toughening up the buttercups
it is not the people who are sick, it's the society
when i was a child, we had an expression:
“toughen up, buttercup.”
such sentiments seem out of keeping with “modern” ideas of childhood and child rearing and even adulthood, but i suspect that this is the source of serious problems and not the pathway past them.
when i was a gatito “so why don’t you cry about it?” was a common retort to the whiny kid, the complainer, the mewling malcontent. was it nice? perhaps not. was it kind? well not precisely. but was it needed? i would argue yes. was it vital to raising real and competent humans? yes, very probably. and is it not the unkindest cut of all to allow our progeny to sidestep the struggles that imbue strength and grow up into sissified wussballs? well yes, i suspect it really, truly is.
and many are starting to notice. and i think perhaps its time we all did.
so let’s be clear, i’m not saying there is no such thing as mental illness or that some people and especially some children may require more than typical levels of help. of course there are.
but the idea that this issue is exploding and increasingly becoming the norm and that somehow wide swathes or even majorities of the population require pharmaceutical intervention in their mental states is one that i think is deeply dangerous.
37 million americans take anti-depressants.
who knows how many are taking anti anxiety drugs and adderall and who knows what else.
feel bad? not your fault! it’s a disease. here, take a pill!
(never mind that these treatments do not, on balance, actually work)
this bizarre modern fixation upon the idea that all difficulties are pathologies and that no one ever had a hard time or found life confusing or adolescence disorienting before and that everyone needs to be medicated has become a full blown mental illness of its own.
it’s not the people who are sick.
it’s a severe societal problem and likely a symptom of a society that’s broken.
a lot of this is a normal reaction to abnormal situations and deprivations.
and it’s time we start looking at taking another path.
if you want to try a fun experiment, try this:
the next time you are in a heated discussion with someone who is attacking or complaining, pretend you are 8 years old and respond to them with “so why don’t you cry about it?” in your best childhood singsong taunty tones.
see what happens.
betcha dollars to donuts they pause for a second, then literally explode in uncontrolled fury and indignation.
adults simply cannot handle it.
kids can, always have. it’s a big part of growing up. but adults, no way.
and this is deeply telling. it’s why well meaning adults are denying their children the ability to grow up. there is a pronounced human tendency to remember the past ever more fondly as time goes by. it seems more idyllic, happier, less hard. and so parents see their children struggle and say “it didn’t used to be so hard, i should protect them.” but it was that hard, memory is just faulty. it just doesn’t seem hard now because you grew strong. even the parents that do remember it as hard do not want that for their kids. “you should have it easier than i did!”
but what if that’s a trap?
what if half the trick of being a parent is not to obsessively partake of every part of childhood to render it “safe”? what if parents simply should not see how much of the sausage of growing up is made because they lack the stomach for it?
consider an analogy:
you were a d1 athlete in college. you worked hard, trained hard, sweat, struggled, strained, and strived. you did punishing weight room workouts until you threw up. you did sprints until your legs would not carry you. and you achieved. you grew into an athlete. well what if growing up is like that? what if it’s supposed to be hard? what if it HAS to be hard? no one would try to keep their aspiring athlete child from these same regimens of achievement because “i don’t want you hurting on the squat rack like i was.”
do we really think that growing up into a self-sufficient self-governing human capable of being high function and happy in a civilization of peers is any different?
it’s not some innate ability, it’s a learned skill.
i delved deeply into this in the piece linked below about how benign neglect and being left alone to rough and tumble (and even dangerous) free play is the basis for civilization. it’s maybe my favorite thing i have written.
the upshot is that childhood and life are supposed to have pointy parts, sharp edges, and difficulties. it’s where the learning takes place.
“they are neglecting neglect and that is raising weak, authority dependent children.”
these are the micro societies in which humans practice being civilized. from the anarchy of childhood emerges societal order as we grow and get better at planning and the implementation of our ideas.
but to gain this skillset, we must be free to scrawl our own designs upon the world. we must face the difficulty of doing so, the responsibility for failure, the lessons of losing, and the triumphs of getting stuff right.
that is the most important lesson in all of growing up. not piano or soccer or interpretive headstand watercolor painting and certainly not indoctrination into the grievance cults of wokedom:
what must be learned is how to become self-governing.
this does not stop in adulthood. the risks just go up.
if you cannot govern yourself, someone else is going to come along and do it for you, good and hard, for he who adjudicates grievance may easily rule the plaintiffs and demand ever more baroque and debased prostrations to whatever is passing for “authority.”
struggle, like time in the weight room, serves a purpose. and removing it, no matter how well meaning your intentions, constitutes harm, not help.
this analogy seems endlessly suitable:
people do not need more pharmaceutical intervention or piles of predatory struggle session therapy/re-education regimens.
they need to strive.
and calling every hardship “disease and pathology” stops this. it’s a lazy answer. it’s the replacing of the weight room and the sprint circuit with cheetos and a couch.
then you wonder why you cannot make the team.
and get sad.
so you get more cheetos.
see where that leads?
this does not need to be that hard.
it’s hardly exotic ideas, we’ve managed this for 1000’s of years.
people don’t need more supervision and more bumpers in more gutters of more bowling alleys.
they just need fellowship, human contact, and networks of friends and colleagues with whom they can express themselves and find commonality.
this is the part of society we seem hell bent on breaking.
instead we push alienation, aggrievement, and suspicion.
we push ideas of fragility, not resilience.
we push ideas of structural hate and unbridgeable difference.
we turn a melting pot into a jar of lonely bugs shaken until they fight then medicated until they stop.
that's not the path to any future you want to inhabit
this is not civilization, it’s barbarism.
this is not care, it’s lenny crushing bunnies he loves.
this isn't that hard guys.
we're just breaking the basic mechanisms that generate civilization, community, and well being.
“oh, sorry it’s hard, but it’s not your fault it’s a disease and here’s the pill for it” is societal strychnine. i mean, they literally wrote dystopian sci-fi about it.
recovery from this means giving up this racket of “everything should be easy.”
it’s time tested and happens all by itself if you stop subverting it.
it is not we who are sick, it is the society. having bad reactions to it is a sign not of illness but that we are well.
you SHOULD hate this. it’s divisive and alienating and stunting. it’s devolution into degenerate responses and reactions. only the sissified wussball or the crybully may thrive in these tainted soils by wailing ever more plaintively for redress, remuneration, and alleviation of pain or cheering on the depredations of those who do.
that is how a society dies.
so let’s not go that way.
instead, let’s toughen up buttercups.
all of us.
no more wild oversensitivity and victim status cultivation.
no more giving into it.
maybe more people DO need to cry about it.
no more pretending to be sick to avoid the painful realization that the breakage of our society has become a malady.
it is not kindness to deprive people of the travails that will lead them to self-sufficiency.
it’s growth inhibitors, maturity blockers.
and clearly, this is not working.
all we have to do is stop describing any struggle as disease and discord and let humans go be humans to struggle and strive and fail and succeed but most of all to grow and grow confident and self-sufficient.
and we will once more begin to thrive.
or did you have something better to do?
I wish I could like this 1,000 times. I work in education and have observed this for years. Well-intentioned (and some less so) people never want to see kids struggle. Medication is a “quick fix” that everyone relies on. Normal behavior is made into a diagnosis to avoid dealing with it. And IEPs are relied upon to place the burden of making things easier for kids on adults rather than teaching the children how to overcome their struggles themselves. It absolutely has created many of the problems we see in young people today.
In praise of lawn darts is my most favorite el gato too and I link it instead of saying cry about it!! <3