Rumination is for cattle
This. This is what I keep talking about. Self self self – it’s a trap! Get out of it! There’s a big huge enormous world out there that’s not You: go out and explore it, and do what you can to improve it in some way. Look outward. Let your “personality” and your “identity” and your “true self” take care of themselves. No one is as interested in them as you are, so wriggle out of the trap and embrace the bigger world.
It’s way more than keeping busy and distracted, in my view, although it does of course do that. But you can be “distracted” by interests and activities that are of vast intrinsic value, so distraction is the least of their merits. Break out of the prison of self at all costs.
All true. But the outside world is scary! It contains catastrophic climate change, all sorts of environmental problems, and war. And Xi, Putin, and Trump. Is it any wonder some teens would rather turn inward?
No, it’s no wonder, it’s probably a necessary developmental stage yadda yadda – but it’s better to encourage them and teach them to look in the other direction as much as possible.
Yes, I agree absolutely. Just pointing out that the state of the world makes the task more difficult. Sorry if I am stating the obvious.
No no, you’re expanding on the point, which is good. Expanding on various points is pretty much all I do.
I didn’t mean the “yadda yadda” as impatience, just as an etcetera.
I recently wrote something for a friend’s blog about a poetry slam we went to – every single poem was about these oh-so-special young people’s internal feelings about themselves. I pointed out that this is the very last thing you want to write about if you want to a) express your uniqueness (everyone sounded exactly the same when talking about about their inner lives – how different they were from their peers, and how misunderstood they felt, and how uncomfortable they were about revealing their ‘true selves’ to the philistines) and b) connect to other people through art. If they really want to express their own worlds to others, and to create the kind of meaningful connection that art can create, they need to instead describe to us how they see and experience the world outside themselves. How often have we had the experience of interacting with art that expresses the way the artist experiences some aspect of the ‘real’ world, and finding our own perception of the same ‘real’ world changed, for the better, as a result?
Okay, thanks for clarifying. Online communication (not face to face) is tricky.
Almost makes me nostalgic for the days when all we had to worry about was immenent nuclear war….
This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I would also not be surprised to find that other forms of school-sponsored rumination have deleterious effects.
BTW, link to the study referred:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796723001560
guest, I’ve seen a lot of that in plays written by youngsters, too. I do write plays sometimes about what I feel…but I try to put it in context of the wider world, and make it a broader story. Their plays are little more than how mean the world (and especially Baby Boomers) are to them. Or they are glorying surrogacy, prostitution, and sexual orientations that are not heterosexual. Those are also often very inward turned, using other characters, for instance, the surrogate mother, as props in their own drama.
Harald – all I think on this subject is that you don’t comment nearly often enough!
I’ve been thinking about this a bit (again) recently as it’s come up as part of our companies proposed DEI. The thing about this idea of universal mental wellbeing introspection is that as a teen you’ve spent so much of your life in a state of learning and mental/emotional/experiential flux that there isn’t really a ‘self’ to do serious work on. Certainly not without well informed and careful external guidance. By the time you’re my age you’ve acquired so many barnacles the best hope you have is to chip a few off. Somewhere in your late 30s to late 40s I suspect there is a sweet spot where you can do some serious work shaping yourself -with at least initial external guidance to give you tools and perspective.
An overly intense focus on mental health as a universal thing in the company DEI is one of a couple of topics I’m pushing back on. Another is the idea that every difference (except sex!) has to be ‘appreciated and celebrated’. Yes, the draft policy listed gender and gender identity – no mention of sex despite that being a protected category under NZ Human Rights law.
This can’t be accidental, can it? All these guidelines, policies, initiatives and codes of conduct that list other characteristics but conveniently leave out sex are just too conveniently coincidental to be drafted in innocence. It’s like having alternative characteristics that these institutions can work towards celebrating, uplifting and defending lets them pretend to be progressive and justicy without having to level the playing field for women. Doing that would take more work and cost too much. Imagine the amount of effort the police would have to put in if misogyny was treated with the same degree of seriousness and dedication that have been lavished upon so-called “anti-trans hate crime”. Law enforcement would grind to a halt, as it became swamped with a deluge of hate crimes against women. So much easier to go after a few stickerers and limerick posters than it is to put a dent in domestic violence and rape. A lot less cost involved in adding preferred pronouns to nametags and e-mail signatures than restructuring payroll to insure that women are paid the same rate as men, or rooting out sexual harrassment. Better still, if women can be portrayed as privileged, oppressor Karens, then you’re perfectly justified in taking things away from them, as if you’re appropriating ill-gotten gains from slaveowners of yore, rather than taking away women’s recently won single-sex facilities, jobs, medals, awards, and safety. Patriarchal sexism gets taken off the table without ever having been dealt with. It’s not so much declaring victory and going home as SQUIRREL! With women no longer marginalized, victimized or downtrodden in any way whatsoever, you can focus your attention (with all the attendant publicity, press releases and photo ops) on the much smaller “gender diverse” part of your organization. The only misogyny that matters any more is “transmisogyny,” as men claiming to be women eagerly take up the novel and unaccustomed role of underdog vis a vis women. You can win your woke cookies, “smash the gender binary,” and fly the Pride Progress flag, without having to change much of anything in regards to pay packets, policy, or governance.
Robert Burton’s advice in The Anatomy of Melancholy was to see friends & find interesting things to do.
YNnB, I don’t think it is accidental. To be fair to my colleagues who ‘drafted’ this policy, they didn’t actually write it. They cribbed from examples supplied by an organisation called the Diversity Agenda which is a bunch of engineering and architecture firms I understand. Where they got the original templates or advice from I don’t know, but I think we could safely say it wasn’t a gender critical source. They’re all really nice people who desperately want to do a good thing – and be seen to do the good thing. They’re not conversant with the counter arguments and are frankly a bit naive about the whole thing. They’re responding defensively at my ‘Well, yes, but’ starting gambit.
Tim, I agree with that. There are times I just want to be alone, but I know that going for a walk, having a change of scene, or even just having a casual and friendly chat with someone, even a stranger, makes things better in the short term at least. Surviving chronic depression is all about surviving the small day to day moments. Keeping perspective. There are no dramatic ‘fixed’ moments. String together enough good day to day moments and suddenly you realise life is ok. The battle is for resilience in the between times.
‘The battle is for resilience in those between times’ – yes, it is! I am a rather melancholic sort of person (though I have the good fortune not to have come to any great depths of depression), and I find that Burton’s words speak home.