https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sKq_Grrgz1s
You know, one of the things that being online allows you to do is to experiment with different identities that are disposable and that are virtual. And then I also thought that to the degree that childhood is being extended and maybe interfered with, especially at the early stages when pretend play should be occurring and there’s so much screen time, that experimentation with identity, which is a form of play, might be being extended out into adolescence and further on. So you get virtualization and the extension of fantasy play. It’s not surprising to me that iGen young people would be, what would you describe it, as very open in relationship to their proclaimed identity, especially also if they’re earning attention points for announcing a non-standard identity and also having no other identity to replace it with in some real sense. Well, I think there’s a lot of other factors at work here too, because of course, these trends have been going on for longer. As opposed to say some of the mental health trends, which really didn’t start to appear until 2012, the rise in say, support for same sex marriage and the embrace of LGBT identities, that’s been building for a longer time. So we see that also, you know, even for Gen Xers and millennials that that’s been rolling out for quite a long time. So I think it’s also a function of individualism. And that was a major theme in Generation Me, my book on the millennials, and it’s still is a different flavor for iGen or Gen Z, but it’s absolutely still present that we have the growth in, you know, North American culture that’s always been individualistic, but has become much more so, especially since the late 1960s. So more focus on the self, less focus on social rules. And what you get with individualism is the acceptance of difference and that people will be who they are. And so that I think is also a natural consequence of more individualism, that you will get more acceptance of different sexual orientations. Right. Well, it’s a strange individualism, though, because it’s based again on what you might describe as maximization of short-term identity. The claim is, I can be whoever I want and all social regulation of that is nothing but an imposition, which is really not true at all, because most of the time, following social principles allows you to form relationships with other people and opens up horizons of opportunity to you. That’s the benefit of sacrificing not exactly individuality, but short-term individual whim. And it’s something that children learn as they mature, right? They can’t get everything they want right now. But the payoff for that is that they can get along with other people and that things work better over the long run. And that all, that I would say, understanding that and then abiding by that principle of medium to long-term well-being is something like maturation. And this individualism that you’re describing isn’t really, I don’t think it’s really, it’s not an enlightened individualism because it’s too short-term. It’s more like, well, I am whatever I feel I am right at this moment. And to me, that smacks of, well, nothing more than in some real sense, like a two-year-old immaturity. And I mean that technically because two-year-olds are very whim-oriented, very, very short-term and very self-centered. They can’t play with other people. And so you have the dissolution of identity, right? There’s no community, no real community, not in terms of community organization, but also not in terms of real face-to-face friendships and interactions. There’s no participation in religious enterprises. There’s no real reading about political or philosophical matters. There’s a decline in spirituality. So there’s a real collapse of sophisticated identity. And all of this, well, the sexualization of identity seems to me to be in some sense, what would you say, a replacement for that or reaction to that? Does that seem on point to you or am I missing something there? In today’s world, we sometimes lose sight of the Judeo-Christian beliefs that built our society. This is why it is so important to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life. There’s no better way to do that than with Hallow. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the U.S. and the number one Catholic app in the world. It’s filled with studies, meditations and reflections, including the number one Christian podcast, The Bible in a Year. Download Hallow today and try their Advent Pray 25 challenge, a 25-day journey through Bible stories from both the Old and New Testament leading up to the birth of Jesus. These meditations are led by cast members from the largest Christian streaming series in history, The Chosen. Advent Pray 25 will help grow your understanding of mankind and develop a disciplined prayer habit during a season when our discipline is put to the test. Download Hallow for three months completely free and experience a personal development that can come from regular prayer, meditation and reflection on who the Bible calls us to be. Get Hallow for free at Hallow.com slash Jordan. That’s Hallow.com slash Jordan. Give yourself the gift of peace, calm and discipline this Christmas. Go to Hallow.com slash Jordan today. Well, you know, I think you’re correct in that some of those elements of individualism are much more short term and not as deeply seated, you know, in terms of religion and meaning and, you know, more focused on some of the short term. But I think lesbian and gay and bisexual identity is not really an example of that because that seems