A complete lack of spirituality — conscious connection with something bigger than just the self
For instance, I would say that so-called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder says more about the utterly mind-numbing boredom of school, and children's need to actually do something with their body and their mind, than about an actual disorder in them. The truth is that if there is a mismatch between a child and school, the child will always be blamed.
When was the last time you saw someone critique not just individual teachers, but the structure of school itself? Even the basic act of sitting for 8 hours a day is an absolute tyranny on the body of developing human beings. We just weren't made to sit all day long. And this is only the surface of how coercive school is, with its constant demand of homework, making you take tests about subjects you don't care about, obeying absurd rules and respecting arbitrary deadlines, etc.
But because our system has no need for free people — who also experience freedom in their body in the form of being free to move and play around, as well as freedom in their mind by speaking their truth about what matters — it is the children who need to be shaped to the institution of the school, not the other way around.
Children then come back to a family that also agrees with the demands of school. They might do so in many different ways: by coercing their own child into "paying more attention" (has that ever worked?), or sending them to specialized schools for "difficult children", or sending them to a child therapist, etc.
But the relationship is the same: one of complete dismissal of the children's reality, because for many people, children are not even human beings whose opinion matters, they're just things you order around and get angry when they don't do the desired things. Which is frighteningly close to the way people discipline their dogs.
And thirdly, the utterly unspiritual — and even anti-spiritual — world creates a void in children's internal world, which will very likely get filled up by whatever is available to cope with it: social media, video games, porn, weed if they're a bit older, etc. When a child spends their time essentially bullied by their teachers and school, and finds no support in their family, it's essentially guaranteed that they'll distract or numb themselves to cope with the deep wound of isolation that afflicts them.
No wonder then that young people feel so aimless, because first of all, they are disconnected, from other people but also something deeper than the shell of the self. They might express this by saying that life is meaningless, but really this is merely the projection of the mind of a deeper empty internal world, resulting from their disconnected life. The mind is favored to make sense of problems, such as talking about "mental health issues", because people nowadays are so dissociated from their body, and numbed from their emotions, that they cannot see anything but the mind.
Those 3 problems I mention — coercion, lack of a supportive environment and the unspiritual world — will not magically get better overtime in my opinion, in the mainstream collective and in the short term at least. Society will keep playing its game of expanding its power for its own sake, until it cannot anymore because of its inherent unsustainability.
So people will be even more and more discontent, utterly confused as to why they can't meet their (suppressed) needs, shame themselves for their inability to conform to the system, feel suicidal and alienated from one another, play the stupid games of the system, or, if they have more agency and clarity of what matters in life, attend to their inner reality, end the cycle of coercion in themselves, live in ways that are increasingly independent from the system, and connect with other like-minded people who recognize that what is truly valuable in life isn't provided by the technological system anyway.
Footnotes
3 Click on footnote 5 here to go to the spoiler-free section