I mean, social media probably isn't helping. At least in the large-scale sites. I'll bet the smaller-scale Discord servers fare better...communities that foster actual social interaction over...
I mean, social media probably isn't helping. At least in the large-scale sites. I'll bet the smaller-scale Discord servers fare better...communities that foster actual social interaction over like/subscribe self-promotion.
The dogpile effect of the internet at large plays no small part. There is that strong 'conform or be harassed' vibe. Any bullying becomes harder to escape. The internet also exacerbates the existing problems from the before times, things like body image distorted by models and photoshop.
There are definitely positive interactions, but they are paired with the risk of some severe toxic ones.
In the 90s and early aughts the internet was where a weird kid could escape whatever toxicity they dealt with in school and find other weirdos they could get along with and vent to. When they...
In the 90s and early aughts the internet was where a weird kid could escape whatever toxicity they dealt with in school and find other weirdos they could get along with and vent to. When they socialized with people they went to school with it was through things like AIM or ICQ where they had one-on-one chats with people they trusted.
Once everyone went on social media with algorithmic timelines then whatever toxicity they dealt with in school followed them home (and went with them in their pockets). Even when they do go into smaller spaces with people they trust, so much of the discourse in those spaces now revolves around venting about or screencapping offensive behavior and bullying from the general spaces, which just contributes to that sense of being under siege.
Even standard feelings of alienation are worsened when you see people you thought were friends hanging out together after not inviting you. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the reasons kids don't actually go and hang out together as much anymore is simply because it's too much work to reassure all 30 of your friends that you don't hate them just because you wanted to have a small gathering instead of hosting a big party.
I think we have enough data now to conclude that this contemporary model of social media as a sort of panopticon where everyone broadcasts what they're up to for everyone else to see, and everything you do is open for comment by your followers, has failed at making people happy or strengthening their relationships with each other.
One of the most harmful symptoms I've noticed is people leveraging their kids for likes. Using them as props in their own lives instead of worrying about the kids' lives. I do my best to keep...
I think we have enough data now to conclude that this contemporary model of social media as a sort of panopticon where everyone broadcasts what they're up to for everyone else to see, and everything you do is open for comment by your followers, has failed at making people happy or strengthening their relationships with each other.
One of the most harmful symptoms I've noticed is people leveraging their kids for likes. Using them as props in their own lives instead of worrying about the kids' lives.
I do my best to keep photos/videos of my children off the public web. It's a difficult task.
I went on Reddit this morning for the first time in a while, I realized how much of the top posts are bullying. Granted, a lot of that was bullying people that were being assholes. But the vibe...
I went on Reddit this morning for the first time in a while, I realized how much of the top posts are bullying. Granted, a lot of that was bullying people that were being assholes. But the vibe isn’t so great regardless.
The blog post doesn't live up to proving its title and I'm somewhat hesitant to post it since it's so closely connected to the debate over "wokeness" and "cancel culture," which I think we've all...
The blog post doesn't live up to proving its title and I'm somewhat hesitant to post it since it's so closely connected to the debate over "wokeness" and "cancel culture," which I think we've all had enough of. Also, some parts of the post are problematic. But with those caveats, I thought this bit was interesting:
Greg [Lukianoff] is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.
What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.
I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.” He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title.
I think he's right that the title is a turnoff, but it seems like Lukianoff had an interesting idea?
Proving things in the social sciences is often difficult. Haidt posts data that suggesting that whatever it is starts in high school, so I don't see why college experiences would be the primary cause? Social media seems more likely, and he does write about that. (Crudely, Tumblr versus 4chan resulted in all of social media getting crazier.)
Such stories are hard to prove, and I'm not going to research this further. Not sure what to do other than shrug and move on.
The excerpt you posted is the same part of the text that put me off the entire article. I admit I didn't get through it due to losing confidence in the author, so forgive me if the issues I harp...
The excerpt you posted is the same part of the text that put me off the entire article. I admit I didn't get through it due to losing confidence in the author, so forgive me if the issues I harp on were resolved later in the article.
CBT is a powerful coping tool for depression and perhaps it's effective at helping to curb some mild to moderate cases, but peddling it as a magic cure for depression seems disingenuous. In my experience, I could identify distorted thinking all I wanted and it did not make it stop. You can recognize a thought is probably untrue or unhelpful, yet somewhere inside a part of you still resonates and reacts to it, and it doesn't necessarily stop you from generating new ones just like it. Depression probably isn't 100% genetic, but it's also not 100% manifested by the patient's mind, either. To suggest that seems almost like victim blaming: it's your fault you're depressed, stop thinking sad things and you won't be so sad!
Further, we aren't given concrete examples with context to see if we agree that these students were rejecting speakers and texts based purely on flawed emotional reasoning. Was the speaker the students wanted to ban planning on giving a speech that was hateful towards LGBTQ/minorities? I'd argue that's not catastrophic thinking in that case. Without context it's difficult to judge whether or not to trust the author's judgment, and based on the simplistic model of depression/CBT given here, I find it hard to fully agree with the author's worldview that colleges are somehow allowing their students to manifest their own depression via suppression of others' free speech.
I have to agree with you. I think the article did not do enough to do more than correlate, and conflated bring diagnosed with a mental illness with actual rates of depression. This completely...
I have to agree with you. I think the article did not do enough to do more than correlate, and conflated bring diagnosed with a mental illness with actual rates of depression. This completely ignores men being discouraged from seeking diagnosis, older people being less open to diagnosis, and the high rates of depression and suicidality in older men in particular. (As well erasing non-binary folks entirely)
What if "liberal women" are just more willing to seek help?
And as someone working in higher ed, our bias response team let's folks report their concern - which is rarely "microaggression" and more often use of slurs or harassment - but the principles of free speech still apply, often frustrating our students and staff but still.
I'm similarly lukewarm on the CBT focus. If we were changing everyone's thoughts with "CBT" all the time we'd have way more control over what the students were doing. If it was that effective outside a therapeutic environment it'd just be brainwashing. And it isn't even often that effective within an environment for the reasons you noted.
