Honey Badgers

A DGAF'ing Generation incarnated specifically to face the apocalypse

As if “Gen Alpha” wasn’t a Chad enough name for children born between 2014 to 2025 my algorithm fed me several videos this week in which they’re being called The Honey Badgers. Why?

Because they don’t give a fuck.

My daughter’s generation seems to have crossed the threshold of the bardo to incarnate at this specific moment in history with the express purpose of fucking shit up.

The supposed “test” for Honey Badger-ship is to ask your kid what they would do if another adult got in your (the parent’s) face to yell at you. 

These kids. 

They’ll give answers like “Scream at him to go away,” or “Karate chop his balls!” 

Bear in mind that this generation is, at their oldest, around 9. My own daughter went on a long rant about the serious kickboxing damage she’d inflict on anyone who dared to attempt to hurt her parents. Seriously overestimated—she’s tiny.

But hey, if it’s “the size of the fight in the dog…”

The meme seems to have originated with a video of a road rage incident in which the adults are screaming at each other in between parked cards and one of these Honey Badgers jumps right in the middle and lays into the opposing adult. Neck cranked back, shouting up at him, dramatically thrusting a pointer finger away as if to banish him and his bullshit.

There’s video after video out there of kids passing the Honey Badger test. What made them so welcoming of conflict when their parents had Mom make the out-sick call into work until they were 25?

It seems to me, they’re sensing what’s needed.

AI is to thank for this marvel

Why Incarnate?

My understanding of the bardo—the liminal space between incarnations in which you choose your new parents—is based almost entirely on an episode of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour on which Jason Louv guest-starred. I’ll easily grant that I’m no expert. I’m barely even informed, but I think I get the basic concept well enough to make the point I want to make.

Here’s an ultra-layman rundown.

In between lives, according to those who believe in the bardo, you experience the profound oneness with creation accompanied by its boundless love, but eventually your own guilt begins to eat at you, taking the form of demons that chase you back to the place where you choose new parents. According to Louv, believers in this mythology consider the pre-birth soul to have serious agency in picking their parents. 

He explains there will be something about the act of conception that piques the soul’s interest and causes it to feel drawn toward the couple. Then it floats incorporeally over, intent on joining in. It enters “the fray” and becomes a baby.

Some New Agers (and yes, I claim that title proudly; I see no reason for the out-of-hand dismissal and mockery of the New Age milieu) believe we make our contracts with other souls prior to incarnation like we’re running down a checklist.

To craft an illustration probably familiar to most Millennials, two souls might approach each other and decide to make an agreement:

“Ok, to burn off the karma I’m trying to burn off in the next lifetime, I need to experience a partner who balances my narcissism with their caretaker mentality. I need to figure out what it’s like to recover from narcissism and you need to discover the experience of overcoming martyrdom? Perfect. Let’s plan to meet up on Earth and get into a relationship for a bit.”

What Soul Contract did the Honey Badgers form with their parents prior to incarnation?

It’s getting kind of old for all these fashionable antinatalists telling me I’m selfish for having children. Their cynical promotion of the myth that the world is overpopulated embeds these stinging barbs of cold dread and icy shame just beneath my scalp.

Is that myth justified though? In Charles Eisenstein’s well-researched work, Climate: A New Story, he asserts that we’d be able to support double our current population with regenerative techniques and better stewardship of the land. There are models for this in indigenous cultures that we can adopt.

Eisenstein argues that we’re too enthusiastic about accepting (what is essentially) a White Supremacist line. The ideologues who promote the overpopulation myth cast Humans in the role of virus. These edgelords coyly reference the sneering monologue of Agent Smith. 

When it comes down to it, however, that only serves to normalize the awful cultural karma that created colonialism—that attempt to compensate for the pulsating, ravenous vacuum of the dominators’ lack of “kennough”-ness. 

The defeatism advocated by antinatalists who parrot the narrative that humans are bad for the environment has an apparent effect: it takes for granted and excuses as inevitable the continuation of behaviors that are responsible for the destruction of our environment, the erosion of our institutions and the peril to our own and countless other species. It does this through accepting as a given that the colonizer approach to stewardship of the ecosystem will never be dethroned as the dominant hegemony.

What future do Honey Badgers have if that’s the case? It’s a bleak one.

If the Cop28 failure is any indication, we aren’t giving that extractive policy toward natural “resources” up. It suggests we’re in store for unprecedented environmental disasters, refugees putting pressure on already failing systems, the failure of our economy, Civil War, and maybe even Mad Max style warlords roving the land looking for oil.

It’s not a promising future. It’s hard to feel like that’s the suffering you’ve consigned a soul to through trapping it in a human incarnation.

What changes about our approach to raising these Honey Badgers, however, if we adopt the mindset that they chose to incarnate right now, at this point in history? What changes if we look at these children, apparently self-assured enough to kick ass if necessary, and believe they want to be here? 

Are they blessed with this pugnacious temperament because they’re ready for that fight?

