Is anyone else a bit cheesed off with the on-line rhetoric that teens and young adults seem to be plugged in to nowadays…? That somehow everyone is a victim?
That every parent is toxic or a narcissist and every woman over fifty is a “Karen”?
That everyone is suffering from trauma or needs to “heal their inner child”
Oh and then there are all the “special” on-line morning routines that involve, er, getting up, washing, eating your breakfast and maybe exercising; all of which I thought were just standard things that most people did every day without much fuss.
I don’t mean to sound horrible or unsympathetic. Of course there are some young men and women who have suffered truly awful upbringings and serious abuse which has traumatised them terribly. I am not addressing them in this post as of course they need proper support.
This post is about the comfortable young adults I know (my adult children and teens and their friends) who seem to buy in to the rhetoric of victimhood when I happen to know that they have loving parents and come from good homes where their parents willingly made lots of sacrifices for them.
Don’t get me wrong, I happen to think that the period of life between leaving university and getting your first job is one of the most challenging you experience as a young adult; when the struggle finding a job and a flat and new friends and standing on your own feet financially is suddenly very real all at once.
It’s just the culture of this generation that seems to make everyone in to a victim that I object to? Somehow everyone is “special” and “in need of healing” and I get labelled toxic if I say to my young adults that although you are special to me, we are just a very ordinary family, and life is about getting on with things and working hard and not blaming everyone else when you don’t put in enough effort and commitment yourself.