The idea that female student activists thinking the effects of something are worse than Lukianoff does means they're catastrophizing is honestly some sexist bullshit. It's barely a step above...
The idea that female student activists thinking the effects of something are worse than Lukianoff does means they're catastrophizing is honestly some sexist bullshit. It's barely a step above calling them hysterical. Rather than actually argue against the points of these "woke" students, he's dressing up the classic "well you're angry and thus cannot be thinking rationally" argument in therapy language.
And don't even get me started on "emotional reasoning". This type of argument is constantly deployed against marginalized people, framing their negative emotions about how they've been treated as somehow invalidating everything they say. The idea that reasoning that completely ignores the existence of human emotions is somehow superior because it's more "rational" is so pervasive among these sorts.
Fully agree here. Of course I'll be emotional if someone else tells me I shouldn't exist, calls me slurs, or wants to outlaw me, and being emotional about that is 100% valid, there is nothing...
And don't even get me started on "emotional reasoning". This type of argument is constantly deployed against marginalized people, framing their negative emotions about how they've been treated as somehow invalidating everything they say.
Fully agree here. Of course I'll be emotional if someone else tells me I shouldn't exist, calls me slurs, or wants to outlaw me, and being emotional about that is 100% valid, there is nothing wrong with emotions, unlike what the author is saying.
The author of this article seems to be drawing flawed conclusions from the data, as well. My first thoughts when seeing the data is that left leaning people are probably more likely to be aware of their own mental health, seek help for mental health, and live in a culture where mental health awareness is encouraged. Additionally, it's probably somewhat true that left leaning people may be more depressed due to being more in tune with how bad the world is right now.
I think it's complete bunk that the author's conclusion was that left leaning people are just overreacting and that universities are "performing reverse CBT" ("reverse CBT" as a theory itself also seems incredibly flawed, as it says critical thinking can't coexist with emotions, according to this author). It seems this author is incredibly dismissive of real issues going on and just wants to blame something (colleges) for "ruining our kids", when at least from my POV, gen Z kids have their heads on straight and will probably be the generation that fixes a lot of the issues we have in the world.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said here -- this seems like a classic issue of selection bias in the underlying data combined with a "researcher" deliberately looking to use data to...
Absolutely agree with everything you've said here -- this seems like a classic issue of selection bias in the underlying data combined with a "researcher" deliberately looking to use data to reinforce his own conclusions about "woke" universities.
So a while ago Philosophy Tube had an episode on stoicism and brought up how CBT acts as a real-world application of the philosophy. The point being to get the patient to accept the world as it...
So a while ago Philosophy Tube had an episode on stoicism and brought up how CBT acts as a real-world application of the philosophy. The point being to get the patient to accept the world as it is. But then they ask the viewer, what if that technique is used to get you to accept things that should not be accepted? Things that may cause harm, for instance? And in some ways that seems like what Heidt is advocating for.
That’s the problem with Heidt. He seems like a good guy. He’s certainly intelligent; he knows what he is talking about. But he doesn’t seem to get the whole picture. He sees people disagreeing and thinks of it as if it’s some sort of mental problem to be solved. And as a result he has taken a lot of research money from right wing ideologues who seem to think he can “solve wokeism”. I wouldn’t say I hate him for it, but I do resent what he has come to represent.
Yeah, I feel similarly to you. I read The Coddling of the American Mind after it came out and ended up really frustrated by it because I couldn't believe that people so smart were missing the...
Yeah, I feel similarly to you. I read The Coddling of the American Mind after it came out and ended up really frustrated by it because I couldn't believe that people so smart were missing the point so hard.
The book basically has two narratives: one is what Haidt reiterates in the linked article here with the "Great Untruths". In the book he and Lukianoff spend a lot of time arguing that stressors and adversity are actually good things because they help develop things like grit, resilience, etc. The other is portraits of people, primarily college officials, who were "cancelled" and faced repercussions for policies they implemented. This second narrative is played for sympathy. Heidt and Lukianoff want us to feel that what was done to these people was a severe injustice.
The disconnect, for me, was also two-fold. I actually was personally sympathetic to some of the people in the latter narrative, but, when I used Haidt's and Lukianoff's own framework instead of my own, I had difficulty mustering that same sympathy. Weren't they just people facing adversity and that they needed a better mental attitude to navigate it? Shouldn't having to overcome this hardship make them better, while doing things to structurally avoid it merely enable them? Weren't these moments in which they just needed to rely on and build their grit and resilience?
The authors would presumably say no, that these cancellings were unfair and disproportionate, and that's why we should be so sympathetic to those individuals in the first place (and, consequently, worried about the trend they represent -- another point which directly goes against the framework they lay out in the first half). This is where my other disconnect lies: in the first half of the book, when talking about their Great Untruths, they never acknowledge that some people are subject to unfair or disproportionate hardship in the first place. They never discuss that some people, on account of who they are or how society treats them, have to deal with undue difficulty that can have deleterious negative effects on them. These won't be solved by mentally reframing the situation, and changing the systemic or environmental issues that effect them is indeed the correct way to act.
Haidt and Lukianoff acknowledge this fully in the second narrative about the cancellations -- it's that section of the book's entire throughline -- but it's completely absent from the first narrative, where it is genuinely more important that it appear.
Part of my frustration with them comes from this, to me, massive inconsistency, but the other part of it comes from the fact that I think they are so close to something real and valuable. I say this as a teacher who can identify some of the patterns they talk about in their "Great Untruths" section in my own students. I also say this as someone who was personally sympathetic to some the cancelled individuals (because I do think it's unfair in cases where individuals become the fall people for systemic issues and face the fallout for problems far bigger than themselves entirely on their own).
Unfortunately, the way the authors missed the point does more harm than good and just feeds the "woke culture run amok" narrative that's nothing more than partisan hokum. I ultimately find it deeply ironic that a book that accuses the American mind of being coddled falls right into what is arguably the dominant method of mental coddling we do see: culture war-driven oversimplification.
I haven't read the book. I'll take it for granted that there's some partisan hokum; it gives me that vibe too. But, to try to salvage something from it, it sounds like the argument they're making...
I haven't read the book. I'll take it for granted that there's some partisan hokum; it gives me that vibe too.
