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Key points
- Among the young, "clicktivism," supporting causes via social media, may serve as a status signal rather than a mark of real social commitment.
- For young people, an emphasis on the primacy of emotions may come at the price of mental resilience.
- Emphasizing victimhood among millennials may constitute a flight from responsibility.
- For millennials, fighting for social justice may serve as a path to a sense of felt belonging, compensating for the decline of religion.
A chance encounter at my local coffee shop (where she was, for a time, the barista) led to friendship with Lily Markle, a thoughtful young journalist in Columbus, Ohio. As a 63-year-old boomer, I was interested in her perspective on the struggles of today’s young people. In a series of conversations (face to face and via email) she tried to explain.
Q: Can you point out for me some of what you see as unique characteristics of your generation?
Lily: I think the people of my generation, myself included, often strategize by correcting from prior felt lack. Sometimes, we may overindulge in corrections. A place I find this is in my generation’s response to emotional difficulties. We have rightfully changed the course towards a concern for emotional wellbeing, something that was lacking in the generation before us, but the focus on emotions carries a price.
Q: Your generation is often characterized as “snowflaky,” over-sensitive. Are young people lacking in resilience?
Lily: The past generation’s approach to resiliency was to deny the recovery process altogether. Status was conferred on those who were unfazed by hardship. My generation has swung in the other direction. We acknowledge trouble and provide ample space for recovery. So much so that recovery is sometimes rendered beside the point. The journalist Bari Weiss explained it well. She said: ”when you’re (the older generation) talking about your wayward youth, the thing that granted you currency was having the adventures of near-death experiences and having bragging rights. These days currency is running in a different direction. The thing that grants you status is being a victim.”
Q: Can you give an example from your own life?
One example comes from my relationship with my husband. Early in our relationships, we followed the logic of attachment theory. This is the idea that if you have parents you can’t rely on, then you can often be quite reluctant to form close bonds with people as an adult, because maybe you’ve learned that you can’t trust others. We were excited to see the idea become popular with people in our circles, somewhat taking on the form of a modern-day personality test.
More recently, my husband and I have come to learn that current research shows parenting style is not quite the blueprint of personality we thought it was. In fact, genes play a more powerful role. Shifting perspectives, from seeing ourselves as victims of our parents’ shortcomings to realizing that we were powerfully shaped by random genes, was quite shocking, in part because how this idea goes against the current cultural trend of blaming other people for our difficulties.
Our parents were big on denial, so we are big on feeling our emotions. The problem is that bad emotions feel bad. This has created the idea that psychological safety is found in the practice of insulating ourselves from all negative experiences. Our attempt to honor emotions led to an effort to create a world free from difficult ones. This may be hurting us. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have noted, avoiding difficult emotions defies one of the basic tenets of psychology; that to be overcome, difficult emotions must be accepted, and processed, so that we learn how to manage them properly.
As my generation looks to reduce anxiety and depression by policing all expressions that may evoke negative emotion, we are in effect practicing experiential avoidance—something cognitive behavioral therapists have long identified as causes for depression and anxiety. Wanting to correct the denial of emotional reactions, we have come to undermine the importance of emotional regulation.
Q: Talk of "trauma" appears to be common among young people. Has trauma been "dumbed down?"
Lily: The psychologist George Bonanno wrote, “I don’t think people in older generations didn’t have traumatic events. There just wasn’t a way to understand it until recently." Did the pendulum swing to over traumatizing everything? Bonanno says that trauma “has become so ubiquitous … we’ve become so focused on everything that can harm us, that when we have something that causes what we think are trauma reactions it removes us from any responsibility, saying the event is causing this for me.” He noted the misconception in the public regarding the probability of events becoming traumatic. Even though our natural inclination as humans is to focus on threat, most people when they have experienced a life threatening or violent event only experience short term reactions, for a few days or weeks. Difficult events may cause distress but rarely trauma or PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
I am the emotional person. But I think it makes sense to have cognition at the table in adulthood. To live believing that the chaos of pain will not hit me is misguided, but I can be ready to pass through it. I can feel safe not in avoiding difficult emotions, but in learning to manage them, and use the information they provide.
Q: Young people are moving away from religion. What’s your take on this trend?
This may be another so-called correction. The affiliation in organized religion is on a consistent decline in recent decades in the United States, an almost 10 percent decrease from baby boomers to millennials going from 18 percent unaffiliated to 29 percent. Generation Z is continuing the trend with an unaffiliated percentage of 34 percent.
Religious affiliation serves a social purpose. In his book Sociological Insights, sociologist Randall Collins points out that “…the key to religion is not its beliefs but the social rituals that its members perform. Religion is a key to social solidarity, and religious beliefs are important, not in their own right, but as symbols for social groups.” As we disassociate from traditional religion, we may simply be replacing them with new social rituals. Collins states, “Religion, pushed to the extreme generalization and abstraction, turns into political ideals.”
American linguist John McWhorter sees such a process in the antiracism movement. His recent book, Woke Racism, breaks down how the characteristics of antiracism look like religion in ways that are more harmful than beneficial. McWhorter argues that the action of "cancel culture" to create the desired outcomes in antiracism is reflective of some of the worst ways to practice religion. “For people to treat people who don’t think like them on these issues as heretics and feel like they can’t be in the same room as them, that people need to lose their jobs, for not going along with the ideology. That is what we associate with one of the seediest and saddest aspects of religion.”
McWhorter makes the argument that the people of my generation are not fighting for justice of the oppressed for the sake of the oppressed, but for the sake of the felt belonging missed in the decline of religious affiliation. This process is enabled, according to Haidt, by another unique feature of my generation’s existence: the rise of social media. He describes how this new form of communication is making us slide backwards, closer to the social rituals that are linked with the dangerous parts of religion we have tried to leave behind. He describes the performative nature of discussion through social media, how instead of talking with someone, one is simply emitting things, as if on a stage. Everyone on social media is in their own small bubbles that are becoming increasingly fragmented. This leaves little room for real one-on-one conversation with people outside one’s group. It also leaves little space for healthy disagreement and discussion to find the best solutions to problems.
Q: Can you give specific examples?
Lily: An example is "clicktivism," the practice of supporting a political or social cause via the internet by means such as social media or online petitions, typically involving little effort or commitment. The term "luxury belief," coined by author Rob Henderson, explains this further. Henderson argues that “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.” These beliefs are ones that create status for the rich while harming the lower class. They can only be held by people who are shielded by their status from the harm that the beliefs can cause. An example is the idea of defunding the police. Many of the people who agreed with this idea were in the higher socioeconomic brackets, the least affected by the services granted by the police.
I spent a near decade through high school and college as a devout Christian. I saw how often morality was used as an indicator of class. Randall Collins states, “our modern, secular society is full of rituals that carry on the older religious forces in a new guise. In some of the most common activities of everyday life, we find religion gone underground.” In using beliefs as markers of status, we are at risk of in effect neglecting the honorable pillars of religion such as forgiveness, believing the best in someone, aspects that would humanize relationships again. In looking to replace the sins of the past, my generation may be replicating them.
