And yet I read Haidt's piece the same day I saw all the reports and clips of what Barbara Walters had to put up with, as well as the deeply unsettling clip of her interview with Sean Connery (about slapping women -- google it). Toughness and dignity yes, but can you blame Gen Z for saying why should anyone put up with that in the first place, to achieve toughness? I do wonder.
I think you are painting with too broad a brush with "left of center" or even "progressives" on this topic. Your issue is with a very online white uber educated subset of the left. "Elizabeth Warren Democrats" maybe.
I'm referring to the kind of person I'm referring to. And I'm getting really close to banhammering anyone who makes a comment of the type "this is not a big enough deal for me to read about." If it's not worth your time, MOVE THE FUCK ON.
I think the issue is with a much wider portion of left-of-center/progressive people than "Elizabeth Warren Democrats", including a strong majority of younger progressives (who aren't typically falling in line with Elizabeth Warren). But leaving that aside, I didn't interpret ben starr's as suggesting that it's not a big enough deal to read about but rather, a call to be extra careful with how we characterize large swaths of people as this is a good thing to be careful about in general especially if we want to achieve more of the nuance whose absence is lamented in the essay. (This interpretation may be overly charitable though.)
I took it not as "this is not a big enough deal" but as "this terminology you used technically includes me and I'm not guilty of the thing" which I also find annoying because JFC it's a generalization and generalizations are generally true and that's all they need to be. Of course there are going to be outliers (like meeeee!).
Yeah, I mean, assuming for the sake of argument your claim about Freddie's criticism applying only to a very narrow subset of progressives, that doesn't mean that it's not a big deal to be worth reading about and you should MOVE THE FUCK ON: even the sliver of highly educated "Elizabeth Warren Democrats" probably has an outsize influence on the discourse and is quite relevant.
I agree with you, partly. Yes, "resilience" can sound like a smug "suck it up, buttercup". Until we realise how expansive this (lack of) resilience seems to be. It's not just making it through challenges, or suffering. I read this fascinating piece https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-struggling-with-their-mental-health-is-more-childhood-independence-the-answer and for some young people it's an inability to even face things that most of us wouldn't even register as "challenging". Going to the store alone, driving to an errand.
I'm not sure "resilience" is even the right term, given that it does imply some kind of strength in adversity. Rather than a complete refocusing of what adversity is. I don't say this to criticise young people who have been raised in a worldview that was very different to that of their parents and grandparents.
When an internal locus of control is feasible, it's great to teach it.
Exaggerating how internal the locus of control really is can backfire spectacularly, though.
Clinicians complain about dealing with patients mistakenly diagnosed with psychosomatic problems that are later revealed to be non-psychosomatic. It's so hard, clinicians complain, to get these patients to listen after that. Patients who lose confidence in self-management techniques after those techniques have proved objectively insufficient to the real problem are apparently some of the worst patients to have, since their protest that they couldn't, in fact, take the expected responsibility for their problems has been proven right.
One way to teach irresponsibility is by not expecting responsibility. Another way is by expecting unrealistic responsibility.
Between attracting onlookers who'll validate anything you do and cancel culture, social media seems good at teaching both expectations.
I think resilience and personal responsibility go hand-in-hand. The process of training young people to become functional adults (no, it doesn't happen organically or through sheer positivity) includes both, and somehow as a culture we've neglected or refused to do either. This is a dysfunction of character-building and maturation. "Victimhood Culture" is nothing if not the renunciation of these values to the detriment of the individual and the society.
100% on the therapy thing. I think that plays into this a lot. We've therapized essentially every aspect of life. "Trauma" and "healing" are words used in connection with everyday events like having an angry driver yell at you from his car rather than the brutal kinds of abuse and suffering that those words used to refer to.
I hear a lot of people say "Everybody should be in therapy!" This to me feels very stupid. It's like saying, "Everybody should have their arm in a cast!" Yeah, if your arm's broken, you should. And if you have a reason to be in therapy, you should be in therapy. But we don't have to act like everyone has to use this very specific tool at all points in their life. A good therapist is fantastic for processing difficult, sticky, enduring psychological problems in your life. You don't need to go to therapy because you had an argument with a friend or because your job is kinda lame. Convincing young people that they need this amount of psychospecialist counseling in their lives is I think one of the biggest contributors to the resilience deficit.
This is definitely part of it. We are primed to see any minor adverse interaction as inflicting harm. And that's a nice warm bath of sympathy and self-pity to slide into. Woe is me, I am hard-done-by. It's seductive, that's the problem.
I think your comment is on target and very well argued. I'd only add that I think the most charitable interpretation of "everyone should be in therapy" is that everyone should have a therapist just like everyone should have a general care doctor. I think there may be merit to this idea. However, it would imply that by default you only see your therapist for maybe an hour-long appointment once a year to check up on how things are going, which is rather different from how most people think of "going to therapy".
I wonder if being in therapy is not an unwitting shorthand for "everyone should have the ability to talk to an understanding, listening person who is going to hear them and be patient with them, and in an increasingly atomized world that's most likely to happen when money changes hands and when the person is sufficiently credentialed to feel that such an exchange is 'worth it'." That is, it's less (but not completely without) the person's mental health qualifications and more the fact that they are a trained listener who is financially bound to help. In a world more connected and in which people had the kind of close friendships they did in the past* I wonder whether the recommendation for people to seek therapy would have been replaced by "just go to the Elk's lodge, you'll feel better."**
*in the US this is absolutely undeniable; social bonds were very strong in this country for a very long time and have been in complete freefall for decades, this being most keenly felt among the less educated. And no, the internet doesn't count.
**and depression, of course, was coded female for much of the post-war era, and antidepressant drugs coded as housewifery. How much of this was due to isolation in the home?
I think this is very insightful. Our communities are dissolving, and many people who for various reasons have difficulty forming real connections with others have the option to pay someone to listen to them with compassion. I've lived in apartments for the past decade or so, surrounded by people, and no one knows each other (unless they have kids around the same age). Growing up, in our neighborhoods, we knew almost everyone on the block.
….which is also one of the reasons people are less willing to let their kids play outside unsupervised. If you know almost everyone on your block and even the next block over, not only are you confident that your kids are safe around them, you know that at least some of them will step in to help if your “unsupervised” kid has a problem. Not so much if you’ve moved to a new town for work and don’t know most of the people around you.
I also get annoyed at the notion that "everyone should be in therapy". In some self-improvement circles it comes up a lot, and it's tied to the idea that no one should think they are special in their suffering because "everyone has issues", so "honestly, everyone should do therapy". A way of reassuring those who seek help and feel bad about it, I suppose.
It's just not true. Sure, lots of people have issues in some sense, maybe they don't get along with a relative or feel unsatisfied in their job as you said, but it's very far removed from the experience of a person who has suffered abuse or has depression or feel acute self-loathing that impair every area of their life. Lots of people are doing fine and don't need therapy at all, or if they need to work through something, meditation or traveling or finding a new hobby will be enough.
I also wonder sometimes if some people don't say "you should see a therapist" because they feel uncomfortable and don't know how to respond when a person tells them about their issues, so it's a way to shut down the conversation and avoid talking about it. I'm not sure.
It's also incredibly elitist. How much is therapy costing these days? Yet it's blithely bandied about as though everyone has the cash to drop on weekly sessions, or workplace insurance that covers it all.
Don't worry. Those who advocate for it are perfectly happy to add "right to therapy" and legislate that everyone should have access for free.
I don't even object to ensure that anyone who *needs* therapy should be able to access for free if they cannot afford it. The bigger question is who actually needs therapy. I don't think everyone does. Everyone may benefit from it from time to time in their life, but that is rather different from needing it.
Not to mention therapy can absolutely create problems where none existed before, thus screwing up with a perfectly healthy person.
If you probe enough, you'll always find materials to craft narratives about the past that supposedly show the patient has been harmed by parents, events or whatever - narratives that aren't true but seem very convincing. It's the therapist's role to find out what your problems and patterns are, after all. There's a fine line between finding out and creating out of whole cloth.
You seem to suggests therapists are devious and deviant. Truth is there is no such thing as a perfectly healthy person. If there was they would be resilient enough not to allow a therapist to screw them up.
One can cause harm without being devious or deviant. A therapist may have the best intentions in the world and still create the wrong narrative/program for a person, one that makes things worse.
I also do not agree with your last point. Therapists hold a certain power, so to speak, they are seen as experts with a talent for diagnosing issues and solving them, and even a healthy person could be impressed by their analysis, especially if it probes at a few doubts or uncertainties they have. No one is perfect.
But even if it's less likely to happen to a healthy person: it would definitely happen to someone who is particularly lost and fragile, which shows, again, that therapy isn't the answer to everything. First, you have to find a good one, and even that isn't a guarantee of anything since the good one could be entirely wrong.
I'm old enough to remember the old Ann Landers advice columns from the 70s - it seemed like 90% of her advice ended with her telling the person seeking advice to get counseling. And these were people complaining because their spouse didn't do some chore to their liking.
I won't say that we can blame Ann Landers for this whole "everyone should be in therapy" thing, but we also shouldn't let her off the hook either.
"I also wonder sometimes if some people don't say "you should see a therapist" because they feel uncomfortable and don't know how to respond when a person tells them about their issues, so it's a way to shut down the conversation and avoid talking about it."
This is definitely a thing but I think it's tied into the way that people seem eager to "trauma dump" these days. How many people have you met who seem to instantly overshare about their mental health issues and childhood trauma? It happens to me all the time and it's uncomfortable because when you don't really know the person well (or at all) it's hard to know how to respond. I think it's a vicious cycle that ties back to the same issue with therapy culture seeping into every area of human social life. Social media has probably also normalized oversharing to the point that people don't see how doing it in real life makes others uncomfortable.
you may be onto something here. It's a bit like people oversharing their personal life/maladies/etc online, and they do it in real life too. (I'm one of those people who would sooner eat their own hand than talk about my personal life, so I don't get it) But I have been "trauma dump"-ed on, with practical strangers telling me about their divorce/miscarriage/kid's addiction/etc.
I've been "trauma-dumped" by complete strangers, too, and I see it as a bit of an ... I don't know ... honor? I think people are willing to speak about things to strangers that they wouldn't to people that they expect to be an ongoing part of their lives. It's less risky, you know? Being vulnerable to a stranger, who can't possibly hurt you.