But, to try to salvage something from it, it sounds like the argument they're making is that people feeling vulnerable and maybe actually being more vulnerable leads to accusations that later lead to injustice.
It's easy to caricature because, often, people really are frail and we do need to be careful. To make an analogy, someone working with the elderly needs to be careful, and saying "well if they weren't so frail then this wouldn't have happened" would be extremely callous. And the same is true of children, who are often more resilient in some ways but not all ways. Also, one should always be cautious about making assumptions about strangers.
At the same time, the amount of damage done depends on how frail you are, and avoiding being frail is in everyone's interests, especially your own. So how is that done? For physical frailty there are exercises, calcium supplements, and so on. What about avoiding mental frailty? I don't think "be more stoic" is going to do it alone, but perhaps the methods of CBT would help?
The level of frailness determines how careful you have to be. There are many activities that young, healthy college students can do easily that others can't. (Though this isn't true of all college students or for all activities.)
From an egalitarian point of view, everyone can use help with physical training. At the same time, we wouldn't want to rule out fun activities that only the very physical fit can do, just because many of us can't do them.
One would want to be able to assess someone's level of physical fitness and recommend activities appropriate for them. To some extent, people can assess this for themselves, but many find advice from trainers useful. Even very fit athletes benefit from having a coach, and people with physical problems will benefit from different kinds of physical therapy.
Also, the goal is for physical activity to make you stronger, not weaker, while avoiding injury.
None of this is as clear for intellectual activity. But, it seems like the attempt should be made? How could it be done?
A typical college course isn't supposed to be in the business of educating anyone who walks in. Many of them have prerequisites, and people who don't meet them should take a different course, or perhaps even go to a different school. Maybe the egalitarian ideal is better served by making sure other courses are available?
What kinds of requirements should be considered fair? It seems like it depends on what the course is about. Hard to say when discussing things at this abstract level.
After thinking about it along these lines, the argument that teachers being "cancelled" should be more stoic doesn't work for me because nobody is saying they're mentally frail or lack "grit" or whatever. Being insufficiently stoic isn't what they're supposed to have done wrong. They don't want people to be nicer to them, they want their job back. Whether they should be removed or not is about whether they're good teachers. (And that gets into the whole tenure system, too, since it's not like some jobs where someone with "grit" could presumably just find another one.)
Or so I assume, not having read the book and not knowing which cases they've written about. Do they go into that at all?
We’re running on my bad memory of a book I read five years ago, so I unfortunately don’t have a lot of specifics to offer. I genuinely can’t remember any of the details of the college...
We’re running on my bad memory of a book I read five years ago, so I unfortunately don’t have a lot of specifics to offer. I genuinely can’t remember any of the details of the college professors/administrators who were cancelled, or even much of the book outside the response I’ve given here.
In some ways, I’m being unfair to the authors, because I’m oversimplifying their entire book, which is certainly more complex than I’m presenting it as. On the other hand, the strong feelings I’m articulating are ones I had while reading the book, and the fact that I can still articulate them five years later means that there was some sticking power there. Most books get lost in my memory way before five years. The fact that this didn’t should speak to the level of my frustration with it. Believe me when I say I genuinely wanted to like it and give it the charitable interpretation you’re going for.
I appreciate your metaphors and in general agree with them. I actually cut out a huge section of my comment above before posting it. It went more in to a lot of what you are talking about, but regrettably I didn’t save it. I’ll do my best to recreate it here on your terms, since you gave me some great metaphors to jump off of.
To extend your fitness analogy, Haidt and Lukianoff prescribed a running regimen for college students, only they didn’t consider that it might be unfair to anyone who was on crutches or in wheelchairs. Instead, they posit that the running regimen is actually good for them and will help them build endurance. It’s true that the regimen is good for some, but the obvious issue here is that it wouldn’t be fair for those in wheelchairs or with injuries, and a more thoughtful exploration of their needs would yield a better outcome. Haidt and Lukianoff ignore this and insist that the regimen is good and correct for all. It will build stamina for everyone.
Then, when they talked about the college professors and administrators, they changed their tune and tried to express how unfair it was that these people had to run. It was hurting them. Everyone was ignoring their needs. Making them run was an injustice. Suddenly, the authors understood that there were exceptions to the regimen and that it could even do damage when unfairly applied.
I didn’t feel the book was fair to either group because both were treated very one-dimensionally. Also, I was sympathetic to both situations and both groups and was hoping for a more complex analysis of the situation as a whole. I wanted them to acknowledge in the first half that the running regimen genuinely might be unfair to some students, so that they could see the injustice there.
Furthermore, by ignoring that, they unintentionally sabotaged their examples in the second half, because it was genuinely hard to read that part and not apply their “nope, they need to run regardless because it’s good for them” prescription to people who just lost their livelihoods. Again, I was personally sympathetic to many of the professors and administrators, but if I applied Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s own principles to them, then I would have to turn off my sympathy and give them a “suck it up” response (which runs counter to my own values). I was kind of baffled that they didn’t given how hard they pushed those principles in the first half.
In highlighting the injustice that the college professors faced, the authors argue for systemic change so that this injustice doesn’t continue to happen. This is where their glaring inconsistency undermined the entirety of their thesis. If college professors and administrators are subject to injustice that needs to be addressed systemically, why can we not say the same for their students? Not all student advocacy is a product of hypervigilance or “safetyism” or the “Great Untruths”. Sometimes students do what they do because the running regimen isn’t right for them.
The most frustrating part to me is that it didn’t have to be like this. When they talk about that culture of “safetyism” in schools, it was resonant and recognizable. In teaching we talk a lot about “lawnmower parents” who don’t allow their children to face even simple frictions in life and consequently develop kids who cannot problem solve, lack resilience, and are often highly anxious because they don’t have a sense of control (because their parents take care of everything for them). Increasing anxiety and mental health issues in kids are common topics for us at work, while cancellations are everywhere when I go online.
I wanted the book to take all of these complex, challenging things that I live and breathe and experience daily and produce some meaningful insights. Unfortunately, they fell far short of that. The questions you asked in your post do a better job of highlighting the gray area and tradeoffs of the tensions at play better than the book did, but that’s because the book refused to see any tradeoffs at all.
