Paper short abstract:

European youth facing climate crisis may be "privileged" as physically secure, but exist where existential insecurity meets widening empathy zones - becoming "globally attached" to the planet. Thunberg pierced individualism's paralysis to change, and youth went from self-harm to collective agency.

Paper long abstract:

This discussion is based on transferred concepts from my study of former Norwegian Foreign Service children. Moving globally, diplomat children are privileged in socio-economic terms, but not as existential security. Their childhood is embedded in morally judging cultural narratives of assumed privilege, putting further pressure on their mental health: In neoliberal terms, you have only yourself to blame for any imperfections. Furthermore, they have bodily reactions when events occur in regions of the world where they lived, showing different empathy zones of closeness and distance compared to those who are nation-state orientated. This intersectionality of "privileged" existential insecurity and embodied global attachment has transfer value to understanding European youth facing climate crisis. They belong to the assumed privileged, yet daily vivid information of the planet "dying" adds to rising existential pathologies expressed as mental and psycho-somatic illness. Fires in the Amazon and Australia is no longer cold cognitive information - it causes hot bodily reactions of crisis, widening their empathy zones to people, nature and animals far away. A growing sense of the planet as small and sensitive leads to an identity as "globally attached". However, this existential state is paralysing to a young generation served a mainstream culture of individualism. Thunberg provided the cultural tools that enabled them to act collectively and express anger towards systemic power structures. Not only does this have the potential to create change, it is also healing for a generation that has otherwise not known alternatives to pointing inwards for self-realisation and self-harm.