On the other side of that argument, we have to consider raising that child from the perspective of a loving and concerned parent who understands that happiness will ultimately fulfill a child more than being productive and that this happiness will transfer over into their adult lives much smoother than simple productivity, specifically that feeling of uniqueness that so often deserts us as we get older. The thing about that feeling some children get is that it comes from the fact that as children, they are far above their peers. They may be in elementary school and read at the level of a high-schooler, or even read at college level. However, the farther you go in life while just accepting that skill as constant and doing nothing to actually improve it further, the more your peers—many of which do study and are constantly improving their skills to keep pace with everyone else—catch up to you. Soon enough, everyone is reading at the high school or college level, and you’re now an average example of a student. You cease to be the poster child of academic success and you fall from the top rank. This feeling of mediocrity fuels a strange shift in perception of self for children: What used to be a child with a superiority complex is now a child with a rather severe inferiority complex. Those two opposite conditions don’t necessarily cancel out, and sometimes begin to simply coexist inside this adolescent who somehow expects to be perfect and everything immediately when they pick it up, and also thinks dangerously lowly of themselves. This strange dichotomy between grandeur and self-loathing often comes together to form some of the thinking traps we see often, and which have been discussed in previous chapters.
There are other ways, of course, that the way a parent raises their offspring can heavily influence the way that child acts as they grow up and become an independent adult. Sometimes you see parents who act in a way completely contradictory to that harsh and strict parent, a parent who is not only constantly doting on their child, but who is also constantly in the act of defending their child from any kind of threat that comes their way. While this defensive nature can come in handy when the child is actually solely a victim and/or in danger, if often instead takes the form of not only that righteous kind of situation, but also cases in which the child is the perpetrator of violence, or otherwise to blame for the punishment they would receive without the parents’ intervention. Refusing to allow your child to experience the world in a way that is harsh enough to let them learn from their mistakes effectively opens up a world of possibilities for the kind of dysfunction that can become their newest habit thereafter. For instance, many children who are let off the hook for things they actually did wrong because their parents intervened, now have the connection in their heads made that they can get away with much more than they had originally thought, without punishment, because their parent or guardian allowed them to originally. Of course, this can be negated with parental intervention, but the longer a child has that connection made and unchecked in their brain, the harder that habit is to derail. It allows the child to act entirely as they please with little to no consequence for their action. They become devious and manipulative, and can even become violent in some cases. This is, however, most definitely not at the fault of the child, not entirely at least—no, to place blame we must look to the parent in this case, who allowed their child to do whatever they desired without ramifications for their actions. The parent who inadvertently gave their child a god complex, allowing them then to wreak havoc whenever they so desire because they know for a fact that absolutely nothing will happen to them, no matter what they do or what anyone else says. This kind of upbringing can severely damage that child when they become an adult, both in the sense of their social capabilities and their actual productivity. When you feel as though no matter what you do, your actions will be either ignored or automatically forgiven, you lose a certain sense of personal justice that most all other people foster and grow as they get older. Not only that, but this justice being destroyed can have heavy effects in the long run of a child’s life. Not only can they quickly devolve into a spiteful person capable of great malicious acts, but they could also turn into an adult who is not at all functional the way that we consider it. Although they seem to function properly, they fail to have a lot of the intrinsic understanding of social groups that “normal” children do. Ironically, when a parent tries to overly socialize their child by allowing them to do essentially whatever they want, they simultaneously are not only setting them up for failure, but they are setting them down the path to being socially inept, awkward children borderline incapable of interacting and bonding with people who would normally be their ideal peers.
It’s strange how this all goes back to how selfish a parent can be with their child. Although there are, of course, the “good” parents, as we consider them, who would essentially do anything for their child to be happy while maintaining a social hierarchy and a sense of consequence to them. Although there are many different, and often conflicting, views of what makes an ideal parent, most people agree that a loving, yet strict home is best for most children. These guardians aren’t so strict that they could be viewed as a stereotypical “Drill Sergeant” parent, or so lax and doting that they could be considered helicopter parents, but they usually find their space somewhere in the center of those two extremes. These parents are much more likely to be able to make “good” and “normal” children, who function just fine and, without any other interfering factors, are more than able to thrive within the majority in our world. Then, on the other side of that spectrum entirely, you have what we consider to be “bad” parents, who lack the restraint or the motivation to make themselves treat their children as people instead of items for their enjoyment or as trophy cases for their pride. Like ideal parents, what we consider as dysfunctional parents come in many different forms, from too lax to not lax enough. It should be kept in mind that in these kinds of cases, this sort of bad parenting causes “bad children”, but—a bit like how we think of bad owners, not bad pets—the dysfunction of the child almost universally rests with the parent, who failed their “job” as a parent to keep their child safe and as happy as possible, environment allowing.
