I’m not really one to call a “vibe shift.” The reality is that all large-scale cultural phenomena take place in distributed landscapes where profoundly different realities can reign, even in those social spaces that are very close to one another. Hollywood appears to be losing patience with the lumpen social justice politics that it cynically embraced in the past decade, while academia by and large seems to be doubling down. And of course even in any particular industry or culture, there will be local dynamics that make a huge difference for the lived experiences of the people in those local spaces. It frequently seems like canceling has run out of steam, as a disciplinary tactic; you watch people on social media trying to get somebody canceled, these days, and it sometimes feels like watching them trying and failing to get a pull-cord lawnmower started. And yet many people remain profoundly vulnerable to being canceled - perversely, they're the ones in closest proximity to the social justice movement - and the notion of a “vibe shift” would not be very comforting to them if they were. So when people ask me whether we’ve turned a corner, as they frequently do, I’m never sure what to say. “Woke” vs. “Anti-woke” is a horribly exhausted and pointless framework, one which suggests binary simplicity where there is only boundless complexity, but beyond that, there was never any chance that there was going to be some clear victory for one or the other. What will emerge will be some synthesis of the two impulses. (Probably an equally exhausting one.)
Superb. I eagerly await your book. This is one of your sweet spots and your work on this has been must-read for me (and, I suspect, more influential in the broader journo culture than you know) for several years.
IMO part of the emerging skepticism toward hyper-therapeuticism is downstream from an emerging skepticism toward the social internet and its swarms of micro-communities. My feeling is that Millennials who are having kids especially are turning against these technologies in a big way and so you're seeing a lot of critical takes about internet culture in a way you just didn't, even 5-6 years ago.
I am not qualified to comment on mental health per se, but I do have a couple of anecdotal observations. First of all, I cried on so many street corners in NYC in my 20s that I think I could do a walking tour of the places that people have handed me kleenex, folded notes of compassion, and even neckties to blow my nose. Pain and self-doubt are part of becoming a person.
Secondly, I am (quite randomly) reading a great book "Prophetic Lament" that describes this cultural shift from a religious point of view. It argues that "The American church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget...We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.
"...Walter Bruegemann writes about this contrast between a theology of "have nots" versus a theology of the "haves." The "have nots" develop a theology of suffering and survival. The "haves" develop a theology of celebration. Those who live under suffering live "their lives aware of the acute precariousness of their situation...those who live in celebration are "concerned with questions of proper management and joyous celebration." Instead of deliverance, they seek constancy and sustainability. "The well-off do not expect their faith to begin in a cry, but rather, in a song. They do not expect or need intrusion, but they rejoice in stability [and the] durability of a world and social order that have been beneficial to them."
I think this is a cultural groundwater that addresses this one of your many great points: "Given that pain and suffering are literally and permanently unavoidable in human life, teaching others to be resilient rather than teaching them to be victims is an act of mercy, and cultivating resilience in yourself is an act of essential personal growth and adult development."
in the "anti-affirmation" list, which I most agree with, there is the statement "Self-diagnosis is inherently unhealthy, without exception" - I wonder if the real problem is "self-diagnoses" and then stopping at that point. Self-diagnosis, followed up by talking to an expert and listening to them with an open mind, seems perfectly fine to me. Also, self-diagnosis, not followed up by anything except a massive amount of self-skepticism, is not necessarily bad, if the problem involved doesn't seem to be serious. I would change this to "don't base your life and outlook on your self-diagnosis"
" that we have a duty to build the kind of society where everyone’s basic needs are met"
That is the core of the problem. As soon as you define what "basic needs" means, all of the people who are just on the other side of the line will clamor to have it expanded. So you expand it, and the next set of people will clamor to have it expanded. There is no such thing as basic needs because you can never define it in such a way that there are bright lines around it.
Where this is most obvious is in the medical industry. A new $10MM medical intervention is introduced? That's a basic need, and it's not fair that only the rich can afford it.
"Hollywood appears to be losing patience with the lumpen social justice politics that it cynically embraced in the past decade..."
"It frequently seems like canceling has run out of steam, as a disciplinary tactic; you watch people on social media trying to get somebody canceled, these days, and it sometimes feels like watching them trying and failing to get a pull-cord lawnmower started."
Lack of sympathy and callousness are my stock in trade. I just think it is a proportionate response to the vicious level of enforcement exerted by liberals against those who question or deviate from their dogmas.
They are absolutely vicious; I am simply mocking. They cancel and destroy lives, and yet I’m a nasty guy for saying that people in the thrall of the therapeutic mindset are weenies. That’s all: losers, losing.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What happened to that?
