Spoiled and Abused

It didn't take long to switch the way we destroy our kids.

Is it just me, or is the Internet suddenly full of people crying? I don’t mean people whose enemies posted snuck clips of them crying. I mean people purposefully sitting down in front of their camera when they feel sad and proudly hissing 1-2-3 go tears!

Have you no shame?

But all these pretty-crying faces suddenly focused my thinking about the balance of adversity in youth.

It used to seem simple, just a couple decades ago: The obvious problem with people’s upbringings was too much suffering. Yeah, adversity makes you tough, but too much too soon? It left kids fucked-up, twisted. It was visible. It was almost inconceivable to think about the apparent non-problem of not suffering enough.

Things seem to have changed faster than we expected.

Wherever people go, you will always have problems, but they seem to be getting more paradoxical: enough of us have achieved a level of comfort where it ain’t just Little Lord Fauntleroy who’s turned into a psychopath by having it too easy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro-hard. Believe it or not, middle-aged people are human. Same as you. We want good. Good is good.

Except good isn’t forever.

And the better we get at drawing out the innocence of suffering—at growing plentiful crops, heating the cold, and plugging our noisy sprouts into the silent Novocaine of an iPad—the longer we keep them safe and warm in the Garden of Eatin’—horrifying pun intended—the more impossible it is for them to conceive of a world without airplanes, GrubHub, the Internet, or even e-begging itself—the more personally offended the younglings seem to feel the first time a boo-boo knocks them hard. (Or a sentence is too long.)

Doesn’t matter how relatively soft, by old-world standards, that first blow is. If it comes too late, it seems to turn you as twisted as the guy whose parents hung him upside-down in the basement in 1988 while they “forgot” to mail his application to Harvard and signed him up for the Marines instead.

One turn o’ the century later, save in cases of unusual parental breakdown combined with somehow being missed by the social safety net, we seem to have gently lofted kids today (TM) over a dubious finish line to ending over-the-top childhood trauma (even if it it doesn’t resemble a finish line to its beneficiaries, judging by the volume of complaining).

The Internet has made almost catatonic laziness into goals and a near-possibility for kids of all ages. And somehow it didn’t turn out as everybody planned. Somehow it’s making us psycho.

This message will be met with a cold shoulder or hate, though, because of one of the problems woven into it: You don’t know what you don’t know.

A generation or so ago, for instance, it was normal to have to do physical labor for at least a few years—yes, multiple—when you were young. Seriously. I can’t believe I need to say this. And it wasn’t shameful. It was the only option. You couldn’t go online and start a business or crowdfund or do Onlyfans. So if your parents weren’t loaded and you didn’t want to be an actual stripper, you had to start at zero, with likely a minimum-wage job. Some of the most accomplished adults I know started their career in a polyester clip-on bowtie and baseball cap, and that was AFTER college.

Same with not owning a car in your 20s. Not having a car didn’t make you a loser. It meant your parents couldn’t afford an extra car; big deal. It was a normal part of being young. Just like child abuse. Which we used to think was the worst thing to do to a kid, but now I wonder.

Time is getting strange. It was a dizzyingly short time ago that I was a sprout myself, and screaming at your kids till your voice gave out was the norm. I’m still in my 40s, technically, but it feels like the plague years brought a massive shift in the way people come out broken in post-adolescence.

The idea that nearly everyone comes from a family where adults gloried in “dysfunctional” (what a fine euphemism!) behavior with impunity, in other words, seemed normal for centuries. Everyone’s in the same boat!

Then in the 1990s and 2000s: Hey, maybe psychiatry can help. My mom says that stuff is for “rich bitches,” but that sounds like another of her excuses… hm, so you can get better someday? Cool! We need to end child abuse, tho… oh, boy, man, won’t people turn out groovy once we turn them on to permissive parenting?

Then I venture onto TikTok and find you, the fresh new voice of the oppressed but plucky tidal wave of youth, and you claim to have been abused because your parents’ expectations of your future success were so high that they had the gall to ask what you were buying with their credit card.

Is that what happens when you end child abuse?! The children are never happy? (And where did she find the glycerin tears, anyway?)

My gramps (foreground), who beat the Nazis so you can never suffer and call him a Nazi.

