Today’s youth might be the first generation in history to learn that self-identity holds more significance than their role within a community. This shift has been driven by the ‘woke’ mentality, which, while now fading, has promoted a particular type of self-centeredness.

Individuals are now encouraged to pledge their allegiance not to their family or local community, but to those who share their identity. Their life’s purpose is no longer something passed down through generations but found on their ‘personal journey’. They are urged to embark on a quest of self-discovery, embrace personal truths, and distance themselves from ‘toxic’ individuals—even if these include close family members.

They can select from a broad spectrum of possible gender identities and retreat to online spaces filled with people who echo their beliefs, on platforms built around showcasing self-images and personal narratives.

Kids used to dream of being astronauts. Now two-thirds of Gen Z want to be an online influencer.

Feminists fought hard against women having to stay at home and look pretty, only for many of their kids to dream of emulating Kim Kardashian so they can stay at home and look pretty.

In the palm of every child’s hand is a video games arcade, a casino, a shopping mall, a raging culture war, a cinema, a 24-hour radio station playing only their favourite music, a gallery filled with photographs of everybody else’s massive success. No wonder they’re hooked on screens, increasingly anxious and addicted to instant gratification.

Consequently many young people now expect everything good in life to be available immediately, handed to them on a plate. Preferably a fancy square one, decorated with pink salt and chilli flakes, for them to show on Instagram.

And a weak establishment gives in to them. A couple of years ago student medics in New York signed a petition against their tutor, an esteemed professor. His apparent offence was making the organic chemistry class too difficult so that many of them were failing. Instead of telling them to get off TikTok and read a book, the university responded by firing the professor.

I don’t entirely blame young people for this attitude. They have been raised not only on woke culture but smartphones and the internet. Lots of people can no longer find their way to the local train station without following a GPS map on their phones and find themselves panicking when they have no wifi. It took just one generation for physical maps to become antiques used by hobbyists and the elderly.

At the current rate of development, kids won’t be able to compose their own sentences without being connected to the internet. Nor will they create new or groundbreaking art or music because of the synthetic, effortless alternatives generated by AI copying centuries of human labour and ingenuity that came before them.

But the most disturbing problem is the substitution of human relationships with synthetic versions that resemble reality but are anything but. Young people will have no incentive or ability to build the social skills needed for the travails of real-world relationships if, through social media, we give them unfettered access to synthetic companionship that pretends to be the real thing. Just look at the explosion of pornography and the rise in porn addiction. Swathes of young people are hooked on immediate, unlimited satisfaction from unrealistic and sometimes disturbing portrayals of sex.

It leaves them with distorted expectations and it robs them of the desire to go out and work for something that’s supposed to be a challenging exercise in social skills, self-improvement and managing human complexity.

When I was growing up I had no idea what my friends were doing unless I was physically with them. My sons, on the other hand, were raised on a relentless stream of photographic evidence that all their friends and colleagues are having the time of their lives while they are not.

The result is ‘FOMO’ – the fear of missing out – and it’s the turbulent force behind the rising tide of anxiety and self-loathing. The envy machine that stokes all this is social media – which was also the baking powder behind the rapid rise of woke. Tribal, global and powered by outrage, it makes a perfect breeding ground for bad ideas and purity purges.

But, like it or not, social media is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere and frankly I wouldn’t want it to. But we have to learn to steel ourselves with a tough outer armour of common sense and recognise that the inflammatory do-or-die arguments we have online are worlds away from how we conduct ourselves in the real world.

The most imperative conflicts and debates on X have no impact whatsoever on tangible things that really matter, like our personal relationships, our physical health and whether we can pay the bills. I love the vibrant riot of competing opinions, ideas and solutions you get on social media, but I recognise that there’s a more important world over the brow of my screen.

I worry, though, that young people simply don’t get this. On their smartphones they’re exposed to a relentless and limitless supply of content and language that no parent would ever show to them and to judgment and standards that dangerously warp their expectations of reality.

The most obvious problem is their expectation of instant gratification and shortcuts. Everything has to be available instantly and effortlessly.

Behind all these worrying developments, there is also clearly a failure of parenting and role models at play. The students who were so shocked to discover that organic chemistry is actually quite difficult are the product of a society in which parents call their infant children ‘heroes’ and schools hand out ‘participation trophies’ for finishing in last place.

If you slap trigger warnings on Dumbo and The Jungle Book, don’t be surprised when the kids grow up to be horrified – as millions have been – by old episodes of Friends on Netflix. Jennifer Aniston responded to a huge viral trend of Gen Z teenagers decrying the classic sitcom as ‘sexist, transphobic and lacking diversity’ by lamenting the sanitised mollycoddling mess we have created to protect them.

