Morally Disconnected, Strangely Depressed: Young Americans & The Culture of Hypersensitivity

The Great Indoors
Most people will know what I mean if I say that people are increasingly sensitive nowadays. The sensitivity of Millennials and the generation to follow has been covered by many articles. Recently a new CBS show called The Great Indoors that mocks Millennial sensitivity offended many Millennials in near-unbelievable irony. Whether this is an issue with younger generations or an overall shift in American society, the problems are the same. And, also ironically, one of the biggest ones is damage to mental health. Another huge one is the way it affects how people present arguments and engage in debate.

On August 21, a Kristi Coulter posted an article about women and the "infuriating truth" of why they drink. Coulter is obviously a full-grown adult person. And yet, when she decides to give up alcohol, it takes only a single event (a company-sponsored wine tasting she feels socially compelled to attend) for her to say, "There is [a water fountain]. But it’s broken. I mingle empty-handed for 15 minutes, fending off well-meaning offers to get me something from the bar. After the fifth, I realize I’m going to cry if one more person offers me alcohol. I leave and cry anyway. Later I order vanilla ice cream from room service to cheer myself up."

As pathetically childish as this response is, and as easy as it is to roll our eyes at people like this, stop and consider how it can be that this full-grown adult is dead serious. The article has a very thin veneer of humor, but when you get down to it, this woman is absolutely convinced that the world is out to get her and that many women are becoming alcoholics in order to cope with living in a man's world. The article is filled with obsession over the slightest hint of alcohol. She seems to be angry at billboard advertisements, alcoholic events of any kind, anyone offering her anything to drink, jokes about alcohol. The list goes on and on. When you get to the end of the article, you realize that Ms. Coulter either despises her life or is being exceedingly melodramatic to the point of dishonesty:

Then Mindy slides her Tom Ford sunglasses back over her eyes and says, “All I can say is it’s really nice on this side of the pool.” I laugh and my heart swells against my swimsuit and I pull my shades down too, to keep my suddenly watery eyes to myself. Because it is. It is so nice on this side of the pool, where the book I’m reading is a letdown and my legs look too white and the ice has long since melted in my glass and work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that. I never expected to make it to this side of the pool. I can’t believe I get to be here.

Hold back your revulsion and ridicule upon reading these completely serious Lucille Bluth-style complaints. Let's ask the question, What is actually going on here? Because we all know that Kristi Coulter is not alone in her feelings, and that while this kind of thinking is more prevalent among middle-upper class whites, it's been spreading for a long time. It's the way more and more people think, among various races and genders. You could almost call it a social fad: the "obsessing over and complaining about juvenile, myopic nonsense" fad. Or the "everyone is out to get me" fad.

I think Coulter and many like her honestly believe that all of her problems are entirely out of her hands. The article borders on parody at points, with lines like, "One day that summer I’m wearing unwise (but cute, so cute) shoes and trip at the farmer’s market, cracking my phone, blood-staining the knees of my favorite jeans, and scraping both my palms," followed by a complaint about other women on Facebook suggesting wine as a comfort. Coulter eventually tries to say something about how being sober is empowering for women, or will reveal the truth to them about how horrible their lives are, or something like that. But it's lost in the noise of her self-centered, tearful complaints.

It's annoying for many people to see this kind of whining and spoiled sense of entitlement in adults, but rarely do we question what it's doing to the human beings who engage in it. And if we take an article like this as any indication (contrarily, when men write such articles, often complaining about women, the childish emotion tends to be disproportionate anger rather than disproportionate sadness; pick your poison), what it's doing is making people who ought to be pretty content with their lives constantly upset.

The most powerful motivator that everyday Americans are likely to encounter is positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement works for a while, but in the long term, positive reinforcement is more powerful. It's likely, then, that people like Coulter are engaging so often in self-centered, pessimistic thinking that blames other people for all problems because they are greatly encouraged to do so. And when your perspective is that everyone is out to get you, even someone disagreeing with your views can simply act to reinforce them; we might call it negative counter-enforcement.

