In my case it was the trauma pissing contest that inevitably came about whenever I had a disagreement with another feminist. It’s the constant demand to justify your opinions by sharing your personal history or identity, as if you didn’t have license to speak as a woman unless you laid all your painful personal experience out on the table and were deemed hurt enough to have a valid opinion. Then it’s being told that even if you have the trauma bonafides your opinion doesn’t count because reasons. It’s telling another woman, “Your argument is not rational” (because it wasn’t) and being told you’re a tool of the patriarchy for accusing a woman of being irrational. It’s the complete abandonment of all rational thinking in the service of feelings.
I am a deeply feeling person and I have a master’s degree in social work. For someone as emotional and as progressive as I am to say, “That’s just too much” and flee a bunch of professional and social connections takes some doing. It wasn’t any one person, though one incident was the final straw. It was the cumulative effect of having to exist in such a toxic environment. An environment I would describe as constant melodramatic grievance with no serious attempt at lasting social change.
I guess that’s a slight digression but maybe not. If I were tougher I wouldn’t have been bothered by any of it.
If you see it at all age levels, then is it an issue of how Gen Z were raised?
My aunt is 85 years old and she’s been this way apparently for her whole life. Is this a particular problem with younger people or is this something in general?
YouTube videos seem to suggest that plenty of middle age people also act badly.
I guess I’m not convinced that bad parenting is making a whole generation of people who are significantly worse behaved than previous generations.
A LOT of the permanent grievance-irati go into the social work areas not to help the world, but to assuage their own demons. cf. “Most shrinks are crazy”.
Or in the case of the folks you’re lamenting it’s about like:
I’ve got a degree in what’s wrong with me. And professionally speaking, it ain’t me. They did it to me.
with a side order of
Nobody knows the pain I’ve been through; yours is small potatoes and I’m certain of that.
And yeah, melodramatic personality quirks, disorders, and manias have a long and storied history written all down the annals of time. Shame we can’t just shoot 'em.
I wonder if it’s a societal shift, so affecting all age levels, but is showing up more measurably in the younger population since they’ve been living with it their whole lives. (And of course any one person might be like this or not.)
If this were the case, perhaps I would expect a rise in the number of suicides, ER mental health visits, etc. for other age groups as well, though maybe smaller than for adolescents. Does anyone know if that is in the data?
My feelings/observations are 100% in agreement with this and your related posts.
I find it almost impossible to talk about it, however, because 48% of the people get violently defensive about a perceived threat to their very identities, and the other 48% see it as justification that any accommodations or increase in empathy is just playing into the wussification of America (and that maybe criminal Republican politician X isn’t so bad if they stand up against pansy liberal coddling).
I mean, I sort of did. It was helpful for me to learn that what I had experienced was something a lot of women shared in common, for some broader systemic reasons. That was valuable because I felt 1) less alone and 2) like maybe we can make a dent in this problem. One reason I love social work is that it’s the opposite of passive grievance. At least in my program, it was, “Let me become an expert on this problem so I can effectively address it with specialized skills.” And when you have a lot of skilled people with those same values working together on an issue it can feel like the opposite of helplessness. Not saying it’s easy or it’s impossible to feel down sometimes, but for me, it helps. Every day I can at least say, I did something. Or more to the point, I can look at my coworkers and say, “We did something.”
Now some of the advocates I know participate enthusiastically in online debate and others just give themselves a little space where they don’t have to be an advocate all the time. I think the people that drove me away the most weren’t the professional advocates, but the people who were just recreationally outraged all the time. There was one guy in particular who was always furious and it stressed me out. At one point, I told him, you would probably feel better if you were doing something concrete about this issue rather than venting about it online. He said, “I work in silicon valley. This is all I have.” Really, dude? You’re always talking up what a big feminist you are and you work in a notoriously sexist environment and you’re not doing anything?
Yet I still left Facebook in part because I didn’t like the role I was playing in that toxic environment. I was angry a lot. I was stressed and depressed. I was doing and saying things I didn’t like, that didn’t feel like me. So I left.
Sounds like you’re dealing both your demons and the world’s demons in just about the optimal way. And avoiding the RO (inward or outward-directed) that ensnares so many.
I think most social workers eventually reach a point where they accept that it’s not about them. The ones that can’t make that distinction burn out. I came dangerously close to that at one point because I related every survivor story to my own, but after some good talks with people who handle this sort of thing all the time, I came to realize no, other people get their own story. The work we are doing right now is about them.
I limit my access to certain news topics, too, which helps. I find out about the big things, usually from here or my husband. It’s not necessary for me to know everything that is happening everywhere. It’s not like I’m going to forget I’m a Democrat or anything.
