The article attempts to answer the question of what life meanings are invested by students of the digital age in a set of traditional values for the national culture? Based on the survey results and experimental attempts to “decode” semantic imprintings/impressions dominating the modern student environment, it is concluded that a new culturological archetype of student youth is being formed, which already today determines the direction of transformations in the mental tracks of youth. This imbalance between traditionally normatively signified and really meaningful, presented in the concept of “vital meanings” of students of the modern era, is gaining more and more expressive proportions. The trends objectified in the results of the study provide the basis for a critical rethinking of a whole range of problems: from the split of generations and the “slipping” of the principle of intergenerational continuity, to raising the question of the beginnings of the national culture transcoding. According to the authors, the euphoria of freedom of self-realization, faced with a limited social backlash given by the trauma society, turned out to produce a forced manipulation effect on modern students generation in the form of adaptive activity.