I can’t say for certain what’s driving it - but what I can say is that I live in a city with good public transportation, where pretty much all kids below high school age live within walking distance of a school * and somehow, I still can’t get down my street at school starting and ending times because of all the parents double and triple parked to drop off and pick up kids. I’ve seen parents dropping off and picking up kids at high schools , parents hiring buses privately to transport kids to high school rather than letting the kids use public transit and I even had one neighbor who sold his house and moved when his oldest kid was starting intermediate school because his wife didn’t want to have to drive the kid six blocks to the school.
What I know isn’t a factor is that car users are being prioritized above all else. Because they aren’t - this is a place that was built around not having cars. Lots of people don’t have licenses and even more don’t have cars. The reason people are double parked outside schools dropping off and picking up kids is because the schools don’t have parking lots and drop off lines. Most places don’t have parking lots. When bike lanes or corrals start appearing, you hear people crying “They’re trying to get rid of cars” - yes, in fact, “they” are trying to get rid of cars.
* There are two private and two public elementary schools within walking distance of my house. There really are three public but one is across a wide street and no kid would be forced to go to a school that required crossing that street.
I was 14 or 15 when I deliberately provoked my mother into an argument. I had asked if I could go over to a friend’s house, a friend she knew and whose home I frequented, and she said no. At this point, it was unusual for my mother to say no, but I assumed she had a good reason and I asked what was going on. Her answe was some variation of “Because I said so.” I gently probed for a better answer, but when she refused to elaborate futher I became belligerent. If my day was going to be ruined for no reason I made it my mission to ruin her day.
Oh, man, I totally forgot about my mom’s car. She and my dad had retired to Sun City AZ, and their house was near the edge of the development. The desert was very close. They got a lot of wildlife in the yard – mostly jacks and cottontails. When she decided she couldn’t live alone any more, we went to move her back to California.
When we tried to start her car, it wouldn’t.
Turned out a cottontail had made a home in the engine area. Also chewed a bunch of wires.
That’s part of it. My mom’s generation (the so-called “Greatest”) didn’t talk about anything. Any least bit of controversy or unconventionality was ignored or at most whispered about. Now, everybody talks about everything. It’s a move in the right direction, but sometimes, you just get tired of all the endless sharing.
That may be a factor, but it doesn’t explain the increase in suicide rates and ER visits for suicide attempts. I do think people are much more open about their mental health than ever before, but I see no evidence that’s helped anyone, really. The dialogue around these issues is increasingly ill-informed and people increasingly seem to expect accommodations around their feelings rather than doing the hard work of recovery. I won’t even lay this at the feet of Gen Z. I see it at all age levels. Part of this we can attribute to the shortage of mental health professionals, but not all of it. Or maybe the lack of access has forced people into these pseudo therapeutic spaces that exacerbate the issue.
Positively or negatively? Because it seems to me that “pressure to conform to societal expectations” is one of those things that has a light side and a dark side. The light side of it is knowing what’s expected of you and how to behave, with some expectation that if you do so, you will belong and have a role to play and be a valued member of society. Is there less of that nowadays than there used to be?
It’s not just parents. Where I live, small kids (mine are 6 and 9) legally require an adult to drop them off and pick them up from school. When I was that age I rode my bike everywhere by myself. If I were to let my kids do that now, I’d get arrested.
And worse than that is screen time. Left to their own devices (literally) they would watch the stupidest shit for hours if unchecked.
What I see happening with my kids is they get very spoiled and entitled and quick to boredom and frustration because they spend too much time in a world where they control every aspect of it constantly.
Fast forward to kids I know in their 20s, they just seem sort of directionless and clueless. Like they don’t know how to exist in a world that doesn’t spoon feed them what to do constantly.
See, in my experience with 20 year olds, they are smart enough to tell, “hey, this job you’re offering me is bullshit. You’re not paying me nearly enough to do this”. So they go into the gig economy, or enter “hustle culture”, or find some other means of making a living; and then the people offering shitty jobs get all huffy and puffy about how kids these days are lazy, entitled, and directionless.
