Why Young People Are Increasingly Choosing Victimhood

I’ve been thinking a lot about why today’s young people are so easily “triggered” by everything.  As with all things, there are likely countless subtle scenarios for this, but a few overarching reasons seem to be the meat and potatoes which predominantly feed this phenomenon.

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Every generation of parents wants their children to have better lives than they did.  Parents are wired to be nurturing, protective and often limit their kids’ exposure to life’s difficulties using whatever updated tools are at hand.  

As technology and communications have exploded during the last generation, the requirements of humans have evolved (or devolved, depending on your perspective) at an unnatural rate.  This has led to many children being unaware of the human efforts required to create and maintain our environments.

Real life can be hard at times.  There are consequences for our mistakes.  Contemporary youth have been trained to circumvent this reality, accessing whatever they need with the touch of a button.  Their search for accomplishment, information, and meaning is no longer achieved through the trial and error which defined humans throughout our history.  

Rather, it is now through absorbing the opinions of others online and streamlining their own to fit a narrative.  When they don’t like what they read or hear, they just give it a thumbs-down and move on to an opinion with which they agree.  

This is not reality.  Our society was not built by a mass population holding hands and singing Kumbaya in perfect harmony.  It was achieved by people who learned to get past their differences to accomplish mutually beneficial things.  

They got past those differences through in-person exposure, where one must temper one’s criticisms according to the level of resistance one is willing to endure.  This practice results in reason and flexibility since avoidance of perpetual (and sometimes physical) battles can only be achieved through discussion and compromise.     

The modern fixation on remote and/or virtual contact has changed that dynamic.  We have created a bubble generation, sealed off from the sometimes harsh realities of actual life.  Throughout our history, developmental years were always spent learning about life’s obstacles and how to best navigate them.  

People developed their own styles - some learned to walk around such obstacles, some leaped over them, some crashed through them, and some avoided them altogether.  Regardless of their style, they all learned how to circumnavigate the issues that life presented.

Today’s youth are having a harder time separating reality from fantasy.  Their technological bubbles have insulated them from the challenges of human existence, so they haven’t developed the tools to deal with them.  When we decreased their exposure to reality while simultaneously increasing their exposure to fantasy, we removed their ability to function in a disparate society.  

Young people learned to be thin-skinned and precious because they’ve never been confronted with a need to compromise.  Rather than address a disagreement, they hide from it and throw stones from afar.  Then, when they’ve cherry-picked enough like-minded individuals, they stand on soapboxes to denigrate that with which they don’t agree.  This accomplishes… absolutely nothing.

Fantasy worlds have always existed for children who, as they matured, learned to compartmentalize them as entertainment apart from real-world responsibilities.  Our current adolescents and young adults remain stuck in the petty squabbles of elementary school.  They address problems by finger-pointing, and name-calling, and avoid the hard work of legitimate conflict resolution.  

They’re often incapable of direct human interaction, so they resort to labeling alternate viewpoints as triggering.  This label attempts to redirect attention toward the source of their dismay, so they don’t have to confront it head-on in order to resolve it.

Human beings have always experienced hurt feelings.  Not only is this inescapable, but it’s also necessary.  It helps to mold us into who we are and teaches us how to overcome discomfort.  We are losing that skill - “Someone called me fat yesterday, so I’m too distraught to go to school today.  I’ll just stay home and comfort eat, and it’s not my fault, it’s theirs.”  

This is not to say that meanness and intolerance should be acceptable, but that today’s youths have lost their sense of personal accountability and their ability to prevail.  They exist in a perpetual state of victimhood, which is used as an excuse for their failures. 

They accept empty existences devoid of societal contribution because someone else is always to blame.  They haven’t been ingrained with “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”, so they have no ability to ignore the nonsense and strive to achieve despite any of it.

Triggering was once used to describe a post-traumatic reaction from exposure to a legitimately traumatic event.  Reminders of such events as extreme violence, sexual assault, severe accidents, etc. would topple the emotions of the person recalling them, thereby “triggering” post-traumatic stress as they relived those experiences.  Nowadays, anything considered marginally offensive is attacked as triggering.

Past generations learned how to overcome due to necessity.  Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps wasn’t just a convenience, it was often life or death.  Even putting aside the majority of human existence when mere survival was difficult and often the only priority, people from the past century experienced this as well.  They lived through wars, disease, and economic depression.  Travel and communication were complicated and slow.  

Those who spent their time complaining and being offended went hungry because nothing was handed to them.  Only the strong survived, and if you didn’t rise above your perceived oppression, it was you who suffered for it.  Today’s youth has been sheltered from most of that, growing up in a world without such extreme challenges.

Once we started over-protecting rather than simply protecting, we deprived our children of those challenges which help them grow up.  They inferred from this that there would always be someone else to take care of anything they don’t want to do, so there was no point in bothering to learn how to do those things themselves.  

Kids filled the void of missing activity with fantasy, and immersed themselves to the detriment of confronting life, growing thicker skin, and learning how to not feel sorry for themselves.  They can’t comprehend the responsibilities required for adult success, because they’ve been wrapped in plastic to protect their delicate sensibilities.  In their bubble worlds, everything takes care of itself, and no one bad can get in. 

They’re all in for a rude awakening because none of that is real.  The sad part is, we’ll never be rid of the antagonists of the world however much we cry about it.  No amount of being triggered is going to change that, and the failure to come to terms with that fact is depriving our bubble generation of the liberation and freedom that comes with learning to let things roll off your shoulders.  Allowing yourself to be easily triggered is choosing victimhood, and that is truly no way to live.   

Zephareth Ledbetter is the author of “A White Man’s Perspectives on Race and Racism”, available as an ebook at smashwords.com/books/view/1184004, and can be reached on Facebook and Twitter