I reject the state religion of the west: therapy. It’s all pretend anyways. It’s a theatre, it’s performance. When you get out in the real world, the hurly-burly, nobody gives a shit about you. Or should I say they care to trounce you so in a way they do give a shit.
What a beautiful and powerful essay. I agree completely that the affirmation model is pernicious. It hurts not just the sufferer, but other people as well.
I think back to my struggle with postpartum depression after my son was born. I was saved by cognitive behavioral therapy, which taught me to take responsibility for my own responses and destructive patterns of thinking. What if everyone around me had adopted the affirmation model and reinforced my feelings of inadequacy? What if every conversation had revolved around people feeling so, so, so sorry for me? What if no one expected me to take care of my son properly because it was too hard for me? I guarantee that my son and I would have been much worse off.
The affirmation model hurts other people too, because it conscripts everyone else into affirming and supporting the sufferer. People have their own issues! They have better things to do than be at the sufferer’s beck and call to support them and praise them no matter what.
I hope you are right, Freddie! Yes, we should expect support from our friends and families, but we also ought to give support in return, and maybe take some responsibility for ourselves too.
"Given that pain and suffering are literally and permanently unavoidable in human life, teaching others to be resilient rather than teaching them to be victims is an act of mercy, and cultivating resilience in yourself is an act of essential personal growth and adult development."
I agree with pretty much the whole post, but this to me is the key. I think of it in terms of friction and callouses. Some people seem to think we can and should try to eliminate rough surfaces from the world or shield people from ever having to contact rough surfaces. We can't, however, but in trying to do so we can greatly lessen our ability to develop callouses. Of course that leaves a million hard questions about how great our capacity to eliminate rough surfaces is, which rough surfaces we should try to sand down, and what do for uniquely sensitive people (everything comes back to the Serenity Prayer), but we need to start from the recognition that resilience is a necessity for living in an imperfect and imperfectible world.
Your focus on resilience is something that I wish was talked about more often in the sphere of mental health. The only one who can truly help you get through your day-to-day trials and tribulations is yourself. Your therapist will not be with you when you are on the freeway feeling manic. Your therapist will not be with you when your overbearing boss belittles you in a meeting. No one is coming to save you from the tedious, the terrifying, the terrible things that are part and parcel with living minute by minute, hour by hour, with yourself. That’s your job, and it can be the hardest job in the world some days. But the more you resist giving in to excuses, the easier it can become.
Excellent piece, again. Thank you for laying out a powerful case against the the aggregation of assumptions that being sublimely happy all the time is a right and should be the responsibility of others.
"Good people spend a great deal of their time categorically and uncritically affirming others - telling friends and strangers alike that their desires are all legitimate, their instincts always correct, their perceptions of their own needs never mistaken or misguided, their self-conception compelling."
But only if the subject is part of the Kool Kids Klub. If they're one of the outcasts, then any mistreatment is not only fair, but the mistreater is seen as doing the world a favor.
The whole affirmation mentality is that of humans who refuse to grow up.
“ As a leftist, my core political assumption is that we are all responsible for each other’s material well-being, that we have a duty to build the kind of society where everyone’s basic needs are met, where everyone enjoys a certain degree of material comfort, and where our rights are respected equally regardless of race, religious, sexual and gender identity, ethnicity, or creed. That is the kind of mutual caring that I signed up for when I became politically conscious as a teenager.
I would never respond to someone telling me that they’re in pain by saying that I don’t care. In fact I’ve spent hours talking complete strangers through mental health crises. But if you care for people you try to walk them towards self-reliance, dignity, and toughness.”
I think that the problem with the former is that it leads to the latter, because of the word “every”.
This is the old “teach a man to fish vs feed a man a fish” principle is it not? I am not a leftist, am 100% in the anti-affirmation camp, and I agree with the goals of the first paragraph and agree completely with the second paragraph. But at some point doesn’t thinking we can save everyone from failing to achieve their basic needs just feed this expectation of all needs being fulfilled? People don’t generally get that needs are pursued in a stair-step hierarchy. Most people always want more. Once they accomplish a level, they crave the next.
“The natural place to look for love, acceptance, and affirmation when you need them is your close friends and family, the people with whom you have mutual emotional attachment, as they are the best equipped to help and the people whose opinion you care about the most; expecting strangers or society writ large to care about you the way your loved ones care about you is deluded and disordered.”