They took a very narrow view of injustice and applied it only to a select group of people. It made their arguments very clean, but it also didn’t hold water for me. I’m someone whose own higher ed experience was made immeasurably worse because of the injustices I faced. After coming out in college I was subjected to hate speech and genuine threats on my life. I have literally been spit on and at by people. One of my professors went on an anti-gay rant during class (not at me, just in general), so I stopped going and failed the class, netting me an F on my transcript and a hit to my GPA.
According to Haidt and Lukianoff, I should be so lucky! Those helped me develop resilience and grit! Undeniably, this is true. I am stronger for having to go through shit like that, but also the implication that those events didn’t come with their own costs as well is infantilizing. Haidt and Lukianoff ignore those costs entirely for students but highlight them exclusively for the college professors and administrators.
Was the professor who went on an anti-gay rant in my class within his academic rights to do that? Maybe? Did it negatively impact my own academic career as well as my own life? Definitely. Which one should take priority? I don’t know but it deserves a deeper analysis than “suck it up — this is good for you”.
Haidt and Lukianoff reminded me a bit of how companies will try to maximize profits by externalizing costs. My “profit” in terms of personal growth can only be seen as a distinctly good thing if we externalize its costs — the undue human suffering I faced as result of systemic discrimination. In that sense their argument “works” but I think it’s dishonest.
Given how they change the weight of those costs based on whom they’re considering and the point they’re trying to make, I think we can infer that they know those costs are real. This, unfortunately, makes their selective application of them feel outright disingenuous. This is what gave me the perception that the book was aimed more at pouring fuel on a culture war fire than treating its subject with genuine fidelity.
Thanks! I think this is a rather complex subject that few people are in a position to evaluate. Perhaps someone will write a better book someday. A very broad argument that students are being...
Thanks! I think this is a rather complex subject that few people are in a position to evaluate. Perhaps someone will write a better book someday.
A very broad argument that students are being “coddled” probably doesn’t make some useful distinctions. One thing I think gets lost in talking about things so broadly is that the “mental fitness” needed depends on the job. It makes sense that if you want to be a surgeon and you faint at the sight of blood then maybe you’re not cut out for it unless you can do something about that. Some jobs require getting up on stage in front of people to give a lecture or perform in a play. If you want to be a historian then there are often language requirements; someone studying ancient Rome needs to know Latin and probably other languages too. There are math requirements for becoming a physicist.
Educational and job requirements may be practical or they may be bullshit. Everyone doesn’t need to learn Latin, or at least not anymore, though it was at one time a widespread requirement in education due to tradition.
Sometimes students may find learning things a useful exercise even though it’s not practical. Students are often skeptical of arguments that something is good for them as a side effect, particularly when they find it tedious. If it’s fun, though, any justification for doing it is fine, even if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Also, practical requirements may be based on culturally specific conditions that, ideally, nobody should have to put up with, but they do now.
People putting up with random adversity as a side effect of getting an education doesn’t seem like fitness training? When it is, it’s by accident. Despite all the years of formal education people go through, much of life is accidental and much of what we learn is accidental. Some of that experience may be helpful, often in unpredictable ways, and other times it’s just damage and something better avoided.
It may be that some important benefits of getting an education are not well-understood and therefore accidental. That can be used as a conservative argument to not mess with the mysterious workings of what we don’t understand, or as motivation to try to get a better understanding so that they can be taught systematically. But life is often an uncontrolled experiment where we change things that seem to need changing and find out what happens.
Without knowing any specifics, that’s about the best I can do.
This is the first article I've read from him, but from how flawed I think his conclusions were and from the language he used (there was a lot of underlying sexism and other bias in this article,...
This is the first article I've read from him, but from how flawed I think his conclusions were and from the language he used (there was a lot of underlying sexism and other bias in this article, it read more like a blog post than it did scientific article), I can't say I'd trust his opinions, myself. I can't speak to his intelligence or anything like that, but I just had so many red flag pop up in my head when reading this.
What are you gonna do about it though? Merely being upset about something you can’t change isn’t really a productive state of agitation to be in. You have to accept that it’s a thing and have a...
But then they ask the viewer, what if that technique is used to get you to accept things that should not be accepted? Things that may cause harm, for instance? And in some ways that seems like what Heidt is advocating for.
What are you gonna do about it though? Merely being upset about something you can’t change isn’t really a productive state of agitation to be in. You have to accept that it’s a thing and have a holistic understanding of why it’s a thing before you can actually hope to do anything about it. And none of that happens if the default reaction is to catastrophize and sink into despair. All that does is leads to a loss of perspective and hopelessness, which breeds only inaction.
This position assumes that everything in life is an inevitability. That is not the case. While there are some things you do have to just accept, there are things in life that you must not accept....
This position assumes that everything in life is an inevitability. That is not the case. While there are some things you do have to just accept, there are things in life that you must not accept. Even if your resistance ends up being unsuccessful, it still had meaning and that is important. Every positive change that has ever been made across history is a result of people not accepting the state of the world and acting to make it change.
So obviously the article seems to be on the "anti-woke" side of things with that focus, but I think the excerpt hit on something important, which is that the community that we're looking at...
So obviously the article seems to be on the "anti-woke" side of things with that focus, but I think the excerpt hit on something important, which is that the community that we're looking at (whether we call that liberal girls or young people or zoomers or socially conscious individuals) does often seem to mirror the symptoms seen in individuals with severe depression, CPTSD, BPD, etc. Doomscrolling certainly is similar to rumination, especially how it presents in people with CPTSD, always needing to be aware of what you're doing and who you're with is straight-up hyper vigilance, FOMO essentially leads to BPD-style efforts to avoid abandonment, etc.
While I think it is a necessary growing pain for something that will continue to evolve into a more empathetic and compassionate society, it definitely does not reinforce healthy behaviors.
I do think there are worthwhile things to examine in the mental health of Gen Z. But I think there's a conflation that is a matter of scale. Nearly every college student I speak with can relate...