There was a tow-truck driver, an Iraq-war veteran, who told me - in great detail - about holding one of his squaddies as he died. (Did you know that blood from a shot to the liver is a different color than the blood you bleed from elsewhere in the body? Neither did I.)
Or a woman in Edinburgh who told me about her suicide attempt, in which she said that her right leg had "decided" to save her, and been fractured in 19 places; she spent three months in hospital, and I don't remember how many surgeries, but (several years later) walked without a hint of a limp, and with no desire ever to attempt to kill herself again.
It's human to need to tell someone about the great and terrible events of our lives. It's also human to listen, and make sympathetic noises in the appropriate places. From time to time I think about both of those people, along with several others. I am grateful that my life briefly intersected with theirs, and hope that my presence was of help to them.
I definitely agree with this..."impair every area of their life." When I've seen therapy work, it's been of short duration and very specific. The goal is to get the individual unstuck and moving on in their life.
Not all therapists are good. One kid had the experience of going through two therapists who were covered by our insurance. The first one wanted to talk about the trauma of being Asian in a predominantly white area, the other wanted to talk about the trauma of being adopted. This kid wanted to talk about the trauma of being in an abusive relationship with a psychopath and was furious at not being heard.
The third one (paid for out of pocket) was great and made all the difference in the world.
I can see an argument for everyone doing therapy, if it was available for all.
I think the issue with therapy is that some therapists just exist to fuel people's narcissism. I've seen people I know do therapy and just use the therapist as someone to moan to who agrees that yes, they are right, they have been treated badly, everyone else is to blame.
That's the issue. There's therapy and therapy. If you find a competent therapist who helps you articulate your issues and devise good solutions for them, and who you get along with, great. But it's not that easy.
And I totally agree with the fueling narcissism thing - it definitely happens for some people. Here the therapist needs to be competent enough to recognize when the person is painting themselves as a victim and gently lead them to interrogate whether that's really true without them becoming defensive - difficult stuff!
For some kind of idealized therapy, "everybody should be in therapy" would be like "everyone should have a personal trainer" or "everybody should have a financial counsellor."
It's probably not true that literally everybody should have a trainer or a financial counsellor, especially if we do a cost benefit of how much benefit the person would get vs how much the trainer would be paid, but there are a lot of people who are leaving a lot of potential fitness and financial gains on the table for want of regular check-ins and good advice.
If more therapy were like personal training - clear goals, objectively measured, and common sense techniques - then I could defend the "everybody" argument as being close to true.
I'm not a therapy consumer, but have a close friend with BPD, and cognitive behavioral therapy seems to have helped her a lot.
That's what I imagine for therapy in general - I show up with some issues I want to address. (I'm unhappy/unmotivated/anxious/scared to go outside/etc.) and the therapist and I make a plan to address those problems, measure our progress, and adjust as necessary, including changing therapists or therapeutic approaches if I'm not making acceptable progress.
CBT makes sense. A lot of sense. But it has some severe limitations in that it only addresses one side of the brain. What about the right side, the heart and the gut? What about the irrational? The meta? Forces beyond the obvious? The invisible?
It's announcing its limitation in the name. BPD is known to be difficult to address.
"clear goals, objectively measured, and common sense techniques"
I think what you're describing is more life coaching than therapy. Coaching is supposed to be efficient and goal-focused, while therapy integrates more analysis and attempting to understand the root causes of issues.
Oh, the trauma, fated to endure life in the midst of the wealthiest people, in the wealthiest, most equitable society which ever existed ... oh the horrors.
Your last paragraph poses the essential question: Why is Jonathan Haidt almost alone in putting forward ANY nuanced argument about the problem (and the stakes) of a generation raised without opportunities to acquire resilience? As you note, you don't need to agree with him on every point to appreciate the fact that he is speaking up, intelligently and urgently.
I see a lot of people who are salivating at how Gen Z doesn't appear to be getting more conservative as they age - I think the most partisan and scheming on the left are a little excited that there's a generation that's leaning left, mental health issues and future crises on the horizon be damned.
This is the most recent study that I've seen flying around for the past week - idk, we shall see... I could very much see the whole generation getting annoyed with the various administrators etc. who try to act like "cool parents".
There's also a weird valorization of the young that has been a constant in my life coming from the left, and I think any criticism of "the youth" becomes a criticism of the glorious new future we're going to enter once everyone is a hyper-online weirdo.
Thinking more about this... Lots of major religious traditions have a quote from their holy figure that's something like "be like a child in your openness and joy at life", which got filtered through Rousseau et al as a reverence for the "childlike", unspoiled state of nature... Maybe as this concept has percolated through various trends and worldviews, it got flipped and taken literally as "children are exemplary look to them for leadership" 🤷♂️
I don't think Jonathan Haidt is "almost alone" in this. When I visit the parenting advice section of my local bookstore, plenty of books have titles like "how to raise a resilient child" and a blurb or introduction that talks about how today's kids are coddled and need to learn better to deal with hardships and disappointments, etc. On the other hand, the authors of these books aren't household names the way Haidt is.
"When I visit the parenting advice section of my local bookstore, plenty of books have titles like 'how to raise a resilient child'"
I know! And plenty of books for children are written explicitly to teach them better self-regulation and everyday problem-solving. Books and activities on this sort of stuff are normal at our local elementary school.
I love the point about parenting books. I’m now curious in how many households Haidt is a household name. Is there a blog-level equivalent to “household”? Can we say Haidt is a “bloghold name”?
I have exclusively heard it about 'the whiny _White_ privileged', and thought whiteness was part of it because snowflakes are white, too. Of course, the people I mostly hear it from are Black.
Great piece. Stuff like this makes me proud to be a subscriber.
Funny thing though, and this goes back to the Voldemort problem you once wrote about, is that it really doesn't matter what word we use to describe what's going on; it'll eventually become right-wing-coded and unspeakable anyway.
Okay, so "snowflake" and "victimhood" are out. Fair enough. But now "resilience" is on its way there too. And then the next term after that, etc.
How can we name a problem if we're not allowed a word to describe it?
We're trying to say the emperor has no clothes, and they are the emperors. It should come as no surprise that any words we use become right-coded by them, because our ideas threaten their status.
Censorship is at the core of the liberal agenda. Banning and controlling language is the one battle that the PMC left has managed to consistently win over the last 40 years and now is the core element of their agenda despite it making no material difference in anyone’s life.
I admit I’m not in the trenches of social media, so I’m curious what the evidence is that “resilience” is on the way out. On it’s face, I’m not sure “resilience” is likely to meet the same fate as the other words you mentioned. I think it depends on how it ends up being used.
“Snowflake” was always used with a sneer, so is it any wonder the people it was being used against didn’t respond positively to the criticism?
The “victimhood culture” also frames things in the negative, and I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that it isn’t received well by the people it describes.
Encouraging the building of resilience has the advantage of being something constructive, and of acknowledging that there are things out there that require one to build resilience. It can be used from a place of solidarity rather than a place of insult or criticism.
Now, if it does simply turn into judgmental criticism or outright insult, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if folks wind up reacting negatively to that.
Preface: I am not great at reading humor in real life, much less online.
“If there isn’t a bit of a sneer, what’s the point?”
How sincere is this? If it’s reasonably sincere, why are people surprised that terms used to sneer at other people provoke negative reactions? If I see you do that to anyone in real life, I’ll likely reduce contact with you.
And it's dominant because... people who feel judged aren't resilient. And there is no satisfactory response to someone whose ego is primed to defend or attack. But who is being educated about the role of the ego? No one. What is the proper role of the ego? In the past, it's been to defend or attack. But if one were to mature their ego how would that person respond? I'd say with resilience. How many adults respond with foreknowledge, depth, and caring? I want names.
The hostility towards anything resembling a pull-by-bootstraps argument is some evidence, I think. Whether it's negatively valenced as "toughen up", or positively valenced as "the world is tough so we should try and make adequately tough people to handle it". Part of the progessive project, as I understand it, is instead/prioritizing trying to sand off more of those rough edges so people don't have to build <s>grit</s> resilience to begin with. That puts too much onus on the individual, and doesn't hold accountable all the Vast Systemic Forces trying to keep people down.
Plus the unfortunate over-weaponization of the <s>grit</s> resilience-lacking narrative against certain Favoured Classes, which is part of what made it right-coded to begin with. Definitely some bad faith in those uses, but even more-compelling proponents like John McWhorter get dismissed out of hand for not advocating the preferred solution to the problem. (At least everyone agrees there __is__ a problem, that the world seems increasingly too complicated and people can't keep up.)
This is helpful. I’m trying to gauge a few things, based on what I’ve seen compared to what I’m seeing others here describe.
- How numerous and powerful are people taking a hard stance that nothing should be done to cultivate individual resilience? That seems like the position people are most upset with, but I’m having a hard time telling how big a deal it really is.
- What is the spectrum of roughness in the sights of the various folks trying to sand off the rough edges? Let’s take microaggressions as a potentially salient example. I take it as given that there will always be things that fit the definition of microaggressions and disagreement about what exactly those are. How many people (and with what power) are solely in the camp of “quash all microaggressions and don’t talk with kids about how to process it when they experience a relevant one”? How many are in the camp of “loudly call out microaggressions and also prepare kids to deal with them”? How many are in the camp of “privately talk to people who commit microaggressions to encourage them to make different choices and also prepare kids to deal with them”? How many are in the camp of “don’t respond to microaggressions and help kids prepare to deal with them”?
I know progressives all along that spectrum. The ones toward the quash/call out side are more likely to share that on social media, sure. The folks who actually have power—in schools, in the publishing of advice or books for parents, etc.—are going to be at all points along the spectrum and probably leaning more towards the side of helping kids learn how to be resilient.
All of that said, I personally think there is value in encouraging folks to learn about how the things they say and do could hurt other people’s feelings and letting them decide where their personal thresholds are for how to use that information. I also understand that when someone says something that hurts my feelings, the responsibility is on me to work through that. The first part doesn’t invalidate the second or vice versa.
Microaggressions is just one specific rough edge, but the general approach—what is the spectrum of beliefs/actions, and how many people (with what power) are actually at each point—is useful for the broader point. There’s usually not nearly as much homogeneity on the progressive side of this as some folks seem to assume. (And given who’s most likely to shoot their mouth off on social media, the assumption is not particularly surprising. I just don’t think social media provides a particularly accurate read on the distribution of perspectives and power on this point.)