And it’s getting worse. We used to talk about fussy ‘helicopter parents’ who hovered around their children and took an unhealthy interest in solving all of their problems for them. Now those parents are going further and rolling over anybody who stands in the way of their child’s progress.

It’s reported that a quarter of Gen Z jobseekers have turned up at a job interview with a parent in tow, while 15 per cent of employers have received complaints about not giving an applicant the job – from their mother or father.

I’ve read hundreds of stories about how Gen Z workers are prone to laziness, taking offence and showing a lack of interest in their jobs. But maybe it’s because we raised them to believe they should follow their wildest dreams and that everything falls apart if they don’t get into an elite university.

Everybody wants the very best for their children but that includes allowing them to experience rejection, failure and disappointment. The real world is full of it. We’re all going to take a beating at some point, but failure itself is not fatal. It will bring you to your knees – if you let it. Success is really about overcoming failure, not avoiding it. The more you learn to overcome setbacks, the more successful you will be.

But our woke culture, instead of celebrating resilience and graft, has succumbed to the systemic indulgence of wallowing. Young people are bombarded with information and ideas about things that might be wrong with them. There is viral currency in victimhood. Speaking ‘your truth’ is deemed brave and courageous.

All of the social validation and rewards are for talking about pain and strife as if struggling itself is the end goal. Celebrities are lauded for revealing their ‘mental health journey’.

Instead of simpering confessionals, though, I want to see them talking about strength and solutions, how bad things happened but they came back stronger than they were before.

I’m a firm believer in massive ambition and dreaming big, but what young people need to grasp is that gratification and glory in life don’t often come with Instagram glamour. All those aspiring ‘influencers’ need to be told the truth – that fewer than 1 per cent of them will ever wield enough influence to actually make a decent living from it, ranking it alongside modelling, elite sports and acting as beyond the reach of the vast majority.

The smartest strategy is to find something you’re actually very good at and do a lot more of it. There is no shame in mastering traditional skills – quite the opposite. For all the talk of artificial intelligence replacing vast numbers of human jobs, it’s going to be a very long time before a chatbot can lay down a carpet or fix a burst water main.

And clearly you’d be far happier and far richer as the world’s greatest plumber than the world’s lousiest TikToker.

Nowhere has the betrayal of young people been more damaging than in our colleges and universities. They are not the holy grail, more so now than ever. Many have become seething hotbeds of vicious woke intolerance. Woke was born in our universities and they will be the place where the last rites take the longest to be read.

Universities are supposed to be the engine rooms of intellect; a place for genius to flourish and for debate to stretch the boundaries of human understanding. Instead they’ve become ‘safe spaces’ from ideas instead of for them.

Feminists routinely have their speaking gigs cancelled amid howls of protest that they are ‘transphobic’ or are met with abusive placard-waving mobs attempting to drown out their heretical opinions.

Courses and reading lists have been sanitised or labelled with ‘trigger warnings’ on the assumption that students are hopelessly infantile and vulnerable. Aberdeen warns that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains ‘classism’ while Greenwich censures Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four over its scenes of ‘self-injurious behaviour and animal cruelty’. Budding crime scene investigators at Exeter University are warned that their forensic science course includes ‘material of a graphic nature’.

In a disturbing and worsening trend, hundreds of US professors have been sanctioned or fired for expressing opinions that challenge the cosy campus consensus or risk upsetting the students. Academics have always tended to be moderate Lefty idealists, but there’s been a mass deportation of conservative opinions. It’s been calculated that there are nine raving Marxists for every curmudgeonly conservative. So much for diversity!

What we now have is a perfect storm of increasingly woke-infused students meeting a wall of woke professors in an institution that bends to their every woke whim to keep the cash flowing.

Having said that, a recent study revealed a huge proportion of American students are faking their own wokeness. At two top universities, nearly 88 per cent of them were exaggerating their progressive views to further their social or professional prospects. Four out of five admitted submitting coursework that misrepresented their personal views simply to grease the wheels of their professors.

There is nothing new or surprising about students being liberal and idealistic. The worrying development, however, is the failure to prepare them for the impending reality in which many of their ideas will be robustly challenged by people who vehemently disagree with them.

You can’t possibly know that you’re right about anything if you systematically plug your ears and squawk over every different point of view. But universities have become giant echo chambers that only allow one uncompromising woke world-view.

The fundamentalist intolerance on elite campuses was laid bare in the aftermath of the October 2023 massacre in Israel. The Hamas terrorists were literally still in the middle of carrying out their barbaric rampage when Yale professor Zareena Grewal posted that ‘Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.’ On the day after, more than 30 student groups at Harvard signed a statement holding the Israeli regime ‘entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’.