I do think there are worthwhile things to examine in the mental health of Gen Z. But I think there's a conflation that is a matter of scale. Nearly every college student I speak with can relate when we talk about how scrolling through TikTok until it tells you to drink some water isn't actual self care. But there's still a huge difference between relating to occasional poor self-care habits and my severely depressed students who are barely engaging with their ADLs.
And current college student are definitely struggling post-covid at higher levels. But they're also way more comfortable asking for help, and open about their diagnoses on the average. (sometimes to their detriment tbh)
I didn't interpret the article as peddling a magic cure for depression. The bit that interested me was about someone who was previously depressed seeing later how people who aren't depressed (as...
I didn't interpret the article as peddling a magic cure for depression. The bit that interested me was about someone who was previously depressed seeing later how people who aren't depressed (as far as he knows) might have some bad habits that are similar. They think schools are sometimes encouraging bad habits of thinking.
Maybe having some bad habits of thinking might later lead to depression? Or maybe they won't? I'm not taking it as proof of anything. We do casually assume some habits are mentally unhealthy, though, and try to avoid them.
I think this falls under "could be important if true, but not proven." I have no idea what's going on in schools (it having been many years since I attended) and I'm not going to trust broad statistics without being able to check them. I'll defer to people who can write about their own experiences.
(Also, I posted this link months ago before the ~life.women group was created, so I think it's being seen in a different context now.)
She does give the example of several universities’ “harmful words lists”, but lists only absurd examples like the phrase “take a stab at”, to use “content warning” instead of “trigger warning”,...
She does give the example of several universities’ “harmful words lists”, but lists only absurd examples like the phrase “take a stab at”, to use “content warning” instead of “trigger warning”, and not to use the word “submit”.
I don’t infer good things about the author’s stance on trans rights based on her use of the podcast featuring JKR as a source for the Tumblr v 4chan info. They didn’t even mention the controversy surrounding JKR. I’m also not sure how you can mention 4chan without talking hate speech and gun violence.
I mean, social media probably isn't helping. At least in the large-scale sites. I'll bet the smaller-scale Discord servers fare better...communities that foster actual social interaction over like/subscribe self-promotion.
The dogpile effect of the internet at large plays no small part. There is that strong 'conform or be harassed' vibe. Any bullying becomes harder to escape. The internet also exacerbates the existing problems from the before times, things like body image distorted by models and photoshop.
There are definitely positive interactions, but they are paired with the risk of some severe toxic ones.
In the 90s and early aughts the internet was where a weird kid could escape whatever toxicity they dealt with in school and find other weirdos they could get along with and vent to. When they socialized with people they went to school with it was through things like AIM or ICQ where they had one-on-one chats with people they trusted.
Once everyone went on social media with algorithmic timelines then whatever toxicity they dealt with in school followed them home (and went with them in their pockets). Even when they do go into smaller spaces with people they trust, so much of the discourse in those spaces now revolves around venting about or screencapping offensive behavior and bullying from the general spaces, which just contributes to that sense of being under siege.
Even standard feelings of alienation are worsened when you see people you thought were friends hanging out together after not inviting you. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the reasons kids don't actually go and hang out together as much anymore is simply because it's too much work to reassure all 30 of your friends that you don't hate them just because you wanted to have a small gathering instead of hosting a big party.
I think we have enough data now to conclude that this contemporary model of social media as a sort of panopticon where everyone broadcasts what they're up to for everyone else to see, and everything you do is open for comment by your followers, has failed at making people happy or strengthening their relationships with each other.
One of the most harmful symptoms I've noticed is people leveraging their kids for likes. Using them as props in their own lives instead of worrying about the kids' lives.
I do my best to keep photos/videos of my children off the public web. It's a difficult task.
I went on Reddit this morning for the first time in a while, I realized how much of the top posts are bullying. Granted, a lot of that was bullying people that were being assholes. But the vibe isn’t so great regardless.
The blog post doesn't live up to proving its title and I'm somewhat hesitant to post it since it's so closely connected to the debate over "wokeness" and "cancel culture," which I think we've all had enough of. Also, some parts of the post are problematic. But with those caveats, I thought this bit was interesting:
I think he's right that the title is a turnoff, but it seems like Lukianoff had an interesting idea?
Proving things in the social sciences is often difficult. Haidt posts data that suggesting that whatever it is starts in high school, so I don't see why college experiences would be the primary cause? Social media seems more likely, and he does write about that. (Crudely, Tumblr versus 4chan resulted in all of social media getting crazier.)
Such stories are hard to prove, and I'm not going to research this further. Not sure what to do other than shrug and move on.
The excerpt you posted is the same part of the text that put me off the entire article. I admit I didn't get through it due to losing confidence in the author, so forgive me if the issues I harp on were resolved later in the article.
CBT is a powerful coping tool for depression and perhaps it's effective at helping to curb some mild to moderate cases, but peddling it as a magic cure for depression seems disingenuous. In my experience, I could identify distorted thinking all I wanted and it did not make it stop. You can recognize a thought is probably untrue or unhelpful, yet somewhere inside a part of you still resonates and reacts to it, and it doesn't necessarily stop you from generating new ones just like it. Depression probably isn't 100% genetic, but it's also not 100% manifested by the patient's mind, either. To suggest that seems almost like victim blaming: it's your fault you're depressed, stop thinking sad things and you won't be so sad!
Further, we aren't given concrete examples with context to see if we agree that these students were rejecting speakers and texts based purely on flawed emotional reasoning. Was the speaker the students wanted to ban planning on giving a speech that was hateful towards LGBTQ/minorities? I'd argue that's not catastrophic thinking in that case. Without context it's difficult to judge whether or not to trust the author's judgment, and based on the simplistic model of depression/CBT given here, I find it hard to fully agree with the author's worldview that colleges are somehow allowing their students to manifest their own depression via suppression of others' free speech.
I have to agree with you. I think the article did not do enough to do more than correlate, and conflated bring diagnosed with a mental illness with actual rates of depression. This completely ignores men being discouraged from seeking diagnosis, older people being less open to diagnosis, and the high rates of depression and suicidality in older men in particular. (As well erasing non-binary folks entirely)
What if "liberal women" are just more willing to seek help?