All of that said, I personally think there is value in encouraging folks to learn about how the things they say and do could hurt other people’s feelings and letting them decide where their personal thresholds are for how to use that information. I also understand that when someone says something that hurts my feelings, the responsibility is on me to work through that. The first part doesn’t invalidate the second or vice versa.
I applaud the effort at calibration. This feels like (heh) one of those "vibes" things though...one could probably devise some quantitative measure or study, but like most CW skirmishes, it's the gestalt impression that matters more to people than what's actually happening in X places by Y people with Z frequency. (And I agree this is annoying for everyone involved who values clarity.)
Twitter seems like an even less useful sample these days, what with the...recent demographic swings.
One of the biggest complainers of insisting on grit to get ahead in life is Freddie! Yet you have people here falling over themselves to blame 'The Left' for handing out participation trophies like it's something a single queer non-binary Antifa lesbian created out of whole cloth in the last 10 years.
I've known some pretty shitty parents in my time and their version of teaching kids grit and boot-strapping was neglect by any other definition. I'm sure we can all bring up personal anecdotes of coddling parents vs. grit parents but that doens't really get to the heart of the discussion I think Freddie wants to have.
I don't think we have to teach homeless or kids trapped in sever poverty about resilience. They're living that every day. So would you say the Church going parents who send their kids to private Catholic school and deprive them of nothing are more capable of teaching their kids how to bootstrap? Because that's the impression I get when I read many of the comments here.
Oh, for sure. Plus Freddie being a part of "The Left", that's the whole schtick. I think he tends to play both sides of the game, though, so I'm not inclined to call out for kettle-blacking. Posts like Your Personality Has To Be Load-Bearing make up for a lot of structural-this, revolution-that.
Resilience and its lack thereof is a multifaceted problem, and the discussion could go several directions and levels of meta. One would be...there is a very real and troubling issue with helicopter parenting, general societal aversion to risk (particularly around anything children-related), and the dark legacy of Tiger Mom-style intensive parenting? Some dangers really can be ~eliminated wholesale, we could end homelessness or poverty or hunger if we wanted to optimize in that direction. So those types of hard-knocks are just unnecessary revanchism, and lefties are right to dream of a world without them.
But there's a whole bunch of other...types of mistakes that are inevitable to meet in life, which would be very costly/difficult to completely insulate from. The experience of frictions ("microaggressions" in other taxonomies), freeform interpersonal interactions, resolving disputes between individuals without involving 3rd parties, jobs-not-structured-like-school. That private Catholic school kid who wants not might eventually graduate to the Ivy League and end up working for Bigshot Inc. - and become one of those impeccably-pedigreed new hires who end up being useless, because they can't think for themselves or generalize the formulae taught in school to slightly-novel problems. That's a big fraction of the litany of woes by/about Millennials, at any rate...that we trained very hard to check boxes and earn certifications, but not really *do* things with them.
I don't know, I can tell I'm rambling here. There's a bigger phenomenon I want to elucidate, but am having trouble distilling into high-impact words. Basically that it's right and just to improve material conditions for everyone, but there's also lots of hard-won wisdom through hardship that we shouldn't throw out by overcorrecting. The optimal amount of trouble in a life is not zero; just as you can't directly teach creativity, you can't directly teach someone to toughen up, so leaving some safer parts of life's path unpaved is important. (If we ever *did* figure out how to teach such skills without any actual adversity required, that's be incredible. Virtual reality, maybe?)
This seems a particularly weird case to stake this argument on.
How have the uses of these terms been controlled?
If I call someone an insult, as with “snowflake,” there’s no need for a NewSpeak level of control to explain why they’ll either react negatively or ignore me. Have folks faced serious consequences just for calling other people snowflakes? Or do they just get ignored/blocked/argued with by the people they were trying to insult?
As for “victimhood culture,” it’s a term that seems apt to put someone on the defensive. That can often be overcome with politeness, context, and good faith. When that’s happened, folks keep using the term without major consequences that I can see. When they add a sneer, again, it doesn’t surprise me that people will disengage.
I guess the questions for me are:
1) How do you (the general “you”) want to use this term? Who’s your audience, what’s your emotional tenor, etc.?
2) What response/reaction are you hoping for? Do you want the people you’re describing to change their thoughts or behavior? Do you want them to engage in rational disagreement? Do you want them to just take it and admit your brilliance?
3) How aligned are your answers to 1 and 2? Are you expecting an insult to prompt a rational argument or an acknowledgement of your brilliance? How reasonable is that expectation?
I guess I’m just not seeing a particularly strong system of control being deployed here, more just basic social dynamics. What am I missing?
Freddie has adequately defined (with exhaustive examples) the rise of victimhood culture in past writings, I don't think it needs a rehashing yet again.
I’m not contesting the existence of the phenomenon. I’m questioning how much language is being controlled to avoid discussion of this particular topic.
The people I find to be the most annoying complainers about the culture of victimhood tend to be the on-line right of center commenters who whine about why they just can't say the crappy shit they used to say 10-15-20 years ago. I mean, the Evangelical Right have made 'victimhood' a lucrative part of their schtick, like the seasonal whining that they can't say Merry Christmas anymore.
>Of course, Haidt isn’t helping himself any. The term “culture of victimhood” reminds many people of the “snowflake” insult, the idea than anyone from a marginalized background who complains about injustice is really just self-involved and weak.
I think this is worth picking a little quibble with, mainly because I'm interested in everyone's experiences with how the derogatory term "snowflake" is used. In my experience, "culture of victimhood" is a classic conservative term used over several decades for anyone marginalized complaining about injustice, and so in my opinion Freddie should have stopped here without relating it to "snowflake". My interpretation of how "snowflake" is used is slightly different: I understand it to refer *both* to fragility (snowflakes melt and fall apart easily) *and* to uniqueness (no two snowflakes are exactly alike). The point with the "snowflake" insult is that the "speshul snowflake" person is making a point both of being fragile and of belonging to a very specific combination of demographic categories and is playing up both, not even necessarily in a context of protesting against injustice. This is a criticism of many very online millennials-and-younger which to my point of view is often valid if unkind; I would not say it's an all-around conservative talking point. And I am emphatically not conservative but tend to agree with Haidt that the rise in "snowflakeyness" among very online youth comes *partly* from a norm of valorizing victimhood in a particular way while there is also a norm that plays a crucial role of generally enjoying identity markers quite apart from claiming victimhood. (Apparently this platform doesn't recognize "valorize" as a word? :P)
I'm curious about what others think: is "snowflake" just a more recent rendition of the classic right-wing term "culture of victimhood"?
Isn't its contemporary usage tied to "Fight Club"? -
"You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
I think it’s sometimes but not always that. I’ve certainly seen it used as a more mean-spirited shorthand for the victimhood culture critique.
It’s also sometimes used in the broader way you describe, and I think it’s very easy for folks to conflate millennial-and-younger folks—especially the very identity-conversant ones—with liberals/the left/etc. more broadly, which further codes it on the right.
I’ve also seen a kind of perverse redirecting of it to use against the right. Certainly there are plenty of folks on that side of things who come across as whiny, too. In those cases, it’s often used to sneer at someone on the right performatively invoking free speech or claiming to have been cancelled when in fact they’ve only received some criticism (and not of the sort rising to the level of threats, job loss, etc.)
And so on…
It’s certainly something that, no matter how it’s used, is more likely to make people defensive than willing to engage constructively.
Well, I overall agree with your summary and agree that the term is not constructive and should probably be avoided. As far as using against the Right is concerned (which I've seen in a number of places, notably on The Young Turks' channel), while there are tons of common right-wing ways to be indignant, get overly offended, and ascribe to a victim complex, I think branding these things as "snowflake" behavior is kind of misguided on more than one level. Specifically playing up being *fragile* and falling under a set of narrow identity markers is very much still a thing of the younger Left and I don't see any trace of it on the Right; we might as well be nuanced enough in the meanings of derogatory terms not to use "snowflake" just to mean whiny and protesting offense. That said, I'm not the arbiter of how "snowflake" is used; other people's experiences with its usage may be different (thus my question in the parent comment); and as you suggest it would probably be better to retire this particular insult.
Yep, I think there are a couple different places where folks’ definitions differ.
One is whether the special-identity-based component is necessary or if perceived fragility is enough. For some, it seems all that’s needed is the fragility.
For those who do see the insult as requiring the special-identity component, I think there are differences in which identities “count” for the purpose of the insult. You’ve described your understanding as pretty narrow. Others who take a broader view might see folks on the right complaining claim the slights they’ve received are *because they are conservative* as qualifying.
I'm certainly aware that a decent number of people have been using "snowflake" broadly to refer only to fragility or be synonymous with "someone with a victim complex". I think I have a strong inclination to err on the narrow side for definitions of terms, because it helps keep the discussion nuanced and guards against fuzzy thinking and lumping too many phenomena or types of people into the same bin. An example would be my frustration with the broadening of the term "gaslighting". All that said, again that's just my inclination which can't dictate how people actually use and understand a term, and I accept Grenwolf's argument for why "snowflake" (and other terms whose primary uses in practice are just for the sake of hurling a dismissive insult) should probably be discouraged altogether.
As a suggestion for a possible future post, if I am recalling your book correctly you were fairly skeptical of "grit" as a quality that could address inequality in education outcomes.
I'd be curious if your research had found that grit, resilience, waiting for the second Oreo or anything in that basket of concepts is easier to teach. As you cover here, even if it won't change achievement gaps, it may have other life benefits.
I think it pretty indisputable that contemporary culture valorizes victimhood. Otherwise, humans would not seek it, or constantly refer to their victim status.
One of the myriad and innumerable ways in which cats are superior to humans is that, while cats may ask for help, we don't feel sorry for ourselves.
I have young kids and it sure is a balance finding the right amount of autonomy with the right amount of protection I need to provide.
On one end you can become “bean dad” — to be clear, I thought that was just tedious but not abusive. The extreme is obviously something like those kids that raise kids or fend for themselves.
Yeah I don’t think it’s crazy to not let a 7-8 year play outside alone on a busy street. It’s crazy not to let them play outside alone in an enclosed backyard, or in a rural setting. What makes for coddling versus neglecting is a pretty tricky balance! This comes from someone who works in K-12 education and sees both extremes every day but very little building resilience.
I live on a moderately busy street, and I actually think that in many ways it is safer. Kids are very concrete thinkers, and it is easier to teach a preschooler that streets are full of cars when they can see the cars with their own eyes.