to be more deeply seated and constant for most people. That does seem to be a much more long term identity. So that I think is not as much on the part of individualism having to do with that self-focus. It’s more around accepting difference and accepting people for who they are and taking some of the more traditional social rules and saying, you know, these don’t really recognize people as individuals and for who they are. And that might be different. It might not be in the majority, but that that’s who they are as people. You talked in your book, In Generation Me, you talked about the self-esteem movement. And self-esteem has always been a particular bugbear of mine, I would say, especially since I discovered that psychometrically it was basically composed of low neuroticism with a bit of extroversion thrown in. And so self-esteem is a proxy for neuroticism in many, many ways. That isn’t obvious to me at all that you treat neuroticism by treating people to be more self-centered. You know, one of the things I used to do with my clients who were socially anxious, say, when they’d go into a social situation, they’d start obsessing about how they were appearing to other people. They’d fall into that trap and then they’d stop making eye contact and then they would get awkward and then they would engage in non-sequiturs and the whole conversation would grind to a halt. And I asked them instead to concentrate as hard as they could on putting the other person at ease. And that gave them something to think about other than themselves. And so the self-esteem movement was predicated on the idea that people high in neuroticism had low self-esteem, which I don’t think was true at all, and that the right remediation for that was to treat everyone as if they were uniquely special. So it was like narcissism was the antidote to neuroticism. It’s so appalling. It doesn’t work. No, no, no. In fact, it makes it much worse. And so… Exactly. Yeah. Okay, okay, okay. So, well, I’m relieved to hear that your sentiments are in keeping with that formulation. I mean, I’ve been trying to base it on the relevant data, trying to figure that out. Chapter 10, independent politics. So what about while you said that the iGen people, they’re not watching the news, the news is dead, right? I mean, legacy media news is dead. I don’t think anybody watches it. I think old people have the TV on, and that’s where the ratings come from. So that’s just gone. That centralizing ability that the nightly news had to broadcast a similar message in some sense to everyone and bolster identity, that’s disappeared too. Everybody’s in their own news. I wouldn’t say bubble exactly, but it’s fragmented so much that there’s no unity of apprehension. What’s happening on the political front with the iGen types? Yeah, so there’s a couple of things going on. So one is that a lot more young people now say they don’t want to belong to a political party at all, that they’re politically independent. And that’s been going on for a while. The other big piece is just huge political polarization, you know, partially for the reasons that you mentioned, that everything is so atomized that you can get your news from a particular source. And perhaps because of the caustic nature of a lot of online interaction, it becomes contentious very, very quickly. So we have a political atmosphere that’s just very, very aggressive and very, very polarized. And I mean, it’s gotten to the point here in the US where people don’t even agree on their own facts, that the two parties have different sets of facts. And young people reflect that larger cultural change. I think they may want to change it, but they also show more who say they’re very liberal or very conservative or very much on the left or very much on the right and fewer in the middle. Yeah, well, that atomization of political identity, it’s another interesting twist on the notion of individualism, because you might say that not abiding, not joining a political party, not joining a political group, not joining a religion, not cementing a local social network, let’s say, frees you up because you’re not constrained by the necessity of abiding by the principles of those groups. But the problem with that is that the more, and this is something that people don’t really understand well about choice, is there’s not a lot of difference between excess choice and anxiety. They’re very much the same thing, right? If you have too many pathways open in front of you, and I can’t help but think that this is contributing to the epidemic of depression and anxiety. I mean, if you have a three-year-old who wants to dress himself and you open up a closet full of clothes, he or she is just generally stumped into immobility. If you lay out three outfits on the bed and say, pick one, then they’re perfectly happy because they’ve had the right amount of constrained choice. And we’ve been teaching young people that all social norms are nothing but constraints on this individualistic freedom. And that completely underplays the role that identity plays in encapsulating anxiety. I was talking to Carl Friston the other day, a neuroscientist, and he’s convinced, as are many people, that our conceptions are entropy management techniques in some real sense. So once you define yourself, for example, within the confines of a given identity, now you’re playing a bounded game that might open up an interesting amount of options, but not so much that you drown. And to lose all those intermediary social structures, except maybe the bond you have with your parents, that strikes me as a, well, as a mental health catastrophe.