I think one of the keys, as I mentioned previously, is to avoid rumination. It’s possible to see that bad things are happening, acknowledge them, and then go do something else. Doom scrolling is the brain’s feeble attempt to solve world conflict, but it’s not going to solve anything. The best thing to do when you feel helpless about a situation is do something about it. The second best thing is to focus on something else.
The online aspect of this is really important, I think, and (I have no way to prove this but) would go a long way toward explaining why the trend seems more intense the younger the population you’re looking at.
I have a lot of interaction with people who are spending time in these same spaces, and the power of strength in numbers within those cloistered environments reallllly can impair how a person is able to perceive and function in interactions outside of the cloister. Disability accommodation is a fantastic example. If I can tweet “ableism in higher ed is so rampant, my professor won’t even give me an accommodation” and get 1000 likes and messages of support literally no matter what has actually transpired, if I’m a person who is slightly prone to self-pity and self-destruction, why would I not spiral in that direction? Why would I not think the blame was 100% on my professor irrespective of the actual facts?
That’s not to say that the grievances themselves are illegitimate. Just that the ease of social bonding around those grievances provides a perverse incentive to be aggrieved. And being aggrieved kinda sucks.
Young people deal with a lot more uncertainty. They are still trying to figure out a path in life, which can be confusing in this day and age when it can seem like every traditional institution of American society is, if not under attack, being endlessly debated.
The 1970’s were very very very different. Young people were angry but also felt full of power and hope and wild new ideas. We were going to remake society. Those are all missing now.
Although young people have had a significant increase while other groups are more or less flat, white middle-aged men are by far the largest group of deaths by suicide, accounting for nearly 70% of suicide deaths in 2021. Cite
I agree with that as a general statement, for sure. The young people I have in mind, though, present themselves as being really quite certain. They come from a place of maybe not absolute moral certainty, but at least moral very-certainty.
The distinction is between, let’s say, a 19 year old who is looking for help because they think they may have been treated unfairly and are trying to figure out what the rules (official or unwritten) are and if they’ve been followed, and a 19 year old who is completely sure that everyone they’ve dealt with has wronged them, that they are currently experiencing a traumatic and systemic inequity, and that every person they deal with is either going to do what they want or is part of the problem.
I think the former kind of young person has always existed in great numbers. The latter kind seems to be much more prevalent now than 10 years ago. And for the record, I wasn’t a young person 10 years ago so it’s at least not entirely that.
I’ve noticed this pattern in many online spaces where social justice issues are being discussed.
It’s as if posters feel the need to establish credibility with their audience by sharing their bonafides before they dig into the meat of the subject.
I think now they see how messed up the political system is and are super jaded because they also see how much of the populace are are totally ok with actively trying to roll back progress that was so hard fought for by those hopeful hippie types of the past. Hence why they’re so depressed.
That’s an interesting question. From the polls I could easily find, there are clear differences between the youth of that era and this one. New ideas is one of them – culture, as opposed to technology, is quite stagnant now, and the kind of breakthrough thinking that happened then, from Black Power to the embrace of Asian religions to organic farming, is far behind us now. With the flood of wealth in that era, young people felt far more freedom to experiment and play. Now, with the economic constrictions at every level of society except the top, young people are rightly very concerned about making a living. They are well aware that they cannot expect to live as well as their parents have.
They remain pretty optimistic though, according to the surveys. A good bit more so than any other age group. The people who are the least optimistic are Republicans. Their optimism is almost nonexistent.
In other words, what we used to call “a 19 year old”.
Being older now, one thing I have recognized is that young people throughout time have probably always been dissatisfied with the way things, thought they knew everything, are overestimated their power and ability to contribute to the world.
@Babale describes young people having an attitude of
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.
Maybe a lot of jobs they are being offered are bullshit dead-end jobs with no future. Then again, a lot of entry level jobs may not pay well or initially suck until the person gains the experience or wisdom to actually learn the job / business / industry.
I think that places a lot of pressure on young people to think that they have to be a multi-millionaire by 30 or have to self-teach themselves critical job skills so they can work on a gig by gig basis. It speaks to a society that feels very unstructured and transactional.
I believe there is a natural state to things where younger people bring new ideas and enthusiasm to the world, but are still dependent on the leadership and experience of older generations to guide them. When you disrupt that, either because older generations fail to uphold their responsibility to mentor and act as role models or because younger people are force-fed a narrative by marketers that they are the center of the universe (so they will buy more lifestyle shit), it creates a lot of chaos and stress.