There are, of course, many ways to go wrong, and almost all of them are things that are controllable, although some of them are not. There are some things in our lives that we can simply never hope to control. There are things that we can try desperately to avoid, to swerve on the road of our lives to avoid crossing paths with some unsightly event, but sometimes it just can’t be helped. Things like this happen, and it’s better to be ready for it than to be ready to abandon ship whenever you hit a bump in the road. That sentiment, actually, brings us to the other large factor of negative thinking—not just how we’re raised as children in our homes, but the environment we interact with our peers in. In part, this is in reference to the public education system, but it could also be taken to refer to the much broader scale of the always changing society of today.
Simply put, the kind of climate that generation after generation grows up in as preteens and young adults changes and varies as different generations move through the stages of life. From the laxer and more carefree environment that 80s and 90s kids, namely what is referred to as “Gen X” --which is possibly the coolest name possible for a bunch of 30-somethings—to the more modern social climate that has encompassed children, particularly in the US, with more tense news than ever. As the line between fear mongering and plainly warning become more and more blurry, how children react and take in potentially concerning information also changes as their sensitization changes. While Gen Y, or “millennials”, which is the generation who is now mostly in their 20s, has been relatively normal with this rapidly changing society, many scientists who have conducted studies on the mental states of young people agree that the stress, depression, and anxiety levels rise year after year after year, now at the equivalent of an institutionalized patient in the 1960s. With this in mind, we look now toward the generation who is now in high school and higher education, Generation Z. Gen Z, as we know it, is
likely the most stressed out, sleep deprived, anxious generation yet, and the one that comes after it is likely to continue that trend. So; what went wrong in the lives of so many to make this such a drastic change, such an extreme plummet in the mental state of our last frontier—our student?
The answer, as many would expect, comes straight from the public education system. With a relatively new push to be successful, more kids are pushing themselves in a curriculum which gets a little harder every year, is working hard to join extracurricular activities that take up even more of their time just so they can get into the college they think will help them to achieve that dream, of being able to live a fulfilling and happy life. Many students have the idea drilled into them that if they work hard enough, they will never suffer in life as much as those who don’t work as hard as them. This simply isn’t true, as most students learn very quickly. In fact, the opposite is true—those students who push themselves are often the ones who end up suffering more when they move on to college, when even more work is piled onto them and they’re now faced with the stresses of living without parental supervision or the comfort of their loved ones right in front of them. Instead, they now have to face the world totally alone; at least, that’s how it seems and how it feels to a lot of students today.
When you begin to feel alone, you feel lonely. Many students, especially college students who now have significantly less contact with their loved ones than they did when they lived at home, report that they feel much lonelier. With that loneliness comes negative thinking. Feeling isolated from your loved ones and from your friends, and feeling overwhelming pressure to succeed without seeing the true value in achieving a fulfilling career in life, can draw most all students, even the ones who were the most successful and the most determined of their peers earlier in life, down into a terrifying spiral of self-doubt and hate. That can spiral out of control very quickly and become a problem that those students may not quite recognize, or know how to fix if they do recognize it.
As it happens, for Gen Z especially, that kind of thinking was normalized, more or less. Whether it be for college or high school students, that way of thinking so little of yourself that it drove up your stress even more, as a strange circular and ineffective way of coping with that stress, spread like wildfire—especially with the help of a still relatively new factor in society for young people, social media. That social media can be a massive help to spread the gospel of other students that are relatable to young people who otherwise feel as if they have no one to connect with or reach out to. While social media is most definitely something of a saving grace, it can also be a crutch for many people, especially those students who are particularly susceptible to persuasion and manipulation, when their other choice is to be all alone. But frankly, not everyone on social media is a good influence or someone whose methods work for everyone, or anyone. While that much is obvious, it can still be a struggle, mentally and emotionally, for students to decide whether they would be alone, or feel connected in a group that is, at its core, unhealthy to all parties involved.
