Here’s the full post so you don’t have to go to X.
I am profoundly, profoundly concerned about the psychological health of both children and adults in this country. A culture overemphasizing emotional safety has robbed people of their opportunities for growth. Many people experience these opportunities as a threat, remaining permanently infantile, afraid, and unable and unwilling to cope with adversity as a result. Indeed the culture itself rather than encouraging resilience, persuades people that even minor inconveniences are personal affronts and even signs of systemic injustice visited upon them. As people begin experiencing everything that falls outside of their narrow box of predictable experience as a form of threat to be neutralized, not only are they personally deprived of growth opportunities, but they create a culture of mistrust, rigidity, and sterility, which in turn reduces in society as a whole availability of the kinds of messy experiences that are critically important for self-discovery, personal growth, and psychological resilience. The outcome is a society of the over-socialized, of the outraged, of the rule-abiding, of the sterile, and ultimately of the psychologically unwell, of the poorly adapted with scant psychological reserve for problems, crises, or even just interesting experiences that fall outside the norm but which in just days or weeks can provide the equivalent of years of life experience. By protecting everyone, we have destroyed the normal maturation process that is a central to creating psychologically well-functioning adults. The fruits of this are, well, that many young adults are now thoroughly psycho-pathological and unable to deal healthily with the normal stresses of life. I cannot be the only one to observe this and it disturbs me beyond words.
Kevin Bass PhD MS – posted on X 10.15.23
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