And as someone working in higher ed, our bias response team let's folks report their concern - which is rarely "microaggression" and more often use of slurs or harassment - but the principles of free speech still apply, often frustrating our students and staff but still.
I'm similarly lukewarm on the CBT focus. If we were changing everyone's thoughts with "CBT" all the time we'd have way more control over what the students were doing. If it was that effective outside a therapeutic environment it'd just be brainwashing. And it isn't even often that effective within an environment for the reasons you noted.
The idea that female student activists thinking the effects of something are worse than Lukianoff does means they're catastrophizing is honestly some sexist bullshit. It's barely a step above calling them hysterical. Rather than actually argue against the points of these "woke" students, he's dressing up the classic "well you're angry and thus cannot be thinking rationally" argument in therapy language.
And don't even get me started on "emotional reasoning". This type of argument is constantly deployed against marginalized people, framing their negative emotions about how they've been treated as somehow invalidating everything they say. The idea that reasoning that completely ignores the existence of human emotions is somehow superior because it's more "rational" is so pervasive among these sorts.
Fully agree here. Of course I'll be emotional if someone else tells me I shouldn't exist, calls me slurs, or wants to outlaw me, and being emotional about that is 100% valid, there is nothing wrong with emotions, unlike what the author is saying.
The author of this article seems to be drawing flawed conclusions from the data, as well. My first thoughts when seeing the data is that left leaning people are probably more likely to be aware of their own mental health, seek help for mental health, and live in a culture where mental health awareness is encouraged. Additionally, it's probably somewhat true that left leaning people may be more depressed due to being more in tune with how bad the world is right now.
I think it's complete bunk that the author's conclusion was that left leaning people are just overreacting and that universities are "performing reverse CBT" ("reverse CBT" as a theory itself also seems incredibly flawed, as it says critical thinking can't coexist with emotions, according to this author). It seems this author is incredibly dismissive of real issues going on and just wants to blame something (colleges) for "ruining our kids", when at least from my POV, gen Z kids have their heads on straight and will probably be the generation that fixes a lot of the issues we have in the world.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said here -- this seems like a classic issue of selection bias in the underlying data combined with a "researcher" deliberately looking to use data to reinforce his own conclusions about "woke" universities.
So a while ago Philosophy Tube had an episode on stoicism and brought up how CBT acts as a real-world application of the philosophy. The point being to get the patient to accept the world as it is. But then they ask the viewer, what if that technique is used to get you to accept things that should not be accepted? Things that may cause harm, for instance? And in some ways that seems like what Heidt is advocating for.
That’s the problem with Heidt. He seems like a good guy. He’s certainly intelligent; he knows what he is talking about. But he doesn’t seem to get the whole picture. He sees people disagreeing and thinks of it as if it’s some sort of mental problem to be solved. And as a result he has taken a lot of research money from right wing ideologues who seem to think he can “solve wokeism”. I wouldn’t say I hate him for it, but I do resent what he has come to represent.
Yeah, I feel similarly to you. I read The Coddling of the American Mind after it came out and ended up really frustrated by it because I couldn't believe that people so smart were missing the point so hard.
The book basically has two narratives: one is what Haidt reiterates in the linked article here with the "Great Untruths". In the book he and Lukianoff spend a lot of time arguing that stressors and adversity are actually good things because they help develop things like grit, resilience, etc. The other is portraits of people, primarily college officials, who were "cancelled" and faced repercussions for policies they implemented. This second narrative is played for sympathy. Heidt and Lukianoff want us to feel that what was done to these people was a severe injustice.
The disconnect, for me, was also two-fold. I actually was personally sympathetic to some of the people in the latter narrative, but, when I used Haidt's and Lukianoff's own framework instead of my own, I had difficulty mustering that same sympathy. Weren't they just people facing adversity and that they needed a better mental attitude to navigate it? Shouldn't having to overcome this hardship make them better, while doing things to structurally avoid it merely enable them? Weren't these moments in which they just needed to rely on and build their grit and resilience?
The authors would presumably say no, that these cancellings were unfair and disproportionate, and that's why we should be so sympathetic to those individuals in the first place (and, consequently, worried about the trend they represent -- another point which directly goes against the framework they lay out in the first half). This is where my other disconnect lies: in the first half of the book, when talking about their Great Untruths, they never acknowledge that some people are subject to unfair or disproportionate hardship in the first place. They never discuss that some people, on account of who they are or how society treats them, have to deal with undue difficulty that can have deleterious negative effects on them. These won't be solved by mentally reframing the situation, and changing the systemic or environmental issues that effect them is indeed the correct way to act.
Haidt and Lukianoff acknowledge this fully in the second narrative about the cancellations -- it's that section of the book's entire throughline -- but it's completely absent from the first narrative, where it is genuinely more important that it appear.
Part of my frustration with them comes from this, to me, massive inconsistency, but the other part of it comes from the fact that I think they are so close to something real and valuable. I say this as a teacher who can identify some of the patterns they talk about in their "Great Untruths" section in my own students. I also say this as someone who was personally sympathetic to some the cancelled individuals (because I do think it's unfair in cases where individuals become the fall people for systemic issues and face the fallout for problems far bigger than themselves entirely on their own).
Unfortunately, the way the authors missed the point does more harm than good and just feeds the "woke culture run amok" narrative that's nothing more than partisan hokum. I ultimately find it deeply ironic that a book that accuses the American mind of being coddled falls right into what is arguably the dominant method of mental coddling we do see: culture war-driven oversimplification.
I haven't read the book. I'll take it for granted that there's some partisan hokum; it gives me that vibe too.
But, to try to salvage something from it, it sounds like the argument they're making is that people feeling vulnerable and maybe actually being more vulnerable leads to accusations that later lead to injustice.
It's easy to caricature because, often, people really are frail and we do need to be careful. To make an analogy, someone working with the elderly needs to be careful, and saying "well if they weren't so frail then this wouldn't have happened" would be extremely callous. And the same is true of children, who are often more resilient in some ways but not all ways. Also, one should always be cautious about making assumptions about strangers.