With the kind of thinking that becomes the secret destroyer for many young people being normalized, how can anyone ever hope to get better? Really, things aren’t as bleak as they may seem. In reality, while there is a considerable amount of young people, specifically those in Generation Z, who think this way, being self-deprecating for the sake of using humor as a kind of coping mechanism, there is another, even newer wave in the behavior of young people and teenagers which takes advantage of the influence well-known influencers on social media have on each other and on their audience: it’s the exact opposite of that self-deprecating talk which plagues the minds of so many young people. That way of thinking responsibly and being aggressively “wholesome” - offers a way and the social validation for young people how to follow those influencers on social media to reach out and actually get help. When before, the idea of suffering in silence for the dark aesthetic was alluring, and was the only aesthetic that was being encouraged and validated by those influencers, now those very same public figures are at the center of the conversation about how we deal with our stress, both the older and younger generations in the modern world. More specifically, tension builds in audiences of social media influencers, so many of them of purer heart feel the need to address that tension and address the very real mental health problem we have in schools, that are quickly infecting children and teenagers much more than the generations in the past. Now, the conversation is not only being handled by younger people on social media but is also being taken into consideration by older people, simply because that dangerous situation is becoming too loud, too obvious, to be ignored or pushed aside any longer. The mental health of youth and the negative thinking of that youth is now so loud and so unhealthy and concerning that, we all must come together as a society and as a world to put forth a collective effort toward helping those who are very much in need. Whether they are our children, our children’s friends or peers we feel are in danger of succumbing to their own terrible thoughts, we who represent the rest of the world are, in a way, personally responsible for those who cannot for whatever reason fend for themselves emotionally. Us, the parents and the guardians and the friends and the peers and the bosses, have to step up and care about each other, and defend and help those who don’t know how to help themselves—such as the law of any ecosystem, no matter how cutthroat; everyone inside of that ecosystem helps each other and they all profit off of each other's strengths and aid in each other's weaknesses.
So, as we move forward with that knowledge, I hope that it lends to you just a bit of perspective toward what kinds of things young people, and all people around the world, as facing inside their own heads. If you are not someone reading this to help yourself, read it so that you can understand how to help those around you, those you love and those you care about. You don’t need to be a victim of something to help other victims of something. It’s the camaraderie that comes with facing the world in all of its terrors that bonds people together and ensures a relationship in which all parties understand their responsibilities and protect each other from other things, or from themselves. Whether it means simply talking to that person or actively ensuring they get the help they may need, do your part in ensuring that those around you are taken care of. To deny others care and the knowledge that they are loved is to cruelly revoke the meaning of life from that person as well.
Chapter 8
Hanging in the Balance
If you’re personally someone who indulges themselves a lot in philosophy in some way or another, you’ve likely pondered the true importance of keeping things relatively balanced. As I said earlier in this book, it’s so incredibly important to express the balance you want in your life. Leaning one way or another toward an extreme will inevitably only lead to more despair of feeling unfulfilled. This is also why many people say that you can have too much of anything, really. It isn’t difficult to overload on something you like or enjoy, or feel like you need. While that refers to binge-eating, an addiction of some kind, or just is in reference to the attempt to be happy by going much too deep into something, a fascination or a hobby or something different entirely, the danger of too much or too little is likely on a much wider scale than you thought.
Often, we have no idea about the dangers of doing too much or too little of anything really. Usually, when we recognize a bad thing that we do habitually and want to stop as soon as we can, we try to stop all at once immediately, like quitting cold turkey when you used to smoke a pack a day. Not only is it had for you in the sense that it isn’t smart, it physically damaged you and your body. It has the capabilities to send your body and your mind into something like a state of shock, too confused by your contradicting behavior to do anything but continue to watch in abject horror as you swing back and forth from high to low, left to right, up to down, from extreme to extreme to extreme without any actual idea of your progress. We want to do this because it feels satisfying. We feel so
much more accomplished when we can say we quit faster and more intensely than our peers. Everything, even things that should be for our very own benefit, can quickly and easily turn into a competition between peers. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. When you want to stop doing something, make sure you can keep track of your progress—whether that means you journal the things you do to take your mind off of your unhealthy and negative thinking patterns, or if you join a group online or in person for people like you who can support and help you when you need support, it doesn’t matter in what format you find a support system, but it’s always good to have one. Vocalizing your progress and putting yourself out there is also really good when you want to quit something. Not only does it remove the compulsion to isolate yourself from everyone you care about, but it also convinces you to follow up on the promises you may have made to the camera and posted online in a rush of the moment, heat of passion. No matter what, take that competitive spirit and use it to your advantage. Challenge yourself every day and make sure you aren’t taking any prisoners. One of the many secrets to successfully kicking a bad habit, other than balance and making sure you have a good support system is having a consistent and aggressive attitude toward kicking that habit. The more you can detach the hate you have for yourself and instead pin it on that bad habit, the better off you will absolutely be in the long run.
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