Trigger Warning

The state of the world came up over breakfast this morning. The consensus was that it wasn’t great. There was a general sense of lament over how people seem more prone to spending time alone or in digital spaces, how people seem less able (or willing) to understand or read social cues (I’m thinking of you, Mr. Leave-your-phone-on-speaker-and-loudly-have-a-conversation-in-public), how on demand culture has turned us into docile automatons who expect everything to show up in a brown box on our doorstep, how we don’t get out and move our bodies, how we’ve lost the ability to communicate well. The list went grimly on.

One thing we didn’t name specifically but would certainly be among the ugly fruits of the cocktail described above was the lack of resilience that many are noticing, particularly among the young. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time (I’ve written about it here and here). Increasingly, it seems that people lack the capacity to process the ordinary pain and discomfort of being a human being on planet earth. The word “trauma,” for example, has undergone such rapid and alarming concept creep as to be virtually meaningless (if the same word can be used to describe enduring the horrors of war and encountering an idea that you find distasteful, then one wonders if it is still useful). Even more troubling, social media has incentivized the use of trauma language as a means of securing validation, affirmation, and status. The net result is a generation that seems primed to interpret a wide range of experiences as “traumatic,” to externalize these in a digital context that amplifies the loudest and most reactionary voices, and to do this in the broader context of crushing loneliness, rampant addiction, and deteriorating overall health.

People are, thankfully, starting to ask some questions about all this. Feminist writer Jill Filipovic, for example, published a piece in The Atlantic today called “I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings.” In it, she documents a shift she has observed from 2008 to the present. In 2008, she was convinced that trigger warnings at the top of articles, specifically about matters related to sexual abuse, were an appropriate accommodation for the sake of readers’ well-being. Over time, however, she noticed the concept creep mentioned above. She quotes Richard Friedman, who ran the student mental-health program at Cornell for several decades. Friedman

started seeing the number of people seeking help each year increase by 10 or 15 percent. “Not just that,” he told me, “but the way young people were talking about upsetting events changed.” He described “this sense of being harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The language that was being used seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done. I mean, I was surprised—people were very upset about things that we would never have thought would be dangerous.” Some students, for instance, complained about lecturers who’d made comments they disliked, or teachers whose beliefs contradicted their personal values…

Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.

Unsurprisingly, this learned fragility is having catastrophic effects, particularly among young girls. Filipovic reports:

Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.

If that paragraph doesn’t make you cringe in horror, you should probably read it again. It’s terrifying to imagine what the next decade might hold.

One last quote from the article (emphasis below is added):

So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it. Since 2014, the proportion of teens with smartphones has risen by 22 percent, and the proportion who say they use the internet “almost constantly” has doubled. Part of the issue may be a social-media ecosystem that lets teens live within a bubble of like-minded peers and tends to privilege the loudest, most aggrieved voices; this kind of insularity can encourage teenagers to understand distressing experiences as traumatizing. “I think it’s easier for them to artificially curate environments that are comfortable,” Shaili Jain, a physician and PTSD specialist, told me. “And I think that is backfiring. Because then when they’re in a situation where they’re not comfortable, it feels really alarming to them.”

There are so very many things that could be said about all this. I see this all around me every day. I suspect you do, too. But this post is getting long, and I’m told nobody reads much more than a few paragraphs these days. One thing I’m increasingly wondering is how we might begin to curate different kinds of environments. If isolating, aggrieved, comfort-obsessed environments are literally destroying us, it would seem that we somehow have to encourage people (young and old) to tolerate, possibly even seek out spaces that are difficult or demanding or at least in some sense require something of us.

Maybe it’s sitting with an idea you find offensive or disagreeable. Maybe it’s going off social media for a day or two (or a thousand). Maybe it’s forcing yourself into a context where real human beings will talk face to face. Maybe it’s doing something physically demanding. Maybe it’s trying, even in some small way, to pump the brakes on the insane idea that institutions owe us protection from even the slightest distress.

There are no doubt many little things we could do to resist what is becoming a  devastating default cultural script and to train our young people do the same. They will vary from context to context. But somehow, we need to come to terms with the fact that the world is a terrible and beautiful place where we will have sad and scary and transcendent and confusing and awe-inspiring and mundane and bewildering and stunning and heartwarming and rage-inducing and inspiring experiences. And that we have been gifted with the capacity to navigate these things well.

Image source.