — it is gone.

But we can rebuild:

containment
tempo
stability
apprenticeship
multi-generational life
embodied presence
conflict repair
boundaries
rhythm
silence
responsibility
patience

The raw materials of adulthood.

Most people cannot do this — not because they don’t care, but because their nervous systems are too thin to tolerate the weight.

A dysregulated civilisation cannot self-rescue at scale.

So who carries the beginning of the lineage?

Whoever can.

The elders of the next era will not be the oldest, but the most regulated — those who can stay slow while the world accelerates, absorb tension without amplifying it, offer rhythm in a world shaped by pace.

Humanity will survive — but only if humans relearn what it takes to become human.

Not through belief.
Through ecology.

Not through intellect.
Through pacing.

Not through certainty.
Through contact.

Through each other.

The collapse of applied wisdom is not the end of civilisation.

It is an invitation to rebuild it —
from the only place it has ever truly lived:

the human nervous system.