SNEAKO - The Reason EVERYBODY is So Sensitive Today

00:00:00.000 The fragile millennial epidemic.

00:00:02.140 In his piece, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt outlines why millennials today 0.99

00:00:08.020 are so fragile and lacking resilience in life and in relationships, in university courses in the

00:00:15.020 workplace, and what has led to this overwhelming push to be protected from anything difficult or

00:00:20.240 uncomfortable or offensive. And he calls it the flight to safety. Tragically unprepared.

00:00:25.900 A lot of school really perpetuates a lot of this bot shit. They all make you tell the right 0.99

00:00:31.400 opinions. They all have safe spaces. Every school is left leaning. Every school perpetuates this woke

00:00:36.780 idea. For life and relationships. Would you comment on that? Well, I think it's good to take a step

00:00:44.220 back from that and think about it in the broadest possible terms. There is definitely an epidemic of

00:00:51.160 overprotective parenting. But it's useful to ask why. And my suspicions are is that this is driven by

00:00:57.740 very fundamental biological and cultural phenomena that aren't generally considered in relationship to

00:01:03.800 this issue. We don't have very many children. We don't have 12, you know, six of whom die.

00:01:11.640 We have one or two. And that makes them very precious, right? We're special, unwilling to take risks with

00:01:21.160 them. And no wonder. And then we also have the much later in life. And so like, if you have a kid when

00:01:27.860 you're 18, you're still a kid, you know, you're gonna go out and have your life, right? Because you're so

00:01:34.200 well, you're in the height of your exploratory, you're in the height of the exploratory part of

00:01:41.180 your life. You're not going to overprotect your kid because you're still a kid. But if you're 40

00:01:47.940 and you have one child, it's like all your eggs are in one basket. And the probability that you're

00:01:53.860 going to take undue risks with that precious person is very, very low. Now, obviously, there's some

00:01:59.340 advantages to that because great, you devote resources to your child, you know, and foster their

00:02:04.060 development. But the downside is that you have every motivation to hover. And maybe you're also

00:02:10.600 extraordinarily desperate as a mother to maintain that bond with your child because you've struggled

00:02:17.580 so long to achieve it. It's highly, highly valuable. You can't take a risk. Well, so I want to have four

00:02:24.100 kids. Young Don said he wants to have five. Maybe that's why I think the strongest people do come

00:02:30.820 in big litters. Because when you get the runts, you could just, you know, donate them to someone

00:02:35.380 else. So these, so we might say, well, perhaps overprotective parenting is a secondary and

00:02:40.700 unintended consequence of the birth control pill and the fact that people now have children later

00:02:45.180 in life. Could easily be. You know, if you have six kids, it's like, what are you going to do?

00:02:49.580 Helicopter parent them? It's like, no, you're so tired, you can't even get off the couch if you have

00:02:54.740 six kids. And they're, they outnumber you, right? They're raising each other. They're competing and

00:02:59.680 they're taking each other down a peg. They're not, there's no overprotection there. But with a,

00:03:04.800 with a single child landscape or dual child landscape, mostly a single child landscape, then

00:03:10.860 you're going to overprotect. And then that ethos starts to permeate the schools and it starts to

00:03:16.520 permeate the higher education institutions as those children mature. And then that all reinforces it.

00:03:22.980 It's not good. It's not obvious what to do about it either, because if it is driven by demographics 0.62

00:03:27.780 in that, in that sense, it's a much more intractable problem than we think. So I did some of that in

00:03:33.540 12 rules for life. You know, I said, look, you, what you have to understand is that you're a danger

00:03:37.640 to your children, no matter what, right? You can let them go out in the world and be hurt

00:03:43.120 or you can overprotect them and hurt them that way. So here's your choice. Can make over,

00:03:49.740 being an overprotective parent is actually, can be more detrimental than being an absent parent.

00:03:57.140 Loving your kid too much hurts them. Giving them too much love, telling them they're special too

00:04:01.540 much. You can always tell. I always knew when I was a kid, ah, your parents have never said no to you.

00:04:07.700 Those kids in the grocery store, throwing huge tantrums, usually white people for the most part. 1.00

00:04:14.140 Stupid bitch Karen, bring me a, I want a Gatorade. And I'd be like hanging out at my friend's house 1.00

00:04:20.340 playing Call of Duty. Oh my God. Jennifer, get me fucking Doritos, bitch mom. Whoa, holy shit. 1.00

00:04:27.720 Okay, sweet little Timmy, of course. I'm sorry, here. That kid's going to grow up to be an asshole. 0.99

00:04:33.220 Make your children competent and courageous, or you can make them safe. But you can't make them safe 1.00

00:04:39.660 because life isn't safe. So if you sacrifice their courage and competence on the altar of safety,

00:04:45.060 then you disarm them completely. And all they can do is pray to be protected.

