What Yellowjackets Reveals About Generational Rot
The Ritual Never Left Us!
The other day, I came across a thumbnail that displayed a blunt statement: “Modern Society is a Disease.” No question mark. Just a flat declaration. And of course, the image was of a doctor in scrubs — the kind people wear when they want to be seen as credible while making sweeping claims about pseudo-health. And of course, it was a cis white man, probably hetero, and very privileged. I say privileged because it’s true. To make statements like that comes from a place of comfort and ignorance.
My first question would be: What part of modern society do you think is the disease? Because modern society is multilayered. It’s been evolving for a long time — ever since we started agriculture and slowly moved away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Which was necessary. But it came with baggage. And I guarantee the emotional reactions people have to “modern society” are actually rooted in ancient habits carried across generations — repackaged, renamed, but still the same.
To even talk about this, I have to use media as an example. Because “media” is part of modern society. Even though creativity has existed as long as humans have. It’s hard to prove, but the remnants of early humans show how creative we’ve always been. Cave paintings. Shelters built from scraps. Storytelling. Rituals.
So what media do I use to make this argument? The TV series Yellowjackets.
WARNING! I discuss triggering topics beyond this point.
You're forewarned.
Of all the options, this one is the best for exposing generational bad habits and how they shape behavior. Even though Yellowjackets was inspired by Lord of the Flies, which focused on boys, Yellowjackets centers on teenage girls. And each girl — regardless of what people might assume — was carefully chosen. Each one represents a different socioeconomic status, mental illness, social capital based on appearance, and sexuality. And the thing all girls and women share is the oppression and suppression of being biologically female in society.
Yellowjackets is a treasure trove for sociological, psychological, and even medical analysis. It’s clear that something in the environment is poisoning the resources. We learn this from the cave that releases gas, knocking out the girls and triggering psychedelic-like dreams. There’s also the red-colored stream, and animals behaving unnaturally — like the bear that approaches the cabin and lets Lottie kill it without resistance. That’s not normal bear behavior. And then they eat it.
Why I’m mentioning this: we can be affected by the same affliction the animal went through by eating it. In reality, we’re not supposed to eat predators. Herbivores are safer — they only eat plants. Predators, like bears, carry a higher risk of parasites and disease. Modern society has made food safer. But you don’t know you have parasites until symptoms show. And even then, you might get misdiagnosed unless the doctor asks the right questions and runs the right tests. And symptoms might not show for a long time.
I’ve learned from outdoor women about the dangers of drinking stream water. The risk of parasites or bacteria is real — and it can cause long-term gut issues. One woman said she didn’t fully heal for a year and had to cut out gluten the entire time.
So yes, modern society gave us science and medicine. And through that, we’ve reduced the risks that led to what happened to the girls in Yellowjackets. A lot of their moral decay and behavioral shifts — especially the taboo of cannibalism — mirror our history. Famine has driven people to eat each other. I learned about some Caribbean islands where certain tribes were cannibalistic. And the pattern there? Lack of resources.
I had to explain this to my dad, who was learning about the Taínos — part of his ancestry and mine. The Taínos had issues with those cannibalistic tribes. And I explained that what probably started from famine — from scarcity — eventually became ritual. A generational ritual, with no memory of why it began. Even though, with what we know now, humans have no real nutritional value. I remember a woman saying even wolves don’t see us as bountiful prey. We’re the bland salad.
In Yellowjackets, if the land is toxic, the animals are too. There’s the deer scene — the one full of maggots. That deer was still alive, walking around, being eaten from the inside out. That scene was trying to tell us something about the environment. And the girls were completely unaware.
That’s us. In reality. We’re unaware of how much innovation has improved our lives. More people live longer. And we forget how laws, regulations, and policies have helped us survive — even within the rise of consumerist capitalism.
Capitalism has existed for centuries. It’s taken many forms. But its backbone is hierarchy. It’s always relied on status. We had caste systems — some countries still use that label — and everywhere else, we adapted a new version: socioeconomic status. Still the same concept. Someone at the top has all the resources. Someone who can command because they control access.
Two characters in Yellowjackets represent that higher economic tier: Jackie and Lottie.
Lottie suffers from something, but as a general viewer, we’re never told exactly what. It seems like she experiences both visual and auditory psychosis. Through Lottie — and through the rising fear among the girls as their supplies dwindle — her delusions begin to take hold. Desperation gives her sway.