Dozens of US campuses were overwhelmed by occupations and disorder, which quickly spawned replica protests in the UK. Long before Israel’s bombardment and blockade in Gaza became morally indefensible, Jewish students and staff were threatened or abused. Some were physically attacked. Viral clips showed demonstrators proudly chanting ‘burn Tel Aviv to the ground’ and ‘Hamas we love you, we support your rockets too’.

This repellent and dogmatic racism could only have flourished unchecked in this fairytale world of ‘oppressors’ and the ‘oppressed’, which universities have baked into their teaching for years.

Here were some of the most privileged people on planet earth, raging against the only multi-ethnic democracy in the Middle East and in support of a regime that violently crushes protests and imprisons homosexuals. It only makes sense in the self-loathing story of marginalised heroes and privileged villains.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with protesting against war. The problem is that we’ve given young people such a basic and uncompromising framework for understanding the world that many felt justified in supporting literal terrorists and racially abusing Jewish people to the point of incitement to violence.

To my mind, the role of universities is quite straightforward. They should be centres of excellence that give young people the facilities to carry out groundbreaking research and the skills to create economic value. That’s it.

Instead they’ve appointed themselves as agents of change and social engineers whose main goal is to eliminate injustice and promote diversity. They’re overflowing with do-gooders who are not doing anything good. Most of them employ as many ‘administrators’ overseeing things like diversity quotas, compliance and marketing as they do teaching staff.

Administrators at Cardiff University banned phrases like ‘piece of cake’ for being ‘too British’ and at Leeds University they barred the words ‘mum and dad’ because they are so wickedly gendered. Yale and Harvard ludicrously now have more administrators than students.

A good place to start in turning things around would be sacking all of these people. Classes on white supremacy should be replaced by classes on the importance of free speech. Every student should have to specify the social cause they are most passionate about and write an essay from the perspective of someone who thinks they are totally wrong.

And anybody who ‘de-platforms’ a guest speaker by hurling abuse at them should be promptly de-platformed from the university.

If only there was a University of Common Sense, or a course named ‘Introduction to Contemporary Piers Morgan Theory’. Instead of PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), we should have PP-Me, open to adults and youngsters of all abilities who want to get ahead and for the world to be a bit less nuts. At its core would be common sense and the need to tell the truth.

Despite endless concerted efforts to banish me from the media and polite society, speaking up for what I believe in and sharing my honestly held opinions has generally always worked for me.

Nothing good can come of keeping your head below the parapet and censoring yourself in the name of appeasing others.

The whole world is a seething mass of people who want to control the direction of society, politics and culture.

Taking part in that debate is the spice of life and the bedrock of democracy.

But it should not always be a team sport. Modern tribalism often boils down to the idea that people who want everything to be more liberal or more conservative should unite on all things, even when they disagree, because defeating the other side is the sole mission.

Neither ‘side’ can be entirely right, or wrong, about absolutely everything. To think otherwise is insincere, it ruins debate and it’s the main reason why politics has become so hopelessly hate-filled and partisan.

My opinions change when the facts change, as they should do. I’m not interested in picking a ‘side’ and passing its purity tests. I’m committed to following my instincts and keeping a firm grip on my own sense of right and wrong.

The woke movement, though, was so intransigently certain of its righteousness that any dissenting view had to be shamed and silenced. And it was strictly a set menu, not an all-you-can-eat buffet. ‘Allies’ had to be all in on the whole package with no exceptions allowed.

Hence, otherwise sensible liberal politicians found themselves defending puberty blockers for children, there were marches under the banner of ‘Queers for Palestine’ and real problems were brushed under the carpet.

The Casey Review, which finally forced the government to order a national inquiry into the UK sex-grooming scandal, has an entire chapter on ‘denial’. Louise Casey found that powerful officials had the data to prove suspects were mostly Asian men but ordered it to be covered up, as they feared stoking racial tensions or being accused of racism themselves.

Their cowardice and negligence led to incalculable suffering that carried on for years after it could have been stopped. They were enabled by people much further down the food chain who blotted out the word ‘Pakistani’ with Tipp-Ex in paperwork and chose to say nothing.

The cover-up only fuelled and emboldened racists and hate-mongers by allowing them to dominate the narrative and obliterating public trust. I shudder to think about the misery and angst that could have been prevented by more people having the courage to simply say what they could see.

I realise it will take a long time for everybody to shed the symptoms of Long Woke and make the world a more honest place, but the recovery starts with not blindly following the pack and staying true to your personal beliefs. Be severely allergic to bullshit, follow your gut instinct and never be afraid to say what you mean.

We’re all grown-ups, we can take it.

• Adapted from Woke Is Dead by Piers Morgan (HarperCollins, £22), to be published 23rd October. © Piers Morgan 2025. To order a copy for £18.70 (offer valid to 18/10/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.