Is today’s generation emotionally weaker than those before them—the disturbing prevalence of murder-suicide

Tendai Ruben Mbofana

The recent horror in Dzivaresekwa—where a nurse axe-murdered her husband, a prominent university lecturer and human rights commissioner, before drinking rat poison over an extramarital affair—is not an isolated shock.

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It is the bloody tip of a monstrous iceberg.

We are witnessing a terrifying shift in the human spirit—a catastrophic decline in basic emotional fortitude, where self-centered weakness has replaced duty and resilience.

Look at what passes for crisis today, and look at how people respond.

When a spouse commits infidelity today, the response is no longer to confront, resolve, or walk away while keeping the children safe.

Instead, we see mothers taking axes to their husbands or poisoning their own flesh and blood before taking their own lives.

In these acts, where is the thought for the child left behind?

Where is the instinct to protect?

It is completely swallowed by a self-absorbed mindset that says: “If my world is ruined, I will destroy everything and everyone in it.”

The ultimate duty of a parent—to absorb life’s blows so the child may live—is cast aside for pure, destructive emotional entitlement.

This spineless fragility is not limited to adults dealing with broken marriages.

It has trickled straight down to our children.

We now have fourteen-year-olds committing suicide because they failed an end-of-term exam, because a teenage romance ended, or simply because their parents could not afford a school trip.

Things that our parents and our own generation would have cried about for a night, shrugged off, and used as motivation to work harder are now treated as life-ending catastrophes.

Likewise, grown men, when faced with suspicion or proof of infidelity, resort to slaughtering their wives or children in fits of pathetic, bruised pride.

Millions of young adults now claim they cannot face the “unbearable stresses of life” without drowning themselves in synthetic drugs, abuse of cough syrups, and chronic alcoholism.

Drinking, once reserved for socializing, has become an everyday crutch for a generation that simply cannot handle reality without a chemical buffer.

Before we even ask how we got here, we must confront the truth: this is a generation characterized by unmitigated self-centeredness and emotional weakness.

The younger generation loves to hide behind a convenient lie: that life today is uniquely difficult.

They point to technology, social media, and dynamic economic pressure, claiming no previous generation ever faced such overwhelming burdens.

That excuse is as lame as it is historically blind.

Every single generation under the sun has stepped into a world radically different from the one their parents knew.

Our own parents, who started working in the 1960s, faced a plethora of new experiences their parents never dreamt of and which they had not grown up knowing.

They grew up in the rural areas amid grinding poverty, walking barefoot to rudimentary schools—a privilege their own illiterate parents never had.

And after school, they moved to a totally new life in urban areas, thrust into an alien, fast-paced existence.

Suddenly, they had to navigate modern houses with electricity, running water, and telephones.

For the first time, they operated in an unforgiving cash economy where failing to pay rent meant immediate homelessness.

They faced explicit, humiliating racial discrimination in urban workplaces.

Crucially, they lost their immediate safety nets—working hundreds of miles away from extended family, facing life’s brutal shocks entirely alone.

Yet, they did not crumble.

They did not drown their anxieties in illicit drugs, nor did they murder their families when hardship struck.

They stood firm, worked hard, and built homes.

Our own generation faced its own seismic shifts.

We transitioned into the digital age, adapting to computers, mobile phones, and the dawn of the internet.

The expectations placed on us skyrocketed.

Where a mother in the 1960s could become a respected nurse with primary education, or a father a teacher with Form Two, our generation was told that anything less than a university degree, a law career, or a medical practice was a failure.

The pressure to excel was immense.

We, too, suffered romantic heartbreaks, family conflicts, and academic failures—yet we had virtually no support structures.

Still, we did not collapse into widespread substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, or suicide.

We endured.

We stayed focused.

We adapted.

So why does today’s generation think they are so special?

Why are they so weak?

The uncomfortable truth lies in the mirror: we sheltered them into weakness.

In our determination to give our children a better life than we had, we coddled them into emotional fragility.

We shielded them from every harsh reality, fought every battle for them, and smoothed over every obstacle.

In doing so, we robbed them of the opportunity to build emotional thick skin.

By pampering them, we raised a generation accustomed to bubble-wrap.

They have been taught that their feelings are the center of the universe, that inconvenience is a tragedy, and that failure is an unbearable catastrophe rather than a normal part of human growth.

When you raise children to believe the world revolves around them, you do not produce resilient adults; you produce selfish, fragile ones.

When personal comfort becomes paramount, duty to others vanishes.

A person grounded in duty says, “I am in agony, but my children must survive.”

A person consumed by self-absorbed fragility says, “My pain is unbearable, so everything and everyone must end.”

Life has always been tough, unpredictable, and unfair.

We are raising our children in a way far different from how our parents raised us and how they themselves were raised.

We were exposed to the real world and taught to face it head-on.

Our parents valued toughness in all situations.

No wonder they whipped us whenever we showed weakness or threw tantrums.

But above all, they instilled in us selflessness—thinking of others before ourselves.

The difference is that previous generations understood that pain was something to be borne with dignity and grit.

Today, we have softened our children to the point of danger.

We must stop making excuses for weakness and return to instilling duty, fortitude, and selflessness.

Or else we will continue to watch a fragile generation shatter at the slightest touch of reality.

• *Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or *

  mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com