To think that adults are much less resilient than they used to be

[louease]

First of all I'll admit that I'm on the older side of 60 so the weight of my belt onion could be effecting my judgement on this.

I see a lot on social media including here where people say they are upset at words they read on a screen, that they've been triggered, or that it should have a warning attached.

Are we making the world harder to live in by trying to make it too comfortable do you think?

You and your friends raised these adults that aren't resilient? We are your kids? If anything it's a reflection on you.

I grew up among survivors of WW2 and the Korean conflict, and those family members were damaged. They were 'resilient' because what other choice did they have? But there was a lot of DV and heavy drinking in our family, and we weren't unusual.
Each generation faces its own struggles and uses its own coping mechanisms. Its pointless comparing them. Life is 'better' today in that most people have more stuff, because normal parents want better for their children that they had.
But more stuff doesn't make you a happy, well rounded human, so their parents generation think they are entitled and ungrateful. Its not new.

But did you have ice on the INSIDE of the windows?

I think it’s lovely that people can say what’s affecting them, that they go to counselling that they work on their mental health.

Unlike my mum who is in their 60s has horrible anxiety, everyone’s walking on egg shells as we can’t have open conversations. It’s makes her miserable and in some ways I feel
sorry for her, being raised in a generation wheres is shut up and get on with it.

Agree that teaching healthy ways to debate is really important. But also think that we should, as well, teach people that they don't have to provide an audience for every idea there is. If I don't want to stop what I'm doing to listen to your ideas about how the earth is definitely flat, or cows should wear trainers, or it should be illegal to be called Simon, then that's just as okay as it is for you to think those things.

Teach people that it's not 'cancelling' someone if you don't want to listen to them. No one is automatically owed the time, attention and intellectual deliberatiom of other people. Free speech and free listening.

Agree, am classed as a millenial and l find this too. Feel it's becoming total lack of personal responsibility for things and people are becoming dependent on saying 'you need to be careful what you do/say in case I come across something I find offensive'.

I think it's do with being bombarded with images and information and images.

People worried about the effect of being exposed to too many issues long before smartphones were a thing.

I remember learning at uni that when Fiji first got TV in the 90s eating disorders shot up from less than 1% of the population to 11% in the first year. The worst bit was you didn't even need a TV to be affected. If people in your peer group had them you were still vulnerable.

Resilience also comes through childhood independence. Playing with peers unsupervised and learning how to navigate situations independently.
Children's horizons of ownership, where they feel comfortable and able alone have shrunk every decade, from hives distances to nothing. We think we're keeping them safe at home and we are from many things, but I think it can store up problems in the longer term. (I'm guilty of this and screens too so no judgements here.)

My aunt would walk 5 miles alone (and back) aged 8 to go an volunteer with animals.
At about 9 I'd go to the corner shop alone and sometimes play out.

No 9 year old I know does that now and tbf I don't know how comfortable I'd be with that given there are a lot of drug and gang issues in my area.

It's definitely a good thing that mental health stigma has declined and upfront conversations are more the norm.

Yes, that is right. And we are more open to speak about issues and how they affect us than before, which is great.
But the pendulum has swang too far in some- increasing- cases.
The middle ground will prevail, in time.

I think the less we have to worry about as a nation ie war, famine, natural disasters, real worries, the more we try and create issues. Quite pathetic ones these days. It's like humans always have to have something to fight against.

I think the less we have to worry about as a nation ie war, famine, natural disasters, real worries, the more we try and create issues. Quite pathetic ones these days. It's like humans always have to have something to fight against.

Google and the way that pregnancy is spoken about in society are big drivers in this type of situation, rather than the younger generation lacking common sense.

Months ago I thought I might be pregnant. I couldn't/wouldn't talk to friends/family about it because DH and I had literally just started thinking about trying for a baby so I wanted to keep it quiet. The driving reason for that was the general consensus from older generations who already have kids that you'll probably have a miscarriage so should keep schtum. (I since don't care about this)

It was too early for me to test, so I turned to Google to put my mind at ease/get more info. But Google now forces you to have a shit ton of text on every web page (like when you want a pasta sauce recipe and you have to sit through 5 pages of the author's childhood in Italy and their thoughts on world war 3 before reaching the ingredients) - this meant that I was immediately overwhelmed and still didn't get any answers. I went through 20+ pages, still no useful info relevant to my situation.

So I went on Mumsnet, wrote the few symptoms I had and got the typical answer of "you're an idiot. Just do a test" "god people are so stupid nowadays, how should I know?". At that point, I didn't know that pregnancy symptoms can vary hugely, because every time you look it up, you get way too much info, 99% of which isn't even relevant.

I'm 28, the only place online I've ever been able to get consistent, short and snappy and useful information is on Tiktok and now that's being vilified and potentially banned. It's really difficult to research anything nowadays, let alone anything related to women's health. I'd say at least 90% of the common sense I have is due to Tiktok and hearing other people's opinions/perspectives/experiences and reading the comments on videos where people are disagreeing, providing more/different information, more context etc. We don't lack common sense, it's just really difficult to get your hands on it nowadays!