Yeah—I can make all the surreally bitter jokes about self-pitying spoiled brats I want. And sure—you’re going to say I’m just bitter because I had a terrible childhood while other people were stroked and coddled and told their slightest suffering is the most scandalous thing in the world and they should immediately sue if they ever fail to receive every drop of the respect they feel is their due, whilst still insisting they are particular victims of fate—well, DUH. And? Would YOU like you?

Especially when the whining pitches all the way up to what teh kids call “stolen valor.”

But it’s also interesting. For one thing, shouldn’t they be happier?

Oyes, we’ve a great many things that still/again suck, and there are many young people whom I do NOT envy. For many reasons, including economic ones; the future is always uncertain and people always feel their times are especially bad, but c’mon, nukes and COVID.

But those unenviable, decent young people ain’t the ones claiming that Grubhub is a human right.

Despite a certain amount of existential/morbid angst—despite the volumes of extreme slapstick that have befallen me in the past decade (I’ve been called “dramatic”by individuals—reminiscent of the armchair psychiatrists who call everyone who’s interesting a “narcissist”— who seem envious of my collection of such surreal outliers as that time I contracted typhus and went blind for four weeks while willy-nilly fleeing my city because the cops seemed to have no interest in making a timely arrest of that guy broke into my apartment and graped me, and that was just the first half of Act II; if you’re the kind of asshole who says you make your own luck, well, good luck)—and despite whatever is skewed with my hambrain under the ridiculous baklava of trauma, I seem to be, generally speaking…

… happier than these people.

Hey now, I’m not saying I’m a Buddhist monk. I wonder, still, what percentage of video recorded in 2024 so far features girls with no scars in hundreds of dollars’ worth of grooming apparatus, crying.

My life reads like the backstory of an extra from Barry Lyndon, and I actually was discriminated against for being a woman (largely by women, tee hee), but I express less desperate distress than a 20-year-old who went straight from well-loved bebe digital native to well-paid champagne socialist without a blip in the girlboss machinery.

Who knew? While people spent centuries generously innovating, bound to remove all suffering from future generations’ lives, doggedly planting trees whose shade they would never yadda da da—there was the hedonic treadmill, slyly smiling in the corner, knowing we would shake the dust off it all too thoroughly and soon.

I mean, that’s kind of a rhetorical question, “who knew?”—come on, Sterzinger, there were plenty of Cassandras and court eunuchs who knew that people become monsters when their lives are too easy. Not to mention that slave who got his eye punched out with a stylus by Marcus Aurelius, and he was supposed to be one of the cool emperors. Wasn’t the electric toothbrush a clear enough warning sign? But being a Cassandra is overrated; it’s nothing but tearing out your hair.

Now we know: There is a line. There’s a civilizational line where you stop being traumatized and ruined by childhood adversity, and start being hollowed out instead by your lack of suffering, empathy, or an understanding of the struggle you will, eventually, face.

And it hits them hard, all at once in their 20s or 30s—one of those issue on the news, about which they have been importantly opining since they learned to type, ends up causing a loss to them, perhaps even financially, and now they’re the most politically radical assholes because hey, I'M not supposed to suffer, ever!

I don’t want to believe that this is the reason for adult human beings in 2024 claiming that real socialism hasn’t been tried yet, the right way, which is taking away money from that guy I hate. But can you come up with a more flattering reason?

I’ve been saying the Internet is going to cause World War III. And, yeah, that might be the mechanism. But you want to talk root causes? We weren’t ready for own our brattiness. Our disgusting ingratitude. I’m certainly not innocent, even if I try to be slightly more self-aware than the average brat smirks to get away with. I’m reluctant to ever claim the moral high ground, because I’ve seen this turn people into monsters on a dime.

But it’s something we need to start thinking about. What’s scarier than winter coming? The winter of your own unnecessary discontent that never ends. Like robots taking our jobs, it’s a weird, nightmarish problem. Like the horror-puzzle of human stupidity, we don’t know how to approach it.

But ignoring a thing till it eats us has, as a method, an un-good track record.

If you finally get bored of being angry—if you can’t quite name the them who are keeping you down, but you feel there’s something wrong—try entertaining the idea that metacognition is a good thing to practice, and it is possible that you are not particularly oppressed.

If it makes you feel better, it isn’t your fault. Spoiling is apparently abuse, because even if it pleases you, it cripples you in the end. It probably isn’t fair. But like those of us who were traditionally mind-fucked, only you can change.

But I fear worse things will happen first.