Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And perhaps, so do people.
Anxiety, fragility, and psychological weakness have skyrocketed in the last 15-20 years. Millennials have developed much thinner skin compared to their older counterparts. Because of that, we have seen an increase in the need for censorship in schools and we’re unrealistically asking the rest of the world to join in, too.
At the ripe age of 23, identifying as part of the Millennial Generation (Gen Y), I have examined the differences between older generations and my fellow millennials. I can’t help but notice how fragile and weak my generation has become. Why is there all of a sudden a need for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces?” Our parents and our parents’ parents survived just fine without them, didn’t they? What got us here?
Let’s start from the beginning.
Parents of Millennials (bless their souls) didn’t set out to raise fragile children. They desperately desired that their kids be safe and happy. Then that evolved into wanting them to be safe, happy, and successful. Faced with kids they loved and perhaps still affected from their own childhood problems, including growing up during the first massive wave of divorce and in an era of increasing crime, they decided that they were going to get this parenting right.
Let me give you some illustration:
Tommy plays football. He gives minimal effort at practice and goes home to sit on the couch and play video games. Kyle gives his best effort at practice and even spends an extra hour at home every night working on his technique. Tommy’s parents see that Kyle always gets to play quarterback and Tommy rarely gets playing time. Thus, they complain that the football coach is “too hard” on him and he isn’t being given a fair chance. Tommy, along with all other kids, gets the same trophy Kyle gets at the end of the season. The result: Tommy learns that he is entitled to receiving the same benefits whether or not he earns it.
Susie said Katy had an ugly dress on today while they were playing on the playground. Katy’s parents called the principal and demanded Susie have to flip a card in the class room. The result: Katy learns that her parents will fight her battles for her and develops an inability to handle issues on her own.
Jackson is failing five out of seven classes. He tells his parents the teachers don’t teach what is interesting to him and classes are not challenging enough. His parents negotiate with the teachers to alter assignments for Jackson. He is then considered “gifted” and is given assignments that interest him even though one would think “gifted” students should be able to excel on standard assignments. The result: Jackson learns that rules don’t apply to him.
Problems are inevitable in life but they can also serve as training for the future. The truth, is that children have been taught the wrong things.
I hear stories from the older generations about what life was like for them. When Cathy broke her arm in the fifth grade, she asked if she could get a break on homework. Her parents told her the struggle would teach her how to work hard. An older gentleman once told me that his football coach made the team run for an hour in rain in the middle of the night because they lost their game that day. Back then, if anyone’s parents got involved in a playground conflict, it was deeply humiliating.
Presently, however, many parents view their child’s pain, anger, or inconvenience less as an opportunity to teach the child a lesson about character and perseverance. Instead, parents take matters into their own hands and confront the angry coach, find all the help the child needs to succeed academically (including sometimes doing homework for them), talk to the principal about playground conflict, and negotiate with teachers to adjust the child’s classroom experience.
What happens next?
As children grow up, graduate high school, and proceed to college on their way to join the workforce they may have out-grown looking to mom and dad to come to their rescue. However, they haven’t accepted life’s struggles as an opportunity for learning and they haven’t adjusted to handling things on their own, either. Instead, they look to bigger institutions like the Universities they attend or the Government, finding that there is an odd familiarity of the coddling they received as a child.
A growing number of millennials support government bills that transform college tuition into an extreme form of progressive taxation as wealthy families fund substantial breaks for the poor, and everyone enjoys the same benefits. These benefits venture outside of facilities, allowing every student access to a large social-welfare organization, including diversity offices for all ethnicities, sexualities, and religions as well as easy-to-reach doctors and counselors. More and more higher education institutions are commissioning “trigger-warnings” so as not to offend anyone, and if by chance someone is still offended, there are “safe spaces.” College has become the ultimate nanny complete with its own form of a comfort blanket.
The current movement developed to protect students from supposed harm has actually resulted in a ridiculous amount of fragility. It’s one thing to consider the emotions and needs of people and try to keep students from legitimately being hurt. It’s another thing entirely to enable millennials to run in the other direction at the faint smell of anything that simply disagrees with their beliefs or ideas.
Institutions that are traditionally places of higher education and exist solely to challenge students’ preconceived ideas are being transformed into the equivalent of highly priced daycare centers. In the world there are many discomforting and distressing viewpoints and serious issues. To progress as a society, students need to be exposed to these viewpoints and issues.
People should go to college to sharpen their understandings and broaden their field of vision, not be shrunken into an intellectual plastic bubble. Shielding students from unfamiliar ideas ensures that the will be ill-prepared for the social and intellectual trials that are destined to hit them as soon as they step off their college campuses and into the real world.
We must learn the exact extent of the issues that warrant these trigger warnings in order to truly protect victims. If we wholeheartedly want to protect those affected, we need to take action against the issues with adequate knowledge and understanding—neither of which can be gained if we delegitimize the topics themselves.
I have to wonder how Millennials are possibly going to cope with the real world where they will inevitably learn first-hand the Darwinian concept of Survival of the Fittest. During my time in college I was pushed hard out of my comfort zone. My advice to students is to expect that your ideas will be challenged and accept that there are people in the world who disagree with every word you say and idea you think. I suggest you learn in college (if you haven’t already) how to live outside of your comfort zone, because that’s what you’ll need to know to survive the years ahead.
There are very few safe spaces in the real world; most of it is just one giant menace that quite frankly doesn’t care about your feelings.