This is really, really inaccurate, if you’re talking about anybody older than 50. We were completely unsupervised, outside, almost all the time we weren’t in school.
What do you consider a “shitty job” for someone right out of college? I can’t do anything about the “bullshit” part, but jobs I’m talking about start at around $60k to $90k a year. But if someone can make more money or lead a more fulfilling professional life doing something they want to do, so much the better.
But what I’m talking about has less to do with professional skills and more a general “softness” when it comes to day to day life shit.
I don’t think you’re wrong. I’m an older Millennial and I think I’m softer than previous generations, but I also have a lot more empathy. It’s a two-edged sword. My emotions in day to day life can be disruptive at times, but I’m 100% there for someone who needs to vent or whatever. The problem really arises when people’s emotions become so dysregulated that they cannot function. This happened to me in college - nobody ever modeled for me how to handle my emotions, so I had to teach myself how to do it. But I wouldn’t look back at my college self and say that’s an okay way to be. I was a disaster. I feel embarrassed about that time in my life.
The difference is I feel like more and more people are taking on this attitude of, “This is how I am and you have to deal with it.” And when other people don’t want to deal with it, these people run to their online spaces and craft carefully wrought victim narratives with other people who reinforce their belief that their needs and emotions are the most important thing about any situation.
This is just what I’ve observed about online culture, but of course that means I’m reading the hot takes of lots of people my age and younger. I was on a Reddit ADHD board for a while and wooh did people there feel entitled to accomodations around basically everything. “I’m an asshole to my friends but it’s just my ADHD, I don’t understand why they won’t just accept my extreme meltdowns, neurotypicals are so ignorant!”
I don’t think that’s a great trend for society in general, not only because these people are annoying to deal with but because it’s actually exhausting to be one of those people, and they suffer a lot because of it.
I’m not disputing you, nor am I asking you to out yourself or do research on our behalf, but I gotta wonder which government entity (city, county, etc) passed that law and what confluence of events and fired-up constituents led to it overcoming political inertia enough to pass.
I agree with this observation at least as far as it goes online. I know it does exist in real life as well, but probably not as much, and in both cases I also don’t feel like dealing with those sorts of people. There’s a NY Times op-ed from last year on the problems of “therapy-speak”. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/12/opinion/mental-health-therapy-instagram.html
Along those lines, I think the old “Five geek social fallacies” is stronger than ever. Especially online, but also in specific social groups and activities. Five Geek Social Fallacies – Plausibly Deniable
The other problem is that “you have to deal with it” seems to be taken to the extreme by more and more these days. An opinion that any behavior, no matter how extreme, disturbing, or just plain anti-social has to be tolerated if the person performing the behavior has the right identity, whether it’s neurological, racial, sexual, or anything else that seems to be part of the “progressive stack”.
Having been officially diagnosed as Level 1 on the autism spectrum (so fairly high functioning but still being quite capable of weirdness, inappropriate humour, and some obnoxiousness) I get this.
My therapist, who has otherwise been invaluable under the circumstances, is a proponent of that mindset. I have actually had to tell her that if I’m in a meeting with my company’s clients for a multi-million dollar project, that just isn’t going to work in a room full of very highly paid engineers and related specialists visiting from somewhere in Europe.
IOW, we neurodiverse better get over it and try to behave.
I went more than a decade without ever using the block list. Ever since 2015 or 2016, I find myself using it more and more. Perhaps I’m part of the problem, but there are threads where I don’t see half the posts these days. It’s also partially why my post count slowed down so drastically after the first 10 to 15 years here.
Or is a loudmouth member of the white right. Those folks are sure convinced everybody else just has to deal with whatever crap they throw out. Their Prime Directive is angry outraged selfishness, and in their view everyone else’s Prime Directive is “suck it up.”
Do you have any examples of this? I’m sure this is not what you mean, but not very long ago, any kind of homosexual or gender non-conforming action would be described by many people as “extreme, disturbing, or just plain anti-social”. Same with “miscegenation”.
How do we tell apart behaviors that actually should not happen from behaviors that society is just too square to accept?