Jackie comes from an upper-middle-class family, with heavy expectations placed on her. Even the soccer coach sees Jackie not as a skilled player, but as someone with the charisma to keep the real talent from tearing each other apart. Her value is social, not athletic. Jackie isn’t particularly academically strong either. Shauna is — she got accepted into Brown, an Ivy League university. For someone at the lower end of the economic threshold, you have to be exceptional to get into schools like that. Jackie doesn’t know this about Shauna. Neither do Jackie’s parents. Jackie is seen as a prime figure, but that’s just social capital — the privilege of the status she was born into.
Still, Jackie is layered. Those who pay attention know she loves Shauna deeply. There’s speculation that she was covertly in love with her. And Shauna felt the same. This is where generational toxicity shows up: the repression of sexuality passed down through patriarchy and religious propaganda. We talk about it more now, how heteronormativity as the default really messed with how we sapphic women couldn’t explore our sexuality when we were young. We’re flooded with hetero-coded messaging from birth. That’s why girls like Jackie and Shauna get confused about their feelings for each other.
There are other sapphic characters in the series: Van and Tai. Being stranded in the wilderness, away from society, gave them space to explore their love. And this is where I need to emphasize something: they were stranded for 19 months. I don’t know if the writers fully considered the weight of that, but it’s a long time to be around each other 24/7. From dawn to dusk. Long nights. Long days. All four seasons. And the most brutal one — winter.
Winter led them to cannibalism. But that final winter wasn’t just about survival. It was about ritual.
Nineteen months matter because they stripped away their performative masks. Except they created new ones in the wild. They saw each other more deeply than anyone back in civilization ever could. The rituals they created to survive didn’t stay in the woods — they seeped into their adult lives. Like the ritual hunt with the adult versions of the girls. It was supposed to be fake, just to appease Lottie. But it turned sideways. Their wilderness selves reemerged. And the hunt for adult Shauna became real. That led to Natalie’s death.
Van and Tai — you might as well call their teen versions a married couple. They were together every day, every hour. That’s more intimate than most couples in civilization. They were completely isolated from the world. All they had was each other and the rest of the survivors.
Shauna also explored her sexuality in the wilderness, but not with the person she truly wanted. Jackie died at the start of their first winter. Melissa became the girl Shauna explored with. But Melissa encouraged Shauna to embrace her darker side, and it backfired. Shauna was angry. Traumatized.
She was the first to eat from Jackie’s corpse, cutting skin from the body. Tai knew this, but kept it a secret. Just like she kept Shauna’s pregnancy quiet.
Tai and Shauna connected in a way that wasn’t romantic, but built on care and loyalty. They were the physical talent on the soccer team — the strongest players. The ones Jackie was supposed to keep in harmony. Tai was the only one who could challenge Shauna. And in the very first episode, you see what she’s capable of. She snapped a teammate’s leg. Not intentionally — but she got too aggressive, too ego-driven, and someone got hurt.
That strength could’ve taken Shauna down. But Tai chose not to. And the reasons go deeper than mental health. She couldn’t be openly in love with Van. If they returned to civilization, they’d have to go back to hiding. Suppressing. Performing. Obeying. Living under a hierarchy.
Adult Tai tried to rise through the ranks to make a difference. But she was willing to do unethical things to get there.
There are so many scenes with the adult versions of the girls, where their wilderness selves — the ones forged over 19 months — seep through like an ache. A quiet hunger to let that side out.
Shauna became the butcher of the group. The one tasked with the hardest job: stomaching the handling of a body. Learning how to peel back skin. Where to cut at the joints to separate limbs more easily. That scene with the car thieves, when she’s trying to get her van back? Chills. It’s better to watch it than have me describe it.
The point I’m making is this: the downside of modern society isn’t the advancements or innovations. It’s the inherited ideologies and belief systems we’ve never addressed. We’ve been building toward a utopia without confronting the rot.
Everything happening today? It’s not new. It’s happened before.
In the show, cannibalism is portrayed, and it’s part of our history, too. It’s even embedded in fairy tales. Hansel and Gretel is a good example. That story, rooted in famine, wasn’t about a witch who wanted to eat children. It was the mother. Let’s be clear about that.
In Yellowjackets, the girls were starving. They went through something unfathomable. And then they ate Jackie. The filmmaker made it dreamlike — a dissociative haze — so they could imagine it as something else. So they could eat their fill without fully confronting the horror.
Shauna had to live with that. She devoured her best friend, and most likely the girl she was in love with. That’s a lot to carry.