Someone made a really good point about the information overload and how we're all still learning to cope with it. I'm young enough to have grown up as the internet developed and always thought it was just getting older that led to me being more stressed but stopping reading the news so much and staying off most social media made a massive difference to my mental health which in turn gave me more capacity for resilience. I wish we were able to take a step back.

I think there's an element of resilience being like a muscle. You need to work to develop it and it can be overloaded. We've developed to deal with stress peaks but the constant low level stress means there's no opportunity for recovery so our resilience doesn't develop properly.

YANBU. It’s a real problem. Particularly for mid-tier authors who are now expected to avoid writing any character that says anything with which a reader may disagree.

I think it flows from people spending too much time hanging out in echo chamber mobs online. The first Facebook generation has grown up, basically, and wants to delete/block anything it doesn’t like.

Saying “I found that statement hurtful / literal violence” is really saying “I aggressively deny the right of free speech to those people I disagree with.”

In fact I don’t think it’s a resilience issue: the adults complaining are usually completely fine and do not get PTSD from reading a statement with which they disagree. What this is really about is a society-level debate on free speech and whether one’s political opponents should be denied free speech. It’s the age-old impulse to a totalitarian society in which minority views are oppressed…

Bollocking sweeping statement.older people are not one universal group that “ can’t see or believe” fgs

like the OP is making sweeping statements.

But we do have all those things to worry about really.

And yet we worry about pronouns. I think people feel useless in the face of inflation/pandemics/war/climate change so they get het up about things they think they can control, like other peoples use of language.

@Lheuredubebe really interesting and thought provoking, thank you.

I work in mental health, and although I'm not a direct carer I interact regularly with a lot of our service users.

The vast majority of people with lifelong, complex mental health problems are over 60. They talk about things that happened over the course of their lives, big and small things, which traumatised and broke them. They were never encouraged to care for themselves properly in terms of their feelings or behaviour when they were younger. People around them, like their families and teachers, weren't encouraged to take responsibility for their feelings either.

The result is a very messed up generation of people living with crippling anxiety, pain, and related neurological issues. They are utterly lost and bewildered by it too, because they were never taught the language to describe how they feel in the first place. They're no "tougher" or "more resilient" than someone my age (millennial), they were just taught incorrectly that there was some sort of virtue in performing 'detachment' and 'toughness'. Now all those chickens are coming home to roost, sadly.

It's not just mental health service users, I see it in my parents and relatives, and other older people I talk to.

If the alternative to that nightmare is being judged as "a snowflake" by my parents' generation just because I know what makes me hurt and I want to avoid or remedy it (which, by the way, I personally define as 'resilience') - then I'll take that any day.

Haha. "I think it's stupid how the young people are always moaning online, so I'm going to moan online about it".

@Dangelis 👏👏👏

I agree, @MushMonster , it’s definitely positive that we can speak more openly now.

But as you say, the pendulum has swung too far in some cases. The art of debate and respectfully listening to different viewpoints is a really important life skill, because if you refuse to listen to other people’s reasoning, how can you ever hope to change their minds, for example? Rational arguments are far more effective than emotional backlash.

I have teenagers who are both learning how to debate, DD is president of her school’s club and I have to say that she’s a very resilient person, far more than I am!

You can only speak individually. If your parents were born pre 1964 and were bigots, then possibly. Mine were born pre then, but second generation immigrants, ok with gay people etc, so no.

Re people speaking on the phone if not planned. In a way that didn't happen to previous generations. Phone calls were planned and post 6pm. Women didn't have to leave the house and were thought if as home birds and it wasn't questioned. Men could be as rude/blunt as they chose to be. I agree with information overload, but also the amount of self medication and unacknowledged violence and abuse. So I'm on the fence. However I do think that there needs to be a kick back against every opportunity for a therapy session, including a night out. Freedom of listening gets my vote.

Thanks! It's a bee I've had in my bonnet for a while now, and it's popped up again (angry as ever!) since the Tiktok hearing. The main place people go for their information isn't working as it should, and the consequence is people not getting the answers they need.

We were talking at work the other day about the whole trans he/she/they thing within my immediate team when I clocked a young guy from another team giving me evils so I thought I better watch what I said in case he reported me. It's like we have to just accept these things these days without any debate or constructive conversation. I am not sure how it has come about really. The whole blm thing was the same.

@Dangelis spot on! 👏

The word "resilient" should be banned. Loads of sanctimonious MNers saying that the kids just needed to learn resilience during covid. Yeah right. Loads of milestones missed but they just had to get on with it. Most of them did, but that's fortunate, isn't it! Nobody was going to help them if they didn't.

I also agree you can't just have a job anymore, it has to be a career, although I think that was already the case when started work in the late 90s.

That said, there's a lot of self-indulgence going on. I agree that a bit of altruism and looking outwards instead of navel gazing doesn't hurt.