00:04:50.500 So in the very act of trying to do the right thing by them, although often with a selfish motive,

00:04:56.660 often with a selfish motive, we strip away the tools and the equipment, the understanding they really

00:05:05.520 need to make life work. No, that's the, that's the Oedipal mother, right? The dark mother. And the dark 0.86

00:05:13.580 mother is the person, she's the witch in Hensel and Gretel. Gingerbread house, lost children, too good

00:05:21.100 to be true. It's like a house of candy. Wow. Who could want anything better? What lives inside the

00:05:27.080 house of candy? The witch that wants to fatten you up and eat you. Right. A cautionary tale about 0.88

00:05:34.140 overprotective parents, overprotective mothers, about the overprotective feminine. It's like the 1.00

00:05:40.680 psychoanalysts, they were so smart. You got to abandon your kid a little bit. You got to let

00:05:45.080 him cry it out. Leave him alone one day. Let him figure it out. Don't get a babysitter. Just leave

00:05:49.660 him. Let him fuck up and like put their hand on the stove. Let him figure it out. Said the good 1.00

00:05:54.000 mother necessarily fails. That's such a brilliant phrase. It's like you can't, as you, as your child

00:06:01.640 matures. You have to fail more and more as a mother, right? Until by the time you're 30,

00:06:07.860 your child's 30, let's say 25 for that matter, you're not their mother anymore. I mean, obviously

00:06:14.160 you are, but the relationship has hit something like quasi-peer status. Not entirely, obviously,

00:06:19.700 but the child's independent, able to stand up on their own. They even say like when you get to 12

00:06:23.500 years old that you even stop listening to your parents and the only people that you really start

00:06:26.540 listening to are your peers, that there's really not much raising you can do past the age of like

00:06:31.000 right around puberty. And take on the world. So now we see this thing where the university

00:06:35.320 student runs into some difficulties with study or whatever and brings their parents in to talk

00:06:39.900 to the faculty. Yeah, or they go off in color. I mean, when I went to Queen's University a week ago

00:06:45.760 and there was a lot of noise and horror around that, you know, that the people who were decrying my visit

00:06:52.620 set up coloring book stations so that people could be comforted because, you know, the evil

00:06:57.160 professor was coming to talk. It's like, and you know, as a clinician. We had that at my school

00:07:01.840 and high school and in college, we had therapy dogs. When Trump won, they brought in dogs so that

00:07:08.960 people, the kids could pet the dog and feel better. There were literally, like they skipped class so that

00:07:14.660 the whole class could go around and pet the dog. Specific, and they called it therapy. It's a fucking dog

00:07:21.360 and they turned it into a mental health issue. And Haidt knows this as well. All the clinicians 1.00

00:07:27.040 worth their salt know this. The worst thing you can do for someone who's anxious is overprotect them.

00:07:34.800 Because you don't teach them how to learn. They just get to be anxious and trigger warning

00:07:38.900 their whole life. Makes them worse. The clinical literature on that is crystal clear. What you do

00:07:44.120 for people who are hyper anxious is gradually expose them with their voluntary consent to increase

00:07:51.360 increasingly threatening situations. That cures them. It's exactly the opposite of what all the

00:07:55.720 mental health professionals. So, and I've used that term extraordinarily lightly, are trying to do to

00:08:01.600 produce safe spaces on the university campus. Like if a safe space. And my school was on every single

00:08:08.220 door. They had a rainbow triangle where you could, you could go skip class. If you were like a soft boy

00:08:13.200 or a girl, you could be like, I'm not feeling safe. And then you just get to sit there and be mental

00:08:17.480 health and skip class. And then be like, what the fuck? If I'm in there, they didn't take it 1.00

00:08:21.100 seriously. But if you were a pussy, they did take it seriously. If a space needs to be, but I'm a 1.00

00:08:25.660 stoic strong man. Nah, but they never took it. I tried to do it sometimes and they just laughed it

00:08:29.400 off because they knew that I was bullshitting. But if I would like, I don't feel safe. You could

00:08:34.440 really like get past the test. I know people who skipped exams because they cried about fucking 0.99

00:08:39.100 abortion, Trump, something. It's so easy. You could be a victim and they'll always validate it now. 1.00

00:08:45.640 It's defined as safe. You can be sure that's the one thing it is not.

00:08:52.460 Jordan, this has been fascinating. Let me pay you a compliment. In some ways, I think the most

00:08:57.540 valuable thing you can do for us is to model the courage to speak your mind. You do it forcefully.

00:09:05.780 And that's why they hate him. That's why he goes to schools and they set up coloring books.

00:09:09.820 Because when you speak the truth, you're not even supposed to handle the truth anymore. There's

00:09:14.440 protection for everything. In the West, at least.

00:09:19.100 If it hurts your feelings, don't listen.

00:09:21.260 You do it courageously. You do it compassionately. Because the reality is you only have to spend a bit

00:09:28.040 of time with you to realize that you actually care, especially about our young people and what

00:09:33.600 they're experiencing. And especially for our young men, because we know boys model themselves

00:09:40.040 on men who they respect.

00:09:45.820 You're doing a great job of modeling courage in the face of fire.

00:09:49.160 Well, there's something I'd like to say, maybe in closing, about courage. People say that to me,

00:09:53.760 and I don't think it's exactly right.

00:09:56.100 There's a line in the Old Testament, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

00:10:00.800 And I think it's more like that. It's not that I'm courageous. It's that I'm afraid of the right

00:10:04.780 things. So when I made my videos, it wasn't like that didn't make me nervous. But I was less nervous

00:10:12.580 about going back to bed and not saying what I had to say than I was about making the videos.

00:10:16.620 Because I know where this is going. I don't want to go there. And so it's not so much courage. It's that

00:10:24.120 it's a matter of... It's less risky to say something than to remain silent when you know

00:10:33.420 there's something to be said. I know that to be the case. And so lots of times in life, it's like

00:10:38.680 there's no pathway forward that's going to shield you from risk. You get to pick this risk,

00:10:43.200 or you get to pick this risk. And I think I picked the lesser risk. And that might be wise,

00:10:48.320 but I'm not so sure it's courageous. Good guy. And they want him to fail. He's too confident.

00:10:56.200 I kind of want him to fail.

SNEAKO - July 18, 2022

The Reason EVERYBODY is So Sensitive Today

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