I loved bean dad. Maybe I have stockholm syndrome because it seemed like something my own parents would have done, but I'm grateful that they put me in many situations like that so that I grew up independent and resilient and confident in my own competence. I can't fathom how anyone considered that abuse. What would the kid have done if she'd been home alone and wanted to open the can of beans? She would have had to figure it out on her own. It's a great lesson and I bet she felt amazing when she finally got it. She'll remember that moment forever (and not just because it went viral).
I was born in the early 90s and my generation was the first to suffer the effects of safetyism and helicopter parenting - even in the early 2000s I was very cognizant of having more freedom, more unscheduled time, and more responsibility than a lot of my peers (nothing serious, just like the fact that I had my own house key and could stay home alone for a few hours at age 9 or the fact that I was allowed to use the stove to cook my own food or the fact that I walked to school alone in middle school). There were moments where I felt neglected compared to my peers because my parents would make me do things for myself that other kids didn't have to do, like packing my own lunch if I didn't want to buy from the cafeteria or getting a job to pay for my own gas money, but from the perspective of a thirtysomething adult I realize that those things only felt like neglect because I was surrounded by the children of helicopter parents. It was nice getting to college and already knowing how to cook and do laundry and call the utility company to handle the electric bill and not having to call my parents six times a day because I was having anxiety attacks from handling the basic tasks of daily living. It took a lot of my friends years to learn how to cope with the responsibility they suddenly acquired when they got to college.
Great article Freddie. I’m always amazed when I talk to Gen X parents who thoroughly enjoyed the level of personal freedom they had growing up and also wouldn’t dream of giving it to their own children.
Even if they *want* to give their children that level of freedom, it's difficult because of the judgements of their peers and because of what is perceived as abuse and / or neglect.
Agreed. It can be difficult to overcome social pressure and meddling busybodies watching out from their front windows. Many states are passing Parental Rights/Childhood Freedom laws now for this very reason.
There was famously a court case in Vancouver where a dad got in trouble with social services because he allowed his kids to take the bus solo (aged 5 to 11; his 11 year old was supervising them).
Great piece. At some point we have to just stop giving a shit what motives the bad-faith online prog left tries to impute on anyone pursuing rational, reasoned thought. These are the same people who’ve made Jordan Peterson a villain of toxic masculinity for telling young men to stand up straight and make their beds. Surely he’s no hero, but he’s not a villain either.
Also, The Coddling of the American Mind is mandatory reading, especially for parents.
EDIT: I would like to also point out that Haidt has shown, fairly convincingly, that the “culture of victimhood” is a SYMPTOM of declining resilience in young children that began about 30 years ago, not a cause. Social trends have been heading in that direction for a few decades but the institutional focus on safetyism in universities and companies with a younger workforce is only there by popular demand. Those kids are lost, or maybe they’ll age out of it eventually, but truly the only course correction starts with young children being raised today to develop better coping skills and self-reliance. It’s going to take a sustained effort for 15 years to reverse where we are today.
Jordan Peterson has been another painful disappointment to me. He went from "stand up straight, take responsibility" (good, sensible advice) to "actually Putin may have good reasons for invading Ukraine."
That is a wonderful and thoughtful paper. Yes, we need nuance, yes we need resilience,. My only disagreement with you is that progressive politics, as you rightly point out, are all about harm reduction. Big daddy-state has mad it its one task to reduce harm, and atha will not promote resilience. But I guess I start to tread thin ice, so I better leave it at that.
I think a real challenge is that as society becomes wealthier and living standards improve people have to go through less adversity. I have never gone 24 hours without food, never had to had to work manual labor beyond stocking shelves, never gotten badly beat up. And all these things are signs of progress, but also mean that I'm softer than some of my ancestors, and in many ways less resilient. How do we think of these tradeoffs? Less adversity is good, but adversity can build resilience. I have spent money on primitive camping gear and Crossfit classes to simulate the adversity I don't face in my life, which is pretty silly when I actually think about it, but also better than not doing it.
Sure, plenty of people suffer and learn nothing. But it's hard/impossible to build resilience if you don't suffer at all. Haidt's argument is that we go too far in eliminating kids' opportunities to suffer and build resilience. But in general we agree that kids suffering is bad. Hence the 2 competing ideas we have to balance.
A useful term here, applicable to most learning, is “zone of proximal development.” If something is too familiar/easy, there’s no way for learning to take place. If something is too hard/new, we bounce off it/give up/shit down. There’s a gradient of learning/growth for the space between these extremes.
The zone of proximal development is the space that maximizes growth without being overwhelming. This is almost always uncomfortable, but it’s not excessively painful.
So “suffering,” commonly understood, is probably counterproductive. People might adapt and survive, but the thought patterns and behaviors that help that happen aren’t the healthy kind of resilience and are often not well calibrated to the rest of our modern lives.
Learning how to work through discomfort and engage in productive struggle, however, is vital. School and a host of other activities, when done well, design experiences to keep leveling kids up. It’s hard to do this in a fully individualized way at scale, so one of the key challenges for modern parenting is how to do this at home (and respond when those other experiences aren’t well calibrated to your particular kid).
Exactly. Actual suffering, as opposed to challenge or discomfort, might make you resilient, but it might just as easily make you callous and cruel: "the world is a dark place where nobody cares about me, so I'm gonna grab as much as I can for myself, and to hell with everyone else."
How do you think about this interpersonally? In life people will be mean to you, not like you, be unfair to you, and it will suck. I'd say every teenager at least feels like they're suffering at some point because of stuff like this. But we need to go through some amount of it to build resilience. Haidt is big on the idea that kids need "unstructured play" to learn to work these situations without tattling. But at the same time as a kid I saw certain kids get bullied really badly, beyond the point I'd want anyone to experience. Where do you think we draw the line?
I don’t think there’s a universal line. It depends on where the person on the receiving end of the behavior is in their development. The response, if any, of adults will also matter.
Let’s say a kid is being teased by a bully. What have they already learned about this behavior? Do they recognize it for what it is? Can they separate the bullying behavior from their own belief in their value? Do they know who is in their support system to help them process this afterward?
If this is the first time they’re experiencing something of this intensity, they’ll almost certainly be upset. If afterward they have a support system—ideally including adults—who can help them understand what happened, affirm that they still have value and will be OK, and talk through possible responses for next time (how to disengage, how to stay mindful and not take the bullying to heart, when if ever to escalate so as to facilitate disengagement [and how to do so effectively], etc.), they’ll be more likely to draw healthy lessons. This will need to repeat in order for the learning to be reinforced and to stick.
If a kid who’s rarely been bullied is suddenly experiencing extreme bullying, it’s a lot less likely that they’ll be in a place to learn from it, hence the value of giving kids lots of opportunities to respond to kids with similar levels of “intensity.”
These experiences are also part of how we help kids shift their thresholds for what feels like suffering. This helps them differentiate conflict from abuse and discomfort from suffering. This won’t necessarily eliminate the feeling of suffering in the short term, but it will increase the chance of healthy patterns forming.
Making the call about when to intervene is certainly tricky. It’s easier if you know the kids involved and can gauge where this falls in the bullied kid’s development.
Also, if the kids (both the bullies and the bullied) know you’re aware of the behavior, inaction will still contribute to learning on both sides. “Unstructured” doesn’t have to mean “unsupervised,” at least to me—I don’t know Haidt’s perspective. Intervening calmly to support the learning of all parties is probably better than teaching bullies that it’s OK to do that and the bullied that they can’t trust adults. (Developing the sense for when to trust vs. not trust adults in general and authority figures in particular is a whole separate conversation.)
I think I might agree with Haidt about social media being the biggest problem for the young, because *multiple* avenues of pathology meander out of it. There’s the “culture of victimhood” and snowflakeyness (which I think are related but not necessarily the same, as another commenter pointed out), but there’s also hypersexualization of kids/teens (just saw a great video by 21yo Toni Bryanne lamenting this; viewer beware, there are multiple TikToks of young teen girls looking and behaving very much not like young teen girls), depression/isolation, body dysmorphia encouraged by the Instagram aesthetic, and other identity-based issues.
Agree, and I’ll add to this: There’s great value in making mistakes unobserved. My adolescent anxiety was all wrapped up in a horror of everyone looking at me and finding me wanting. I had phases as a teenager where I couldn’t order at a fast food restaurant for terror of fucking up the interaction somehow. The cure was just growing up enough to realize that no one really cared one way or another about what I said or did and nobody was actually looking at me.
I feel like if I tried to tell someone fifteen years younger than me, “Don’t worry! No one’s looking at you all the time!” they could justifiably look at me like I was a total idiot. *Nothing* they do is unobserved and to a lot of them the idea of saying or doing something unobserved is kind of strange.
And this sense of constantly being observed feeds the our narcissism, for it implies one is ALWAYS the center of someone's attention, when nothing could be healthier than realizing that you're not the center of the universe. In fact, that realization is the start of being able to experience the sublime, when say, you look up at the stars or a mountain vista. We're not just sapping resiliency, we're strip-mining life of the potential for joy.
Yes! And I think a lot of the younger set do start to figure this out - but I think they figure it out later. As I (millennial, modern social media was invented when I was in late high school) figured it out later than my parents.
And yet I read Haidt's piece the same day I saw all the reports and clips of what Barbara Walters had to put up with, as well as the deeply unsettling clip of her interview with Sean Connery (about slapping women -- google it). Toughness and dignity yes, but can you blame Gen Z for saying why should anyone put up with that in the first place, to achieve toughness? I do wonder.
*Haidt. I guess we don't have an edit button here?
I believe you do have an edit button
Click on the 3 little dots under your comment.
That's if it's someone ELSE'S comment. It offers "edit" if it's a comment you wrote.
Yup my mistake.
I think you are painting with too broad a brush with "left of center" or even "progressives" on this topic. Your issue is with a very online white uber educated subset of the left. "Elizabeth Warren Democrats" maybe.
I'm referring to the kind of person I'm referring to. And I'm getting really close to banhammering anyone who makes a comment of the type "this is not a big enough deal for me to read about." If it's not worth your time, MOVE THE FUCK ON.
I think the issue is with a much wider portion of left-of-center/progressive people than "Elizabeth Warren Democrats", including a strong majority of younger progressives (who aren't typically falling in line with Elizabeth Warren). But leaving that aside, I didn't interpret ben starr's as suggesting that it's not a big enough deal to read about but rather, a call to be extra careful with how we characterize large swaths of people as this is a good thing to be careful about in general especially if we want to achieve more of the nuance whose absence is lamented in the essay. (This interpretation may be overly charitable though.)