At the same time, the amount of damage done depends on how frail you are, and avoiding being frail is in everyone's interests, especially your own. So how is that done? For physical frailty there are exercises, calcium supplements, and so on. What about avoiding mental frailty? I don't think "be more stoic" is going to do it alone, but perhaps the methods of CBT would help?
The level of frailness determines how careful you have to be. There are many activities that young, healthy college students can do easily that others can't. (Though this isn't true of all college students or for all activities.)
From an egalitarian point of view, everyone can use help with physical training. At the same time, we wouldn't want to rule out fun activities that only the very physical fit can do, just because many of us can't do them.
One would want to be able to assess someone's level of physical fitness and recommend activities appropriate for them. To some extent, people can assess this for themselves, but many find advice from trainers useful. Even very fit athletes benefit from having a coach, and people with physical problems will benefit from different kinds of physical therapy.
Also, the goal is for physical activity to make you stronger, not weaker, while avoiding injury.
None of this is as clear for intellectual activity. But, it seems like the attempt should be made? How could it be done?
A typical college course isn't supposed to be in the business of educating anyone who walks in. Many of them have prerequisites, and people who don't meet them should take a different course, or perhaps even go to a different school. Maybe the egalitarian ideal is better served by making sure other courses are available?
What kinds of requirements should be considered fair? It seems like it depends on what the course is about. Hard to say when discussing things at this abstract level.
After thinking about it along these lines, the argument that teachers being "cancelled" should be more stoic doesn't work for me because nobody is saying they're mentally frail or lack "grit" or whatever. Being insufficiently stoic isn't what they're supposed to have done wrong. They don't want people to be nicer to them, they want their job back. Whether they should be removed or not is about whether they're good teachers. (And that gets into the whole tenure system, too, since it's not like some jobs where someone with "grit" could presumably just find another one.)
Or so I assume, not having read the book and not knowing which cases they've written about. Do they go into that at all?
We’re running on my bad memory of a book I read five years ago, so I unfortunately don’t have a lot of specifics to offer. I genuinely can’t remember any of the details of the college professors/administrators who were cancelled, or even much of the book outside the response I’ve given here.
In some ways, I’m being unfair to the authors, because I’m oversimplifying their entire book, which is certainly more complex than I’m presenting it as. On the other hand, the strong feelings I’m articulating are ones I had while reading the book, and the fact that I can still articulate them five years later means that there was some sticking power there. Most books get lost in my memory way before five years. The fact that this didn’t should speak to the level of my frustration with it. Believe me when I say I genuinely wanted to like it and give it the charitable interpretation you’re going for.
I appreciate your metaphors and in general agree with them. I actually cut out a huge section of my comment above before posting it. It went more in to a lot of what you are talking about, but regrettably I didn’t save it. I’ll do my best to recreate it here on your terms, since you gave me some great metaphors to jump off of.
To extend your fitness analogy, Haidt and Lukianoff prescribed a running regimen for college students, only they didn’t consider that it might be unfair to anyone who was on crutches or in wheelchairs. Instead, they posit that the running regimen is actually good for them and will help them build endurance. It’s true that the regimen is good for some, but the obvious issue here is that it wouldn’t be fair for those in wheelchairs or with injuries, and a more thoughtful exploration of their needs would yield a better outcome. Haidt and Lukianoff ignore this and insist that the regimen is good and correct for all. It will build stamina for everyone.
Then, when they talked about the college professors and administrators, they changed their tune and tried to express how unfair it was that these people had to run. It was hurting them. Everyone was ignoring their needs. Making them run was an injustice. Suddenly, the authors understood that there were exceptions to the regimen and that it could even do damage when unfairly applied.
I didn’t feel the book was fair to either group because both were treated very one-dimensionally. Also, I was sympathetic to both situations and both groups and was hoping for a more complex analysis of the situation as a whole. I wanted them to acknowledge in the first half that the running regimen genuinely might be unfair to some students, so that they could see the injustice there.
Furthermore, by ignoring that, they unintentionally sabotaged their examples in the second half, because it was genuinely hard to read that part and not apply their “nope, they need to run regardless because it’s good for them” prescription to people who just lost their livelihoods. Again, I was personally sympathetic to many of the professors and administrators, but if I applied Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s own principles to them, then I would have to turn off my sympathy and give them a “suck it up” response (which runs counter to my own values). I was kind of baffled that they didn’t given how hard they pushed those principles in the first half.
In highlighting the injustice that the college professors faced, the authors argue for systemic change so that this injustice doesn’t continue to happen. This is where their glaring inconsistency undermined the entirety of their thesis. If college professors and administrators are subject to injustice that needs to be addressed systemically, why can we not say the same for their students? Not all student advocacy is a product of hypervigilance or “safetyism” or the “Great Untruths”. Sometimes students do what they do because the running regimen isn’t right for them.
The most frustrating part to me is that it didn’t have to be like this. When they talk about that culture of “safetyism” in schools, it was resonant and recognizable. In teaching we talk a lot about “lawnmower parents” who don’t allow their children to face even simple frictions in life and consequently develop kids who cannot problem solve, lack resilience, and are often highly anxious because they don’t have a sense of control (because their parents take care of everything for them). Increasing anxiety and mental health issues in kids are common topics for us at work, while cancellations are everywhere when I go online.
I wanted the book to take all of these complex, challenging things that I live and breathe and experience daily and produce some meaningful insights. Unfortunately, they fell far short of that. The questions you asked in your post do a better job of highlighting the gray area and tradeoffs of the tensions at play better than the book did, but that’s because the book refused to see any tradeoffs at all.
They took a very narrow view of injustice and applied it only to a select group of people. It made their arguments very clean, but it also didn’t hold water for me. I’m someone whose own higher ed experience was made immeasurably worse because of the injustices I faced. After coming out in college I was subjected to hate speech and genuine threats on my life. I have literally been spit on and at by people. One of my professors went on an anti-gay rant during class (not at me, just in general), so I stopped going and failed the class, netting me an F on my transcript and a hit to my GPA.