We have the perception that children are raised by their parents, then become fixed adults. But our society is constantly raising us. The sway of public opinion occurs exactly because adults regularly change their minds. So it's bad enough to engage in this behavior in itself, but it may be even worse to encourage it. Many readers posted comments on Coulter's article such as, "Absolutely loved this. So many important points in this piece — it expressed how I feel about feminism — the sense that 'women can do anything!' has translated into 'women should do everything.' As a college student preparing for the work world, thought this was very relevant." Such mutual back-patting is not helping. Coulter's readers are the worse for having read her article and Coulter is the worse for reading so much praise of it.

And this isn't about whether women have problems, or alcoholics have problems. Such issues should be addressed. It's about using a general problem that exists in the real world to warp your view of life until problems like ice in your drink melting, reading a bad book, receiving the wrong product in the mail, or having a mundane breakfast seem like the end of the world. Until being offered some alcohol at an alcoholic event is enough to produce tears.

This entire mindset just makes people unhappy and reliant upon one another's constant praise to be picked up -- only to fall back down again as they obsess over supposedly infuriating details. The Zen fad is over, the yoga fad is on, and still nobody seems to have learned anything about rolling with life's punches. It should be no surprise that doing something like posting a story on Steemit and then sitting back and expecting the world makes people unhappy. Research has shown that it's actually being generous that makes people happy. Thinking about the world and helping other people is good for us. Drawing inward and focusing on what the world owes us or microaggressions to the point of depression is bad for us.

Consider, for example, a recent event where French policemen forced a woman on a beach in Nice to remove her burkini. Regardless of whether you agree with the burkini ban or this manner of its enforcement (personally I don't feel I have enough information about world history, Islam, French society, etc., to have an opinion), there's one element that could be problematic: “The saddest thing was that people were shouting ‘go home’, some were applauding the police,” she said. “Her daughter was crying.” Her daughter crying does not alter the morality of the act, but many people seem to feel that it does.

image source
To put it in perspective, imagine that a policeman forced a female member of the KKK at a rally with her daughter to remove her hood. If people yell at them to go home or the woman's daughter cries, does that make the policemen or people at fault? No, it's much more complex than that. Morality simply can't be determined through someone getting upset. Yet, increasingly, I am noticing people's emotional reactions taking the place of actual arguments. So you can see that Coulter's blaming the people offering her alcohol at an alcoholic event for her sadness is a mindset that goes far beyond small middle-upper class interactions and can affect people's opinions on meaningful world events.

At the heart of it all, I believe, is an overemphasis on the concept that being upset or offended by something makes you right.

So I would like to propose a mindset absolutely separate from "boo feminists!" and "boo patriarchy!" or "boo Clinton!" and "boo Trump!" Whatever your beliefs, you don't have to sit idle or cease calling people out for problems they create. But living your life as happily as you can and improving the world are not mutually exclusive. You do not have to rage constantly over every little thing to get anything done. It is possible to be calm and effective. It is possible to take personal responsibility and still be able to recognize when a problem is not your doing. We should not be working ourselves up into increasing anger; we should be strengthening our self-control and awareness. We should act more out of true concern for ourselves and others, rather than selfishness and hate. Emotions are fickle and the more we encourage so-called righteous fury or tears, the more we open ourselves up to illogical thinking and lifelong unhappiness.

How much healthier would we be as a society if we dealt with minor and meaningless problems in the manner of this Taoist fable (taken from The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff):

"A horse was tied outside a shop in a narrow Chinese village street. Whenever anyone would try to walk by, the horse would kick him. Before long, a small crowd of villagers had gathered near the shop, arguing about how best to get past the dangerous horse. Suddenly, someone came running. “The Old Master is coming!” he shouted. “He’ll know what to do!”

The crowd watched eagerly as the Old Master came around the corner, saw the horse, turned, and walked down another street."