I took it not as "this is not a big enough deal" but as "this terminology you used technically includes me and I'm not guilty of the thing" which I also find annoying because JFC it's a generalization and generalizations are generally true and that's all they need to be. Of course there are going to be outliers (like meeeee!).
I actually paid up after reading this morning which is the opposite of the characterization.
Yeah, I mean, assuming for the sake of argument your claim about Freddie's criticism applying only to a very narrow subset of progressives, that doesn't mean that it's not a big deal to be worth reading about and you should MOVE THE FUCK ON: even the sliver of highly educated "Elizabeth Warren Democrats" probably has an outsize influence on the discourse and is quite relevant.
I agree with you, partly. Yes, "resilience" can sound like a smug "suck it up, buttercup". Until we realise how expansive this (lack of) resilience seems to be. It's not just making it through challenges, or suffering. I read this fascinating piece https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-struggling-with-their-mental-health-is-more-childhood-independence-the-answer and for some young people it's an inability to even face things that most of us wouldn't even register as "challenging". Going to the store alone, driving to an errand.
I'm not sure "resilience" is even the right term, given that it does imply some kind of strength in adversity. Rather than a complete refocusing of what adversity is. I don't say this to criticise young people who have been raised in a worldview that was very different to that of their parents and grandparents.
When an internal locus of control is feasible, it's great to teach it.
Exaggerating how internal the locus of control really is can backfire spectacularly, though.
Clinicians complain about dealing with patients mistakenly diagnosed with psychosomatic problems that are later revealed to be non-psychosomatic. It's so hard, clinicians complain, to get these patients to listen after that. Patients who lose confidence in self-management techniques after those techniques have proved objectively insufficient to the real problem are apparently some of the worst patients to have, since their protest that they couldn't, in fact, take the expected responsibility for their problems has been proven right.
One way to teach irresponsibility is by not expecting responsibility. Another way is by expecting unrealistic responsibility.
Between attracting onlookers who'll validate anything you do and cancel culture, social media seems good at teaching both expectations.
I think resilience and personal responsibility go hand-in-hand. The process of training young people to become functional adults (no, it doesn't happen organically or through sheer positivity) includes both, and somehow as a culture we've neglected or refused to do either. This is a dysfunction of character-building and maturation. "Victimhood Culture" is nothing if not the renunciation of these values to the detriment of the individual and the society.
100% on the therapy thing. I think that plays into this a lot. We've therapized essentially every aspect of life. "Trauma" and "healing" are words used in connection with everyday events like having an angry driver yell at you from his car rather than the brutal kinds of abuse and suffering that those words used to refer to.
I hear a lot of people say "Everybody should be in therapy!" This to me feels very stupid. It's like saying, "Everybody should have their arm in a cast!" Yeah, if your arm's broken, you should. And if you have a reason to be in therapy, you should be in therapy. But we don't have to act like everyone has to use this very specific tool at all points in their life. A good therapist is fantastic for processing difficult, sticky, enduring psychological problems in your life. You don't need to go to therapy because you had an argument with a friend or because your job is kinda lame. Convincing young people that they need this amount of psychospecialist counseling in their lives is I think one of the biggest contributors to the resilience deficit.
This is definitely part of it. We are primed to see any minor adverse interaction as inflicting harm. And that's a nice warm bath of sympathy and self-pity to slide into. Woe is me, I am hard-done-by. It's seductive, that's the problem.
I think your comment is on target and very well argued. I'd only add that I think the most charitable interpretation of "everyone should be in therapy" is that everyone should have a therapist just like everyone should have a general care doctor. I think there may be merit to this idea. However, it would imply that by default you only see your therapist for maybe an hour-long appointment once a year to check up on how things are going, which is rather different from how most people think of "going to therapy".
I wonder if being in therapy is not an unwitting shorthand for "everyone should have the ability to talk to an understanding, listening person who is going to hear them and be patient with them, and in an increasingly atomized world that's most likely to happen when money changes hands and when the person is sufficiently credentialed to feel that such an exchange is 'worth it'." That is, it's less (but not completely without) the person's mental health qualifications and more the fact that they are a trained listener who is financially bound to help. In a world more connected and in which people had the kind of close friendships they did in the past* I wonder whether the recommendation for people to seek therapy would have been replaced by "just go to the Elk's lodge, you'll feel better."**
*in the US this is absolutely undeniable; social bonds were very strong in this country for a very long time and have been in complete freefall for decades, this being most keenly felt among the less educated. And no, the internet doesn't count.
**and depression, of course, was coded female for much of the post-war era, and antidepressant drugs coded as housewifery. How much of this was due to isolation in the home?
I think this is very insightful. Our communities are dissolving, and many people who for various reasons have difficulty forming real connections with others have the option to pay someone to listen to them with compassion. I've lived in apartments for the past decade or so, surrounded by people, and no one knows each other (unless they have kids around the same age). Growing up, in our neighborhoods, we knew almost everyone on the block.
….which is also one of the reasons people are less willing to let their kids play outside unsupervised. If you know almost everyone on your block and even the next block over, not only are you confident that your kids are safe around them, you know that at least some of them will step in to help if your “unsupervised” kid has a problem. Not so much if you’ve moved to a new town for work and don’t know most of the people around you.
that and a "stranger danger" moral panic of the '80s and '90s
I also get annoyed at the notion that "everyone should be in therapy". In some self-improvement circles it comes up a lot, and it's tied to the idea that no one should think they are special in their suffering because "everyone has issues", so "honestly, everyone should do therapy". A way of reassuring those who seek help and feel bad about it, I suppose.
It's just not true. Sure, lots of people have issues in some sense, maybe they don't get along with a relative or feel unsatisfied in their job as you said, but it's very far removed from the experience of a person who has suffered abuse or has depression or feel acute self-loathing that impair every area of their life. Lots of people are doing fine and don't need therapy at all, or if they need to work through something, meditation or traveling or finding a new hobby will be enough.
I also wonder sometimes if some people don't say "you should see a therapist" because they feel uncomfortable and don't know how to respond when a person tells them about their issues, so it's a way to shut down the conversation and avoid talking about it. I'm not sure.
It's also incredibly elitist. How much is therapy costing these days? Yet it's blithely bandied about as though everyone has the cash to drop on weekly sessions, or workplace insurance that covers it all.
Don't worry. Those who advocate for it are perfectly happy to add "right to therapy" and legislate that everyone should have access for free.
I don't even object to ensure that anyone who *needs* therapy should be able to access for free if they cannot afford it. The bigger question is who actually needs therapy. I don't think everyone does. Everyone may benefit from it from time to time in their life, but that is rather different from needing it.
Not to mention therapy can absolutely create problems where none existed before, thus screwing up with a perfectly healthy person.
If you probe enough, you'll always find materials to craft narratives about the past that supposedly show the patient has been harmed by parents, events or whatever - narratives that aren't true but seem very convincing. It's the therapist's role to find out what your problems and patterns are, after all. There's a fine line between finding out and creating out of whole cloth.
You seem to suggests therapists are devious and deviant. Truth is there is no such thing as a perfectly healthy person. If there was they would be resilient enough not to allow a therapist to screw them up.
One can cause harm without being devious or deviant. A therapist may have the best intentions in the world and still create the wrong narrative/program for a person, one that makes things worse.
I also do not agree with your last point. Therapists hold a certain power, so to speak, they are seen as experts with a talent for diagnosing issues and solving them, and even a healthy person could be impressed by their analysis, especially if it probes at a few doubts or uncertainties they have. No one is perfect.
But even if it's less likely to happen to a healthy person: it would definitely happen to someone who is particularly lost and fragile, which shows, again, that therapy isn't the answer to everything. First, you have to find a good one, and even that isn't a guarantee of anything since the good one could be entirely wrong.
But then everything is elitist. Let them bandy. What's the harm?
I'm old enough to remember the old Ann Landers advice columns from the 70s - it seemed like 90% of her advice ended with her telling the person seeking advice to get counseling. And these were people complaining because their spouse didn't do some chore to their liking.
I won't say that we can blame Ann Landers for this whole "everyone should be in therapy" thing, but we also shouldn't let her off the hook either.
Read Miss Lonelyhearts
Novel by Nathanael West
"I also wonder sometimes if some people don't say "you should see a therapist" because they feel uncomfortable and don't know how to respond when a person tells them about their issues, so it's a way to shut down the conversation and avoid talking about it."
This is definitely a thing but I think it's tied into the way that people seem eager to "trauma dump" these days. How many people have you met who seem to instantly overshare about their mental health issues and childhood trauma? It happens to me all the time and it's uncomfortable because when you don't really know the person well (or at all) it's hard to know how to respond. I think it's a vicious cycle that ties back to the same issue with therapy culture seeping into every area of human social life. Social media has probably also normalized oversharing to the point that people don't see how doing it in real life makes others uncomfortable.
you may be onto something here. It's a bit like people oversharing their personal life/maladies/etc online, and they do it in real life too. (I'm one of those people who would sooner eat their own hand than talk about my personal life, so I don't get it) But I have been "trauma dump"-ed on, with practical strangers telling me about their divorce/miscarriage/kid's addiction/etc.
I've been "trauma-dumped" by complete strangers, too, and I see it as a bit of an ... I don't know ... honor? I think people are willing to speak about things to strangers that they wouldn't to people that they expect to be an ongoing part of their lives. It's less risky, you know? Being vulnerable to a stranger, who can't possibly hurt you.
There was a tow-truck driver, an Iraq-war veteran, who told me - in great detail - about holding one of his squaddies as he died. (Did you know that blood from a shot to the liver is a different color than the blood you bleed from elsewhere in the body? Neither did I.)
Or a woman in Edinburgh who told me about her suicide attempt, in which she said that her right leg had "decided" to save her, and been fractured in 19 places; she spent three months in hospital, and I don't remember how many surgeries, but (several years later) walked without a hint of a limp, and with no desire ever to attempt to kill herself again.
It's human to need to tell someone about the great and terrible events of our lives. It's also human to listen, and make sympathetic noises in the appropriate places. From time to time I think about both of those people, along with several others. I am grateful that my life briefly intersected with theirs, and hope that my presence was of help to them.
I definitely agree with this..."impair every area of their life." When I've seen therapy work, it's been of short duration and very specific. The goal is to get the individual unstuck and moving on in their life.