According to Haidt and Lukianoff, I should be so lucky! Those helped me develop resilience and grit! Undeniably, this is true. I am stronger for having to go through shit like that, but also the implication that those events didn’t come with their own costs as well is infantilizing. Haidt and Lukianoff ignore those costs entirely for students but highlight them exclusively for the college professors and administrators.
Was the professor who went on an anti-gay rant in my class within his academic rights to do that? Maybe? Did it negatively impact my own academic career as well as my own life? Definitely. Which one should take priority? I don’t know but it deserves a deeper analysis than “suck it up — this is good for you”.
Haidt and Lukianoff reminded me a bit of how companies will try to maximize profits by externalizing costs. My “profit” in terms of personal growth can only be seen as a distinctly good thing if we externalize its costs — the undue human suffering I faced as result of systemic discrimination. In that sense their argument “works” but I think it’s dishonest.
Given how they change the weight of those costs based on whom they’re considering and the point they’re trying to make, I think we can infer that they know those costs are real. This, unfortunately, makes their selective application of them feel outright disingenuous. This is what gave me the perception that the book was aimed more at pouring fuel on a culture war fire than treating its subject with genuine fidelity.
Thanks! I think this is a rather complex subject that few people are in a position to evaluate. Perhaps someone will write a better book someday.
A very broad argument that students are being “coddled” probably doesn’t make some useful distinctions. One thing I think gets lost in talking about things so broadly is that the “mental fitness” needed depends on the job. It makes sense that if you want to be a surgeon and you faint at the sight of blood then maybe you’re not cut out for it unless you can do something about that. Some jobs require getting up on stage in front of people to give a lecture or perform in a play. If you want to be a historian then there are often language requirements; someone studying ancient Rome needs to know Latin and probably other languages too. There are math requirements for becoming a physicist.
Educational and job requirements may be practical or they may be bullshit. Everyone doesn’t need to learn Latin, or at least not anymore, though it was at one time a widespread requirement in education due to tradition.
Sometimes students may find learning things a useful exercise even though it’s not practical. Students are often skeptical of arguments that something is good for them as a side effect, particularly when they find it tedious. If it’s fun, though, any justification for doing it is fine, even if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Also, practical requirements may be based on culturally specific conditions that, ideally, nobody should have to put up with, but they do now.
People putting up with random adversity as a side effect of getting an education doesn’t seem like fitness training? When it is, it’s by accident. Despite all the years of formal education people go through, much of life is accidental and much of what we learn is accidental. Some of that experience may be helpful, often in unpredictable ways, and other times it’s just damage and something better avoided.
It may be that some important benefits of getting an education are not well-understood and therefore accidental. That can be used as a conservative argument to not mess with the mysterious workings of what we don’t understand, or as motivation to try to get a better understanding so that they can be taught systematically. But life is often an uncontrolled experiment where we change things that seem to need changing and find out what happens.
Without knowing any specifics, that’s about the best I can do.
This is the first article I've read from him, but from how flawed I think his conclusions were and from the language he used (there was a lot of underlying sexism and other bias in this article, it read more like a blog post than it did scientific article), I can't say I'd trust his opinions, myself. I can't speak to his intelligence or anything like that, but I just had so many red flag pop up in my head when reading this.
What are you gonna do about it though? Merely being upset about something you can’t change isn’t really a productive state of agitation to be in. You have to accept that it’s a thing and have a holistic understanding of why it’s a thing before you can actually hope to do anything about it. And none of that happens if the default reaction is to catastrophize and sink into despair. All that does is leads to a loss of perspective and hopelessness, which breeds only inaction.
This position assumes that everything in life is an inevitability. That is not the case. While there are some things you do have to just accept, there are things in life that you must not accept. Even if your resistance ends up being unsuccessful, it still had meaning and that is important. Every positive change that has ever been made across history is a result of people not accepting the state of the world and acting to make it change.
So obviously the article seems to be on the "anti-woke" side of things with that focus, but I think the excerpt hit on something important, which is that the community that we're looking at (whether we call that liberal girls or young people or zoomers or socially conscious individuals) does often seem to mirror the symptoms seen in individuals with severe depression, CPTSD, BPD, etc. Doomscrolling certainly is similar to rumination, especially how it presents in people with CPTSD, always needing to be aware of what you're doing and who you're with is straight-up hyper vigilance, FOMO essentially leads to BPD-style efforts to avoid abandonment, etc.
While I think it is a necessary growing pain for something that will continue to evolve into a more empathetic and compassionate society, it definitely does not reinforce healthy behaviors.
I do think there are worthwhile things to examine in the mental health of Gen Z. But I think there's a conflation that is a matter of scale. Nearly every college student I speak with can relate when we talk about how scrolling through TikTok until it tells you to drink some water isn't actual self care. But there's still a huge difference between relating to occasional poor self-care habits and my severely depressed students who are barely engaging with their ADLs.
And current college student are definitely struggling post-covid at higher levels. But they're also way more comfortable asking for help, and open about their diagnoses on the average. (sometimes to their detriment tbh)
I didn't interpret the article as peddling a magic cure for depression. The bit that interested me was about someone who was previously depressed seeing later how people who aren't depressed (as far as he knows) might have some bad habits that are similar. They think schools are sometimes encouraging bad habits of thinking.
Maybe having some bad habits of thinking might later lead to depression? Or maybe they won't? I'm not taking it as proof of anything. We do casually assume some habits are mentally unhealthy, though, and try to avoid them.
I think this falls under "could be important if true, but not proven." I have no idea what's going on in schools (it having been many years since I attended) and I'm not going to trust broad statistics without being able to check them. I'll defer to people who can write about their own experiences.
(Also, I posted this link months ago before the ~life.women group was created, so I think it's being seen in a different context now.)
She does give the example of several universities’ “harmful words lists”, but lists only absurd examples like the phrase “take a stab at”, to use “content warning” instead of “trigger warning”, and not to use the word “submit”.
I don’t infer good things about the author’s stance on trans rights based on her use of the podcast featuring JKR as a source for the Tumblr v 4chan info. They didn’t even mention the controversy surrounding JKR. I’m also not sure how you can mention 4chan without talking hate speech and gun violence.