I was thinking about the Scandinavian countries that leftists in the USA so often laud as the model we should strive for. Those countries tax the crap out of all income earners, but do a better job taking care of their citizen’s basic needs. But there is a massive difference in that immigration is controlled and the people of those countries are much more culturally homogenous have much greater family and friend attachment. From my perspective, it is not our lowest level needs that drives this opinion that the US is so crappy. We do a pretty good job providing the masses with food, shelter, etc. it is the next levels of phycological needs, loving and being loved, that is wrecked. And it is made more profound a problem because the USA is a country of 330 million strangers without enough to bind them as family. And instead of coming together, we are being more driven apart.
Superb. I eagerly await your book. This is one of your sweet spots and your work on this has been must-read for me (and, I suspect, more influential in the broader journo culture than you know) for several years.
IMO part of the emerging skepticism toward hyper-therapeuticism is downstream from an emerging skepticism toward the social internet and its swarms of micro-communities. My feeling is that Millennials who are having kids especially are turning against these technologies in a big way and so you're seeing a lot of critical takes about internet culture in a way you just didn't, even 5-6 years ago.
I am not qualified to comment on mental health per se, but I do have a couple of anecdotal observations. First of all, I cried on so many street corners in NYC in my 20s that I think I could do a walking tour of the places that people have handed me kleenex, folded notes of compassion, and even neckties to blow my nose. Pain and self-doubt are part of becoming a person.
Secondly, I am (quite randomly) reading a great book "Prophetic Lament" that describes this cultural shift from a religious point of view. It argues that "The American church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget...We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.
"...Walter Bruegemann writes about this contrast between a theology of "have nots" versus a theology of the "haves." The "have nots" develop a theology of suffering and survival. The "haves" develop a theology of celebration. Those who live under suffering live "their lives aware of the acute precariousness of their situation...those who live in celebration are "concerned with questions of proper management and joyous celebration." Instead of deliverance, they seek constancy and sustainability. "The well-off do not expect their faith to begin in a cry, but rather, in a song. They do not expect or need intrusion, but they rejoice in stability [and the] durability of a world and social order that have been beneficial to them."
I think this is a cultural groundwater that addresses this one of your many great points: "Given that pain and suffering are literally and permanently unavoidable in human life, teaching others to be resilient rather than teaching them to be victims is an act of mercy, and cultivating resilience in yourself is an act of essential personal growth and adult development."
in the "anti-affirmation" list, which I most agree with, there is the statement "Self-diagnosis is inherently unhealthy, without exception" - I wonder if the real problem is "self-diagnoses" and then stopping at that point. Self-diagnosis, followed up by talking to an expert and listening to them with an open mind, seems perfectly fine to me. Also, self-diagnosis, not followed up by anything except a massive amount of self-skepticism, is not necessarily bad, if the problem involved doesn't seem to be serious. I would change this to "don't base your life and outlook on your self-diagnosis"
" that we have a duty to build the kind of society where everyone’s basic needs are met"
That is the core of the problem. As soon as you define what "basic needs" means, all of the people who are just on the other side of the line will clamor to have it expanded. So you expand it, and the next set of people will clamor to have it expanded. There is no such thing as basic needs because you can never define it in such a way that there are bright lines around it.
Where this is most obvious is in the medical industry. A new $10MM medical intervention is introduced? That's a basic need, and it's not fair that only the rich can afford it.
"Hollywood appears to be losing patience with the lumpen social justice politics that it cynically embraced in the past decade..."
"It frequently seems like canceling has run out of steam, as a disciplinary tactic; you watch people on social media trying to get somebody canceled, these days, and it sometimes feels like watching them trying and failing to get a pull-cord lawnmower started."
Stop, Freddie. I can only get so erect.
Honestly, you could have just made this whole thing the last paragraph, and it would have worked almost as well. Very well stated.
Lack of sympathy and callousness are my stock in trade. I just think it is a proportionate response to the vicious level of enforcement exerted by liberals against those who question or deviate from their dogmas.
They are absolutely vicious; I am simply mocking. They cancel and destroy lives, and yet I’m a nasty guy for saying that people in the thrall of the therapeutic mindset are weenies. That’s all: losers, losing.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What happened to that?
I reject the state religion of the west: therapy. It’s all pretend anyways. It’s a theatre, it’s performance. When you get out in the real world, the hurly-burly, nobody gives a shit about you. Or should I say they care to trounce you so in a way they do give a shit.
Great piece Freddie!
What a beautiful and powerful essay. I agree completely that the affirmation model is pernicious. It hurts not just the sufferer, but other people as well.