Not all therapists are good. One kid had the experience of going through two therapists who were covered by our insurance. The first one wanted to talk about the trauma of being Asian in a predominantly white area, the other wanted to talk about the trauma of being adopted. This kid wanted to talk about the trauma of being in an abusive relationship with a psychopath and was furious at not being heard.
The third one (paid for out of pocket) was great and made all the difference in the world.
I can see an argument for everyone doing therapy, if it was available for all.
I think the issue with therapy is that some therapists just exist to fuel people's narcissism. I've seen people I know do therapy and just use the therapist as someone to moan to who agrees that yes, they are right, they have been treated badly, everyone else is to blame.
But a lot of therapy is not like that at all.
That's the issue. There's therapy and therapy. If you find a competent therapist who helps you articulate your issues and devise good solutions for them, and who you get along with, great. But it's not that easy.
And I totally agree with the fueling narcissism thing - it definitely happens for some people. Here the therapist needs to be competent enough to recognize when the person is painting themselves as a victim and gently lead them to interrogate whether that's really true without them becoming defensive - difficult stuff!
For some kind of idealized therapy, "everybody should be in therapy" would be like "everyone should have a personal trainer" or "everybody should have a financial counsellor."
It's probably not true that literally everybody should have a trainer or a financial counsellor, especially if we do a cost benefit of how much benefit the person would get vs how much the trainer would be paid, but there are a lot of people who are leaving a lot of potential fitness and financial gains on the table for want of regular check-ins and good advice.
If more therapy were like personal training - clear goals, objectively measured, and common sense techniques - then I could defend the "everybody" argument as being close to true.
Some therapy is like that. -clear goals, objectively measured, and common sense techniques- but it's mediocre or serviceable.
I'm not a therapy consumer, but have a close friend with BPD, and cognitive behavioral therapy seems to have helped her a lot.
That's what I imagine for therapy in general - I show up with some issues I want to address. (I'm unhappy/unmotivated/anxious/scared to go outside/etc.) and the therapist and I make a plan to address those problems, measure our progress, and adjust as necessary, including changing therapists or therapeutic approaches if I'm not making acceptable progress.
CBT makes sense. A lot of sense. But it has some severe limitations in that it only addresses one side of the brain. What about the right side, the heart and the gut? What about the irrational? The meta? Forces beyond the obvious? The invisible?
It's announcing its limitation in the name. BPD is known to be difficult to address.
"clear goals, objectively measured, and common sense techniques"
I think what you're describing is more life coaching than therapy. Coaching is supposed to be efficient and goal-focused, while therapy integrates more analysis and attempting to understand the root causes of issues.
Oh, the trauma, fated to endure life in the midst of the wealthiest people, in the wealthiest, most equitable society which ever existed ... oh the horrors.
[That was sarcasm]
Your last paragraph poses the essential question: Why is Jonathan Haidt almost alone in putting forward ANY nuanced argument about the problem (and the stakes) of a generation raised without opportunities to acquire resilience? As you note, you don't need to agree with him on every point to appreciate the fact that he is speaking up, intelligently and urgently.
I see a lot of people who are salivating at how Gen Z doesn't appear to be getting more conservative as they age - I think the most partisan and scheming on the left are a little excited that there's a generation that's leaning left, mental health issues and future crises on the horizon be damned.
This is the most recent study that I've seen flying around for the past week - idk, we shall see... I could very much see the whole generation getting annoyed with the various administrators etc. who try to act like "cool parents".
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323
Obviously it'll be time for those Gen X cougars to shine 😂
There's also a weird valorization of the young that has been a constant in my life coming from the left, and I think any criticism of "the youth" becomes a criticism of the glorious new future we're going to enter once everyone is a hyper-online weirdo.
Thinking more about this... Lots of major religious traditions have a quote from their holy figure that's something like "be like a child in your openness and joy at life", which got filtered through Rousseau et al as a reverence for the "childlike", unspoiled state of nature... Maybe as this concept has percolated through various trends and worldviews, it got flipped and taken literally as "children are exemplary look to them for leadership" 🤷♂️
So we get Biden in diapers. Regressing from Trump, his face in his oatmeal. Does history go any further back?
The oldest members of Gen Z are what, 25? Seems premature to make any claims about what they're doing as they age...
I don't think Jonathan Haidt is "almost alone" in this. When I visit the parenting advice section of my local bookstore, plenty of books have titles like "how to raise a resilient child" and a blurb or introduction that talks about how today's kids are coddled and need to learn better to deal with hardships and disappointments, etc. On the other hand, the authors of these books aren't household names the way Haidt is.
"When I visit the parenting advice section of my local bookstore, plenty of books have titles like 'how to raise a resilient child'"
I know! And plenty of books for children are written explicitly to teach them better self-regulation and everyday problem-solving. Books and activities on this sort of stuff are normal at our local elementary school.
I love the point about parenting books. I’m now curious in how many households Haidt is a household name. Is there a blog-level equivalent to “household”? Can we say Haidt is a “bloghold name”?
"Bloghold". I like it.
"“snowflake” insult, the idea than anyone from a marginalized background who complains about injustice is really just self-involved and weak. "
This surprises me. I've only heard this term used to refer to whiny privileged kids of helicopter parents.
Where does the "marginalized background complaining of social injustice" come in?
I guess we'll have to agree that there are a lot of snowflake definitions out there.,
every heard Ben Shapiro's podcast
No.
I have exclusively heard it about 'the whiny _White_ privileged', and thought whiteness was part of it because snowflakes are white, too. Of course, the people I mostly hear it from are Black.
Great piece. Stuff like this makes me proud to be a subscriber.
Funny thing though, and this goes back to the Voldemort problem you once wrote about, is that it really doesn't matter what word we use to describe what's going on; it'll eventually become right-wing-coded and unspeakable anyway.
Okay, so "snowflake" and "victimhood" are out. Fair enough. But now "resilience" is on its way there too. And then the next term after that, etc.
How can we name a problem if we're not allowed a word to describe it?
We're trying to say the emperor has no clothes, and they are the emperors. It should come as no surprise that any words we use become right-coded by them, because our ideas threaten their status.
Censorship is at the core of the liberal agenda. Banning and controlling language is the one battle that the PMC left has managed to consistently win over the last 40 years and now is the core element of their agenda despite it making no material difference in anyone’s life.
I admit I’m not in the trenches of social media, so I’m curious what the evidence is that “resilience” is on the way out. On it’s face, I’m not sure “resilience” is likely to meet the same fate as the other words you mentioned. I think it depends on how it ends up being used.
“Snowflake” was always used with a sneer, so is it any wonder the people it was being used against didn’t respond positively to the criticism?
The “victimhood culture” also frames things in the negative, and I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that it isn’t received well by the people it describes.
Encouraging the building of resilience has the advantage of being something constructive, and of acknowledging that there are things out there that require one to build resilience. It can be used from a place of solidarity rather than a place of insult or criticism.
Now, if it does simply turn into judgmental criticism or outright insult, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if folks wind up reacting negatively to that.
Preface: I am not great at reading humor in real life, much less online.
“If there isn’t a bit of a sneer, what’s the point?”
How sincere is this? If it’s reasonably sincere, why are people surprised that terms used to sneer at other people provoke negative reactions? If I see you do that to anyone in real life, I’ll likely reduce contact with you.
I apologize if that was entirely your point.
And it's dominant because... people who feel judged aren't resilient. And there is no satisfactory response to someone whose ego is primed to defend or attack. But who is being educated about the role of the ego? No one. What is the proper role of the ego? In the past, it's been to defend or attack. But if one were to mature their ego how would that person respond? I'd say with resilience. How many adults respond with foreknowledge, depth, and caring? I want names.
Ah, thank you!
The hostility towards anything resembling a pull-by-bootstraps argument is some evidence, I think. Whether it's negatively valenced as "toughen up", or positively valenced as "the world is tough so we should try and make adequately tough people to handle it". Part of the progessive project, as I understand it, is instead/prioritizing trying to sand off more of those rough edges so people don't have to build <s>grit</s> resilience to begin with. That puts too much onus on the individual, and doesn't hold accountable all the Vast Systemic Forces trying to keep people down.
Plus the unfortunate over-weaponization of the <s>grit</s> resilience-lacking narrative against certain Favoured Classes, which is part of what made it right-coded to begin with. Definitely some bad faith in those uses, but even more-compelling proponents like John McWhorter get dismissed out of hand for not advocating the preferred solution to the problem. (At least everyone agrees there __is__ a problem, that the world seems increasingly too complicated and people can't keep up.)
This is helpful. I’m trying to gauge a few things, based on what I’ve seen compared to what I’m seeing others here describe.
- How numerous and powerful are people taking a hard stance that nothing should be done to cultivate individual resilience? That seems like the position people are most upset with, but I’m having a hard time telling how big a deal it really is.
- What is the spectrum of roughness in the sights of the various folks trying to sand off the rough edges? Let’s take microaggressions as a potentially salient example. I take it as given that there will always be things that fit the definition of microaggressions and disagreement about what exactly those are. How many people (and with what power) are solely in the camp of “quash all microaggressions and don’t talk with kids about how to process it when they experience a relevant one”? How many are in the camp of “loudly call out microaggressions and also prepare kids to deal with them”? How many are in the camp of “privately talk to people who commit microaggressions to encourage them to make different choices and also prepare kids to deal with them”? How many are in the camp of “don’t respond to microaggressions and help kids prepare to deal with them”?
I know progressives all along that spectrum. The ones toward the quash/call out side are more likely to share that on social media, sure. The folks who actually have power—in schools, in the publishing of advice or books for parents, etc.—are going to be at all points along the spectrum and probably leaning more towards the side of helping kids learn how to be resilient.
All of that said, I personally think there is value in encouraging folks to learn about how the things they say and do could hurt other people’s feelings and letting them decide where their personal thresholds are for how to use that information. I also understand that when someone says something that hurts my feelings, the responsibility is on me to work through that. The first part doesn’t invalidate the second or vice versa.
Microaggressions is just one specific rough edge, but the general approach—what is the spectrum of beliefs/actions, and how many people (with what power) are actually at each point—is useful for the broader point. There’s usually not nearly as much homogeneity on the progressive side of this as some folks seem to assume. (And given who’s most likely to shoot their mouth off on social media, the assumption is not particularly surprising. I just don’t think social media provides a particularly accurate read on the distribution of perspectives and power on this point.)