It’s a sharp contrast with their millennial parents, who are painfully pampered. 

We’re famous for leaving town for college and calling our parents to get us an Uber to the bar. For having mom fill out our tax forms. For being unable to answer the phone. It’s not a generation that seems overly ready to take over leadership from the dying Silent and Boomer generations. Those older generations hold the vast majority of congressional seats and even though they’d rather glitch than retire, they’re going to be forced to sooner or later.

We’re like that because we’re terrified. We’re terrified, I’d argue, primarily because we are mired in the myth of separation. 

There is an assumption built-in to my anxiety and depression that there will never be enough abundance, security, belonging, and love in the world. That assumption is there because I fundamentally believe that I am a separate individual. 

Had I been raised to enjoy the support of a loving tribe, perhaps I might have integrated the message that I am fundamentally lovable. Instead, skinning my knee after falling off my bike a few houses down from my own, anonymous and alone with welling tears, I was taught that my pain affected no one. That my comfort was my own—or perhaps my parents’—responsibility. No one else’s.

Millennials rely on our helicopter moms because the rest of society is fucking scary.

The suburbs reinforce this message. The walls between bedrooms—which Steven Pinker reminds us are a recent innovation in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature—give us desirable privacy, but they also negate the positives of communal living that Pinker points to, including a drive to behave with decorum and courtesy because of our proximity to our siblings and peers. Pinker’s argument is that those codes of etiquette helped drive society toward greater and greater peace. We had to learn how to get along.

What does it mean that that’s no longer true?

Alienation.

What could be going on behind those walls? 

What serial killer lives two houses down? Will I be the person to tell the evening news, speaking of one of my estranged neighbors, “I never thought it could be him, he seemed so normal.”

We no longer feel belonging within the humans we share proximity with. 

For some this alienation is so severe that they actually become the thing that creates more of the same alienation.

Serial killers, rapists, pedophiles. 

Mass shooters. 

In 2023 we had 565 mass shootings, according to Harvard News. Not only do these events cause us to feel less and less comfortable in crowds of people, they are spawned through individuals feeling totally alienated from their community. 

Certainly there are complex motivations that create the conditions for someone to pick up an AR15 with violent intent, but equally true: the crime couldn’t be committed by someone with healthy, reciprocal, loving attachments to the people they are murdering.

It’s a problem that the Honey Badgers are being parented to confront.

My daughter’s elementary school has already provided her with ample training on what to do about bullying, how to develop emotional intelligence, empathy, and compassion, and how to effectively de-escalate conflict.

She is self-assured precisely because her own parents—helicoptered as we were—leaned away from “making the same mistakes” our own parents did. Which is, of course, what every generation has done throughout the last couple hundred years.

Millennials are committed to parenting our children to handle the things we can’t. In the process, we’re committed to reparenting the wounded parts of ourselves in pursuit of greater wholeness.

When we teach children these EQ skills like affect labeling and nonviolent communication—literally part of my daughter’s school curriculum—that creates scenarios in which she reminds me to be kinder to myself. 

What changes when we consider the possibility that these souls took human incarnation at this moment and place in timespace because they’re predisposed to balancing badass DGAF’ing and compassionate activism? 

What if those souls chose to be here because they have lessons to learn about navigating the collapse of systems with care, compassion and a mindset that doesn’t preclude healthy conflict?

What if these Honey Badgers—so brazen they’re willing to lecture their own submissive millennial parents into adopting the emotional intelligence and resilience that they’re learning in school—have manifested here in three dimensional reality precisely because they know they have the exact karma suited to the polycrisis?

Just look at the Honey Badgers’ observable karma. 

They are being raised by a generation that has developed self-awareness through, as John Vervake says in his Meaning Crisis series, examining their own behavior made solid and reflected back to them in social media posts. Self-awareness that has uncovered the impacts of the trauma created by separation, shame, self-negation and the embattled self-esteem that arises from being sheltered all the way to impotent incompetence. 

Self-awareness that is being combined with a gritty growth-mindset and thirst for Obama-esque Hope and Change that engenders a utopian drive to build something better, together. A desire to help, heal, fix, and solve that, in some cases, manifests as awakened parenthood.

Perhaps that doesn’t fully capture the zeitgeist of contemporary culture, but I suspect it will resonate with the people this essay reaches. 

Are you a Liminal Trickster Mystic parent who’s unsure you’re doing the right thing by raising kids mid-apocalypse?

Consider that your little Honey Badger chose to be here, and let it guide you toward encouraging them to maximally express the authentic self they brought with them.

Dr. Shefali Tsabary writes excellent books providing instructions for awakened and conscious parenting. Her New Age techniques represent a sort of Parenting Yoga that makes clear our role as parents mid-metacrisis is straightforward: find ways to allow our kids to more fully embody the Soul they came with, and reunite with our own suppressed souls in the process.

Your own and your kids’ Higher Selves are exactly what the world needs.