In his book The Wounded Healer, Henri JM Nouwen introduces his readers to the characteristics that place modern youth in their role as “Nuclear Man”. Nuclear Man subverts ritual and subtleties with a genuine presence. He experiences increasing detachment due to his external locus of control. He lives in the moment. These qualities derive from a dissolution of the structural limits of life. Known and unknown causal factors in today’s Western society have become vague and therefore out of one’s control. A clear distinction between self and environment, good and evil, and fantasy and reality emerges from humanity’s technological prowess and nests like a confused burden in the thoughts of nuclear man.

The present is a prison for the nuclear man, depriving him of meaningful connections to the past and the future. Injected with the consciousness of his post-war parents, but confronted with the threat of annihilation, this person lives in a strange world of strange worries and aspirations, armed only with an impenetrable heart and immune to all but the immediate now, because the present of the nuclear man exists. in a void of optional future and erasable past.

The advancement of technology represents not only the potential to create freedom from canvas and leisure lifestyles, but also the ability to destroy all possibilities. The potential for destruction extends throughout the entire great chain of being. The push of a single button can kill man and all earthly life, extinguishing to the point of extermination, eliminating even the possibility of rebirth. With all sentience removed, life is not destroyed for a span of time, but even history becomes irrelevant and meaningless. Despite the abundances allowed, the conveniences created, and the sophistication provided, this technological advance has not remedied, reconciled, or relaxed the nuclear man’s search for meaning. The grasp on him has become a fluttering in empty space.

The lost sense of continuity stirs apathy and boredom where the most compromising anxiety and joy once sprang. This historical dislocation paralyzes the nuclear man. The classical, fixed philosophy of his people has been shuffled aside by a fluid, fragmented ideology of pluralistic relativism. You can subscribe to suspicions, but beliefs are absent. Thus, motivations can push him to action, but he will never be pushed by conviction. With its back to the symbols of yesteryear, in the face of a seemingly impossible immortality, is there a release from the predicament of the nuclear man? Surrender.