All of that said, I personally think there is value in encouraging folks to learn about how the things they say and do could hurt other people’s feelings and letting them decide where their personal thresholds are for how to use that information. I also understand that when someone says something that hurts my feelings, the responsibility is on me to work through that. The first part doesn’t invalidate the second or vice versa.
What if it does?
I’m sorry, I’m not following. Can you say more?
The 2nd part invalidates the first.
I applaud the effort at calibration. This feels like (heh) one of those "vibes" things though...one could probably devise some quantitative measure or study, but like most CW skirmishes, it's the gestalt impression that matters more to people than what's actually happening in X places by Y people with Z frequency. (And I agree this is annoying for everyone involved who values clarity.)
Twitter seems like an even less useful sample these days, what with the...recent demographic swings.
One of the biggest complainers of insisting on grit to get ahead in life is Freddie! Yet you have people here falling over themselves to blame 'The Left' for handing out participation trophies like it's something a single queer non-binary Antifa lesbian created out of whole cloth in the last 10 years.
I've known some pretty shitty parents in my time and their version of teaching kids grit and boot-strapping was neglect by any other definition. I'm sure we can all bring up personal anecdotes of coddling parents vs. grit parents but that doens't really get to the heart of the discussion I think Freddie wants to have.
I don't think we have to teach homeless or kids trapped in sever poverty about resilience. They're living that every day. So would you say the Church going parents who send their kids to private Catholic school and deprive them of nothing are more capable of teaching their kids how to bootstrap? Because that's the impression I get when I read many of the comments here.
Oh, for sure. Plus Freddie being a part of "The Left", that's the whole schtick. I think he tends to play both sides of the game, though, so I'm not inclined to call out for kettle-blacking. Posts like Your Personality Has To Be Load-Bearing make up for a lot of structural-this, revolution-that.
Resilience and its lack thereof is a multifaceted problem, and the discussion could go several directions and levels of meta. One would be...there is a very real and troubling issue with helicopter parenting, general societal aversion to risk (particularly around anything children-related), and the dark legacy of Tiger Mom-style intensive parenting? Some dangers really can be ~eliminated wholesale, we could end homelessness or poverty or hunger if we wanted to optimize in that direction. So those types of hard-knocks are just unnecessary revanchism, and lefties are right to dream of a world without them.
But there's a whole bunch of other...types of mistakes that are inevitable to meet in life, which would be very costly/difficult to completely insulate from. The experience of frictions ("microaggressions" in other taxonomies), freeform interpersonal interactions, resolving disputes between individuals without involving 3rd parties, jobs-not-structured-like-school. That private Catholic school kid who wants not might eventually graduate to the Ivy League and end up working for Bigshot Inc. - and become one of those impeccably-pedigreed new hires who end up being useless, because they can't think for themselves or generalize the formulae taught in school to slightly-novel problems. That's a big fraction of the litany of woes by/about Millennials, at any rate...that we trained very hard to check boxes and earn certifications, but not really *do* things with them.
I don't know, I can tell I'm rambling here. There's a bigger phenomenon I want to elucidate, but am having trouble distilling into high-impact words. Basically that it's right and just to improve material conditions for everyone, but there's also lots of hard-won wisdom through hardship that we shouldn't throw out by overcorrecting. The optimal amount of trouble in a life is not zero; just as you can't directly teach creativity, you can't directly teach someone to toughen up, so leaving some safer parts of life's path unpaved is important. (If we ever *did* figure out how to teach such skills without any actual adversity required, that's be incredible. Virtual reality, maybe?)
This is the grand purpose of NewSpeak, to remove the use of logic and reasoning from your opponent. How better to do this than control their language
This seems a particularly weird case to stake this argument on.
How have the uses of these terms been controlled?
If I call someone an insult, as with “snowflake,” there’s no need for a NewSpeak level of control to explain why they’ll either react negatively or ignore me. Have folks faced serious consequences just for calling other people snowflakes? Or do they just get ignored/blocked/argued with by the people they were trying to insult?
As for “victimhood culture,” it’s a term that seems apt to put someone on the defensive. That can often be overcome with politeness, context, and good faith. When that’s happened, folks keep using the term without major consequences that I can see. When they add a sneer, again, it doesn’t surprise me that people will disengage.
I guess the questions for me are:
1) How do you (the general “you”) want to use this term? Who’s your audience, what’s your emotional tenor, etc.?
2) What response/reaction are you hoping for? Do you want the people you’re describing to change their thoughts or behavior? Do you want them to engage in rational disagreement? Do you want them to just take it and admit your brilliance?
3) How aligned are your answers to 1 and 2? Are you expecting an insult to prompt a rational argument or an acknowledgement of your brilliance? How reasonable is that expectation?
I guess I’m just not seeing a particularly strong system of control being deployed here, more just basic social dynamics. What am I missing?
Freddie has adequately defined (with exhaustive examples) the rise of victimhood culture in past writings, I don't think it needs a rehashing yet again.
I’m not contesting the existence of the phenomenon. I’m questioning how much language is being controlled to avoid discussion of this particular topic.
The people I find to be the most annoying complainers about the culture of victimhood tend to be the on-line right of center commenters who whine about why they just can't say the crappy shit they used to say 10-15-20 years ago. I mean, the Evangelical Right have made 'victimhood' a lucrative part of their schtick, like the seasonal whining that they can't say Merry Christmas anymore.
Not just control but limit it and eventually empty it of meaning so that all you understand is force.
>Of course, Haidt isn’t helping himself any. The term “culture of victimhood” reminds many people of the “snowflake” insult, the idea than anyone from a marginalized background who complains about injustice is really just self-involved and weak.
I think this is worth picking a little quibble with, mainly because I'm interested in everyone's experiences with how the derogatory term "snowflake" is used. In my experience, "culture of victimhood" is a classic conservative term used over several decades for anyone marginalized complaining about injustice, and so in my opinion Freddie should have stopped here without relating it to "snowflake". My interpretation of how "snowflake" is used is slightly different: I understand it to refer *both* to fragility (snowflakes melt and fall apart easily) *and* to uniqueness (no two snowflakes are exactly alike). The point with the "snowflake" insult is that the "speshul snowflake" person is making a point both of being fragile and of belonging to a very specific combination of demographic categories and is playing up both, not even necessarily in a context of protesting against injustice. This is a criticism of many very online millennials-and-younger which to my point of view is often valid if unkind; I would not say it's an all-around conservative talking point. And I am emphatically not conservative but tend to agree with Haidt that the rise in "snowflakeyness" among very online youth comes *partly* from a norm of valorizing victimhood in a particular way while there is also a norm that plays a crucial role of generally enjoying identity markers quite apart from claiming victimhood. (Apparently this platform doesn't recognize "valorize" as a word? :P)
I'm curious about what others think: is "snowflake" just a more recent rendition of the classic right-wing term "culture of victimhood"?
Isn't its contemporary usage tied to "Fight Club"? -
"You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
I think Fight Club was trying to subvert (or at least mock) a pre-existing cliche, rather than creating its own new metaphor.
I think it’s sometimes but not always that. I’ve certainly seen it used as a more mean-spirited shorthand for the victimhood culture critique.
It’s also sometimes used in the broader way you describe, and I think it’s very easy for folks to conflate millennial-and-younger folks—especially the very identity-conversant ones—with liberals/the left/etc. more broadly, which further codes it on the right.
I’ve also seen a kind of perverse redirecting of it to use against the right. Certainly there are plenty of folks on that side of things who come across as whiny, too. In those cases, it’s often used to sneer at someone on the right performatively invoking free speech or claiming to have been cancelled when in fact they’ve only received some criticism (and not of the sort rising to the level of threats, job loss, etc.)
And so on…
It’s certainly something that, no matter how it’s used, is more likely to make people defensive than willing to engage constructively.
Well, I overall agree with your summary and agree that the term is not constructive and should probably be avoided. As far as using against the Right is concerned (which I've seen in a number of places, notably on The Young Turks' channel), while there are tons of common right-wing ways to be indignant, get overly offended, and ascribe to a victim complex, I think branding these things as "snowflake" behavior is kind of misguided on more than one level. Specifically playing up being *fragile* and falling under a set of narrow identity markers is very much still a thing of the younger Left and I don't see any trace of it on the Right; we might as well be nuanced enough in the meanings of derogatory terms not to use "snowflake" just to mean whiny and protesting offense. That said, I'm not the arbiter of how "snowflake" is used; other people's experiences with its usage may be different (thus my question in the parent comment); and as you suggest it would probably be better to retire this particular insult.
Yep, I think there are a couple different places where folks’ definitions differ.
One is whether the special-identity-based component is necessary or if perceived fragility is enough. For some, it seems all that’s needed is the fragility.
For those who do see the insult as requiring the special-identity component, I think there are differences in which identities “count” for the purpose of the insult. You’ve described your understanding as pretty narrow. Others who take a broader view might see folks on the right complaining claim the slights they’ve received are *because they are conservative* as qualifying.
I’m also no arbiter of this, of course.
I'm certainly aware that a decent number of people have been using "snowflake" broadly to refer only to fragility or be synonymous with "someone with a victim complex". I think I have a strong inclination to err on the narrow side for definitions of terms, because it helps keep the discussion nuanced and guards against fuzzy thinking and lumping too many phenomena or types of people into the same bin. An example would be my frustration with the broadening of the term "gaslighting". All that said, again that's just my inclination which can't dictate how people actually use and understand a term, and I accept Grenwolf's argument for why "snowflake" (and other terms whose primary uses in practice are just for the sake of hurling a dismissive insult) should probably be discouraged altogether.
As a suggestion for a possible future post, if I am recalling your book correctly you were fairly skeptical of "grit" as a quality that could address inequality in education outcomes.
I'd be curious if your research had found that grit, resilience, waiting for the second Oreo or anything in that basket of concepts is easier to teach. As you cover here, even if it won't change achievement gaps, it may have other life benefits.
I think grit is a perfect example of a trait that's useful for almost anything except moving the needle on quantitative educational outcomes
I think it pretty indisputable that contemporary culture valorizes victimhood. Otherwise, humans would not seek it, or constantly refer to their victim status.
One of the myriad and innumerable ways in which cats are superior to humans is that, while cats may ask for help, we don't feel sorry for ourselves.
Your clowder of cats has never had a pet collar or had humans inflict an embarrassing grooming job, then?