I think back to my struggle with postpartum depression after my son was born. I was saved by cognitive behavioral therapy, which taught me to take responsibility for my own responses and destructive patterns of thinking. What if everyone around me had adopted the affirmation model and reinforced my feelings of inadequacy? What if every conversation had revolved around people feeling so, so, so sorry for me? What if no one expected me to take care of my son properly because it was too hard for me? I guarantee that my son and I would have been much worse off.
The affirmation model hurts other people too, because it conscripts everyone else into affirming and supporting the sufferer. People have their own issues! They have better things to do than be at the sufferer’s beck and call to support them and praise them no matter what.
I hope you are right, Freddie! Yes, we should expect support from our friends and families, but we also ought to give support in return, and maybe take some responsibility for ourselves too.
"Given that pain and suffering are literally and permanently unavoidable in human life, teaching others to be resilient rather than teaching them to be victims is an act of mercy, and cultivating resilience in yourself is an act of essential personal growth and adult development."
I agree with pretty much the whole post, but this to me is the key. I think of it in terms of friction and callouses. Some people seem to think we can and should try to eliminate rough surfaces from the world or shield people from ever having to contact rough surfaces. We can't, however, but in trying to do so we can greatly lessen our ability to develop callouses. Of course that leaves a million hard questions about how great our capacity to eliminate rough surfaces is, which rough surfaces we should try to sand down, and what do for uniquely sensitive people (everything comes back to the Serenity Prayer), but we need to start from the recognition that resilience is a necessity for living in an imperfect and imperfectible world.
So you’re telling me that...everybody hurts?
Your focus on resilience is something that I wish was talked about more often in the sphere of mental health. The only one who can truly help you get through your day-to-day trials and tribulations is yourself. Your therapist will not be with you when you are on the freeway feeling manic. Your therapist will not be with you when your overbearing boss belittles you in a meeting. No one is coming to save you from the tedious, the terrifying, the terrible things that are part and parcel with living minute by minute, hour by hour, with yourself. That’s your job, and it can be the hardest job in the world some days. But the more you resist giving in to excuses, the easier it can become.
Excellent piece, again. Thank you for laying out a powerful case against the the aggregation of assumptions that being sublimely happy all the time is a right and should be the responsibility of others.
"Good people spend a great deal of their time categorically and uncritically affirming others - telling friends and strangers alike that their desires are all legitimate, their instincts always correct, their perceptions of their own needs never mistaken or misguided, their self-conception compelling."
But only if the subject is part of the Kool Kids Klub. If they're one of the outcasts, then any mistreatment is not only fair, but the mistreater is seen as doing the world a favor.
The whole affirmation mentality is that of humans who refuse to grow up.
Th is is a great piece. Thank you.
“ As a leftist, my core political assumption is that we are all responsible for each other’s material well-being, that we have a duty to build the kind of society where everyone’s basic needs are met, where everyone enjoys a certain degree of material comfort, and where our rights are respected equally regardless of race, religious, sexual and gender identity, ethnicity, or creed. That is the kind of mutual caring that I signed up for when I became politically conscious as a teenager.
I would never respond to someone telling me that they’re in pain by saying that I don’t care. In fact I’ve spent hours talking complete strangers through mental health crises. But if you care for people you try to walk them towards self-reliance, dignity, and toughness.”
I think that the problem with the former is that it leads to the latter, because of the word “every”.
This is the old “teach a man to fish vs feed a man a fish” principle is it not? I am not a leftist, am 100% in the anti-affirmation camp, and I agree with the goals of the first paragraph and agree completely with the second paragraph. But at some point doesn’t thinking we can save everyone from failing to achieve their basic needs just feed this expectation of all needs being fulfilled? People don’t generally get that needs are pursued in a stair-step hierarchy. Most people always want more. Once they accomplish a level, they crave the next.
“The natural place to look for love, acceptance, and affirmation when you need them is your close friends and family, the people with whom you have mutual emotional attachment, as they are the best equipped to help and the people whose opinion you care about the most; expecting strangers or society writ large to care about you the way your loved ones care about you is deluded and disordered.”
I was thinking about the Scandinavian countries that leftists in the USA so often laud as the model we should strive for. Those countries tax the crap out of all income earners, but do a better job taking care of their citizen’s basic needs. But there is a massive difference in that immigration is controlled and the people of those countries are much more culturally homogenous have much greater family and friend attachment. From my perspective, it is not our lowest level needs that drives this opinion that the US is so crappy. We do a pretty good job providing the masses with food, shelter, etc. it is the next levels of phycological needs, loving and being loved, that is wrecked. And it is made more profound a problem because the USA is a country of 330 million strangers without enough to bind them as family. And instead of coming together, we are being more driven apart.
Your next book: "The End of Affirmation?"