Different media have shown us what the collapse of modern society looks like. And I say that because our reality mirrors those stories. They show us we are morally neutral, shaped by our environments.
In Yellowjackets, Misty sabotages the beacon — their only chance of rescue — because she craved attention. In civilization, she was bullied and mocked for her looks and personality. In the wilderness, she mattered.
Lottie fueled fear and created a belief system. She built rituals. In the first episode, we witness a hunt for a girl. Later, we learn it was Mari. That’s not far off from how humans turn survival into ritual — to stomach it, and to justify it.
It mirrors ancient civilizations that created blood sacrifices. Women and children were offered up. I’ve played video games that explore this — Fatal Frame, for example, shows ritual sacrifices of young girls or priestesses for the benefit of others.
So what the girls in Yellowjackets did isn’t far-fetched. It’s human. It’s what we’re capable of when influenced by belief, by desperation, by someone claiming authority, or by environmental toxins like the gas leak from the cave.
Modern society has mitigated a lot of those factors. I would never go back — or even dream of going back — to the unknown of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Or to the marketed fantasy of farm-life, cottagecore, or whatever trend sells the illusion of a soft, simple life.
No. It’s not simple. It’s complex. It takes more energy and work to uphold that lifestyle. And it comes with risky uncertainties that can be lethal.
I’m thankful for modern medicine. For modern agriculture. For the fact that we can filter water easily. We can control what our livestock eats to reduce the risk of parasitic infections.
I’m grateful we’re globalized — that we can learn about each other, our cultures, our food, and our art. That we can pick our tribes. We’re no longer bound to villages or families that don’t share our values.
Look at those girls. They endured 19 months together. Some may have found peace by being themselves, like Van and Tai. But look at Shauna. She spun out of control after Jackie’s death.
And look at how those experiences turned out to be the worst. But they needed each other to survive.
Now, I imagine what would’ve happened if Jackie hadn’t died. I don’t know. But I think Shauna wouldn’t have spiraled. Maybe they would’ve made up.
Because even a couple of days together can solve a problem.
A heated moment led to Jackie sleeping outside. No one knew it would snow. Jackie died of hypothermia. Everyone knew she couldn’t take care of herself. That fire she made was weak.
I imagine a lot of them carried guilt from that night.
I imagine Jackie and Shauna making up. Working through their feelings.
There was no denying it — Jackie prioritized Shauna. Even during the plane crash, she chose to get Shauna out. She didn’t help Van. Her priority was Shauna’s safety.
And sometimes, we have to see that as nothing personal. Because it wasn’t.
We’re going to prioritize certain people in our lives more than others.
People hate on Jackie for leaving Van behind. But some people do prioritize. That’s why it’s hard to make ethical choices with emotions getting in the way.
Based on emotion, Jackie chose Shauna.
If it were Van trying to save Jackie, Tai would’ve chosen Van.
We like to imagine we’d do the right thing in the moment. But the truth is, we don’t know. Not until that choice is in front of us.
And hopefully, it never is.
Some people do try until the very end to save someone. But the ones who succeed? It’s usually a group effort.
It takes more than one person.
Human beings are complex; our minds all work differently. We each carry different levels of empathy. And empathy itself breaks into three parts: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate.
Someone can function just fine in society with high cognitive and compassionate empathy, and very little emotional empathy. I’m describing myself, by the way.
Compassionate empathy is my bridge between the cognitive and the emotional. I have high-functioning cognitive empathy — I understand people through patterns, not through feeling their emotions inside me. I don’t mirror emotions. I don’t absorb them. But I care. I nurture. And I do it subtly, without imposing myself.
Everything I do is quiet. Intentional. I don’t force myself into people’s emotional space. But I can’t feel or mirror their emotions in me.
So when I view the characters in Yellowjackets, I’m viewing them through cognitive empathy — and with compassion.
That’s why I can say the things I said in this blog.
So… is modern society the disease?
No.
It’s the generations of ideological beliefs, toxic patterns, oppression, marginalization, hierarchies — all the bullshit we’ve carried and never addressed. Never healed.
Modernization was never the perpetrator. It’s our means of living better. Thriving.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine a world without watching films, TV series, and playing video games that have become another form of storytelling. The number of novels we read in all forms. Music. Cosplay. LARP… the list goes on.
Modern society is amazing. It’s a miracle.
And the fact that I can be here, write about it, and share it with you all?
That’s fucking amazing.
Tell me that’s not true.