Cats' self-pity and shame when humans groom them funny is rather adorable.
Cats certainly can experience shame. Self-pity, not really.
I have young kids and it sure is a balance finding the right amount of autonomy with the right amount of protection I need to provide.
On one end you can become “bean dad” — to be clear, I thought that was just tedious but not abusive. The extreme is obviously something like those kids that raise kids or fend for themselves.
The other end is a bunch of useless pod people.
Yeah I don’t think it’s crazy to not let a 7-8 year play outside alone on a busy street. It’s crazy not to let them play outside alone in an enclosed backyard, or in a rural setting. What makes for coddling versus neglecting is a pretty tricky balance! This comes from someone who works in K-12 education and sees both extremes every day but very little building resilience.
I live on a moderately busy street, and I actually think that in many ways it is safer. Kids are very concrete thinkers, and it is easier to teach a preschooler that streets are full of cars when they can see the cars with their own eyes.
I loved bean dad. Maybe I have stockholm syndrome because it seemed like something my own parents would have done, but I'm grateful that they put me in many situations like that so that I grew up independent and resilient and confident in my own competence. I can't fathom how anyone considered that abuse. What would the kid have done if she'd been home alone and wanted to open the can of beans? She would have had to figure it out on her own. It's a great lesson and I bet she felt amazing when she finally got it. She'll remember that moment forever (and not just because it went viral).
I was born in the early 90s and my generation was the first to suffer the effects of safetyism and helicopter parenting - even in the early 2000s I was very cognizant of having more freedom, more unscheduled time, and more responsibility than a lot of my peers (nothing serious, just like the fact that I had my own house key and could stay home alone for a few hours at age 9 or the fact that I was allowed to use the stove to cook my own food or the fact that I walked to school alone in middle school). There were moments where I felt neglected compared to my peers because my parents would make me do things for myself that other kids didn't have to do, like packing my own lunch if I didn't want to buy from the cafeteria or getting a job to pay for my own gas money, but from the perspective of a thirtysomething adult I realize that those things only felt like neglect because I was surrounded by the children of helicopter parents. It was nice getting to college and already knowing how to cook and do laundry and call the utility company to handle the electric bill and not having to call my parents six times a day because I was having anxiety attacks from handling the basic tasks of daily living. It took a lot of my friends years to learn how to cope with the responsibility they suddenly acquired when they got to college.
Great article Freddie. I’m always amazed when I talk to Gen X parents who thoroughly enjoyed the level of personal freedom they had growing up and also wouldn’t dream of giving it to their own children.
Even if they *want* to give their children that level of freedom, it's difficult because of the judgements of their peers and because of what is perceived as abuse and / or neglect.
Agreed. It can be difficult to overcome social pressure and meddling busybodies watching out from their front windows. Many states are passing Parental Rights/Childhood Freedom laws now for this very reason.
There was famously a court case in Vancouver where a dad got in trouble with social services because he allowed his kids to take the bus solo (aged 5 to 11; his 11 year old was supervising them).
Great piece. At some point we have to just stop giving a shit what motives the bad-faith online prog left tries to impute on anyone pursuing rational, reasoned thought. These are the same people who’ve made Jordan Peterson a villain of toxic masculinity for telling young men to stand up straight and make their beds. Surely he’s no hero, but he’s not a villain either.
Also, The Coddling of the American Mind is mandatory reading, especially for parents.
EDIT: I would like to also point out that Haidt has shown, fairly convincingly, that the “culture of victimhood” is a SYMPTOM of declining resilience in young children that began about 30 years ago, not a cause. Social trends have been heading in that direction for a few decades but the institutional focus on safetyism in universities and companies with a younger workforce is only there by popular demand. Those kids are lost, or maybe they’ll age out of it eventually, but truly the only course correction starts with young children being raised today to develop better coping skills and self-reliance. It’s going to take a sustained effort for 15 years to reverse where we are today.
Jordan Peterson has been another painful disappointment to me. He went from "stand up straight, take responsibility" (good, sensible advice) to "actually Putin may have good reasons for invading Ukraine."
Yes. Let's just assume when we're discussing JP it's pre-"medical sabbatical." He's one for whom the spotlight shined a bit too bright.
That is a wonderful and thoughtful paper. Yes, we need nuance, yes we need resilience,. My only disagreement with you is that progressive politics, as you rightly point out, are all about harm reduction. Big daddy-state has mad it its one task to reduce harm, and atha will not promote resilience. But I guess I start to tread thin ice, so I better leave it at that.
I think a real challenge is that as society becomes wealthier and living standards improve people have to go through less adversity. I have never gone 24 hours without food, never had to had to work manual labor beyond stocking shelves, never gotten badly beat up. And all these things are signs of progress, but also mean that I'm softer than some of my ancestors, and in many ways less resilient. How do we think of these tradeoffs? Less adversity is good, but adversity can build resilience. I have spent money on primitive camping gear and Crossfit classes to simulate the adversity I don't face in my life, which is pretty silly when I actually think about it, but also better than not doing it.
I'm not so sure that suffering itself is what makes you resilient. It's how you learn to deal with suffering that makes you resilient.
Sure, plenty of people suffer and learn nothing. But it's hard/impossible to build resilience if you don't suffer at all. Haidt's argument is that we go too far in eliminating kids' opportunities to suffer and build resilience. But in general we agree that kids suffering is bad. Hence the 2 competing ideas we have to balance.
Indeed.
A useful term here, applicable to most learning, is “zone of proximal development.” If something is too familiar/easy, there’s no way for learning to take place. If something is too hard/new, we bounce off it/give up/shit down. There’s a gradient of learning/growth for the space between these extremes.
The zone of proximal development is the space that maximizes growth without being overwhelming. This is almost always uncomfortable, but it’s not excessively painful.
So “suffering,” commonly understood, is probably counterproductive. People might adapt and survive, but the thought patterns and behaviors that help that happen aren’t the healthy kind of resilience and are often not well calibrated to the rest of our modern lives.
Learning how to work through discomfort and engage in productive struggle, however, is vital. School and a host of other activities, when done well, design experiences to keep leveling kids up. It’s hard to do this in a fully individualized way at scale, so one of the key challenges for modern parenting is how to do this at home (and respond when those other experiences aren’t well calibrated to your particular kid).
Exactly. Actual suffering, as opposed to challenge or discomfort, might make you resilient, but it might just as easily make you callous and cruel: "the world is a dark place where nobody cares about me, so I'm gonna grab as much as I can for myself, and to hell with everyone else."
How do you think about this interpersonally? In life people will be mean to you, not like you, be unfair to you, and it will suck. I'd say every teenager at least feels like they're suffering at some point because of stuff like this. But we need to go through some amount of it to build resilience. Haidt is big on the idea that kids need "unstructured play" to learn to work these situations without tattling. But at the same time as a kid I saw certain kids get bullied really badly, beyond the point I'd want anyone to experience. Where do you think we draw the line?
I don’t think there’s a universal line. It depends on where the person on the receiving end of the behavior is in their development. The response, if any, of adults will also matter.
Let’s say a kid is being teased by a bully. What have they already learned about this behavior? Do they recognize it for what it is? Can they separate the bullying behavior from their own belief in their value? Do they know who is in their support system to help them process this afterward?
If this is the first time they’re experiencing something of this intensity, they’ll almost certainly be upset. If afterward they have a support system—ideally including adults—who can help them understand what happened, affirm that they still have value and will be OK, and talk through possible responses for next time (how to disengage, how to stay mindful and not take the bullying to heart, when if ever to escalate so as to facilitate disengagement [and how to do so effectively], etc.), they’ll be more likely to draw healthy lessons. This will need to repeat in order for the learning to be reinforced and to stick.
If a kid who’s rarely been bullied is suddenly experiencing extreme bullying, it’s a lot less likely that they’ll be in a place to learn from it, hence the value of giving kids lots of opportunities to respond to kids with similar levels of “intensity.”
These experiences are also part of how we help kids shift their thresholds for what feels like suffering. This helps them differentiate conflict from abuse and discomfort from suffering. This won’t necessarily eliminate the feeling of suffering in the short term, but it will increase the chance of healthy patterns forming.
Making the call about when to intervene is certainly tricky. It’s easier if you know the kids involved and can gauge where this falls in the bullied kid’s development.
Also, if the kids (both the bullies and the bullied) know you’re aware of the behavior, inaction will still contribute to learning on both sides. “Unstructured” doesn’t have to mean “unsupervised,” at least to me—I don’t know Haidt’s perspective. Intervening calmly to support the learning of all parties is probably better than teaching bullies that it’s OK to do that and the bullied that they can’t trust adults. (Developing the sense for when to trust vs. not trust adults in general and authority figures in particular is a whole separate conversation.)
I think I might agree with Haidt about social media being the biggest problem for the young, because *multiple* avenues of pathology meander out of it. There’s the “culture of victimhood” and snowflakeyness (which I think are related but not necessarily the same, as another commenter pointed out), but there’s also hypersexualization of kids/teens (just saw a great video by 21yo Toni Bryanne lamenting this; viewer beware, there are multiple TikToks of young teen girls looking and behaving very much not like young teen girls), depression/isolation, body dysmorphia encouraged by the Instagram aesthetic, and other identity-based issues.
Agree, and I’ll add to this: There’s great value in making mistakes unobserved. My adolescent anxiety was all wrapped up in a horror of everyone looking at me and finding me wanting. I had phases as a teenager where I couldn’t order at a fast food restaurant for terror of fucking up the interaction somehow. The cure was just growing up enough to realize that no one really cared one way or another about what I said or did and nobody was actually looking at me.
I feel like if I tried to tell someone fifteen years younger than me, “Don’t worry! No one’s looking at you all the time!” they could justifiably look at me like I was a total idiot. *Nothing* they do is unobserved and to a lot of them the idea of saying or doing something unobserved is kind of strange.
And this sense of constantly being observed feeds the our narcissism, for it implies one is ALWAYS the center of someone's attention, when nothing could be healthier than realizing that you're not the center of the universe. In fact, that realization is the start of being able to experience the sublime, when say, you look up at the stars or a mountain vista. We're not just sapping resiliency, we're strip-mining life of the potential for joy.
Yes! And I think a lot of the younger set do start to figure this out - but I think they figure it out later. As I (millennial, modern social media was invented when I was in late high school) figured it out later than my parents.
My parents never did, but I was lucky to have some great folks who taught me- but like you, I learned later than they did.