It feels to me like the world (at least the middle-class American world I live in) needs a bit more of this Shrier-type thinking, in the same way it needs a little more of the Jordan Peterson type of stuff. Just a smidge, not a whole serving. But it's probably impossible to write a book that says, "Mostly what you think is right, but just season it with this other perspective." It would be hard to even be motivated to write that kind of book. So the people who advocate this stuff advocate it full-throatedly. If you can culture-surf a variety of content (as most of us do) without falling too deeply into it, that's probably a good way forward. Then again, I converted to Catholicism last year, so I can testify that there's always a danger of falling the whole way into something that promises to be The Answer.
I can’t overstate how strongly I endorse this. I was raised — with the best of intentions, by people who genuinely thought it was best practice and had worked for them — to suppress inconvenient (to self or others) feelings. It made me very “functional,” and concurrently and quietly made an unholy mess of my life, and I would not recommend it to anyone. Sorry to splat all over your comments section etc but it really cannot be emphatically enough underlined.
I understand what Linden describes as agreeing with you, not disagreeing.
Suppose I'm out looking for birds. If you ask me "What's up?", it sounds pretty good: I'll excitedly tell you about what I've seen and what I hope to see. If you ask me to think about how I'm feeling, it sounds pretty miserable: I'm hot and sweaty and stinky and tired and sore, I'm annoyed by one of many small frustrations (missed a bird, took the wrong trail, binoculars need cleaning AGAIN), I'm either thirsty or need to pee or both.
To me, it sounds like Linden is recommending the same attitude you are: not focusing on those small discomforts, and instead on everything else: the activity itself, pleasant thoughts outside yourself, everything but the details of what you're feeling.
I learned of Shrier's existence and her book from seeing her interviewed by Coleman Hughes on his podcast, and I thought throughout that interview Shrier sounded like she was made of good common sense (it helps that I'm already broadly in sympathy with wanting to push back against what we might call "very online therapy culture" which Ozy seems also to be in agreement with), with an exceptional moment here or there: for instance, at some point one of them (I think it was Coleman) seemed to imply that it's good when children are slightly scared of their parents. While there may be some empirical evidence somewhere that children who are slightly scared of their parents stay on the straight-and-narrow and have more positive life/career outcomes or something, this idea still massively creeps me out. But still, overall in conversation, Shrier comes across as reasonable. I think this sequence of posts tearing apart her parenting beliefs as expressed in her book (unless a bunch of these quotes are grossly taken out of context in some way I can't see) show that she's less reasonable "in writing" and that her more deliberate beliefs that she expresses in her work represent a pushback that is righteous initially but goes to an unfortunate far extreme in the other direction.
The part of her interview that stuck in my mind the most, actually, was her line about "We used to ask kids such-and-such; now we ask them about their feelings all the time", which wasn't something that had occurred to me before but I was open to where she was coming from. So I find the response to it in the end of this article interesting. I don't say this with much confidence, but I tend to feel more like Shrier on the issue of how often we're actually feeling the emotion of happiness, although I don't think I'm clinically depressed or at all prone to it (although I have a rather negative outlook at the moment about my future prospects and the world in general which may prevent me from feeling much wholehearted happiness, but that goes for a lot of us. I think perhaps a majority of people relate more to Shrier here. Just yesterday or so, I saw a post from a Tumblr mutual saying they haven't had a single *pleasant* day in years like they used to in the 2010's, only "good given the worse background situation" days. This seems to relate to the same idea. Maybe due to recent shifts in world events most of us have moved in that direction? I don't know.)
I would suggest actually from reading the end of this article that the difference might come not from psychological make-up but from a disagreement over the definition what it means to feel happiness, where Ozy's definition aligns more with what Shrier and I would call "feeling okay".
I think you're arguing with an extreme version of Shrier that doesn't really exist. For example, nobody says in the book to ignore a teenager who is self-harming - the quote is about treating cutting as "a dire crisis". To me, treating a mental health symptom as a "dire crisis" means going to the hospital - not talking to the kid kindly and empathetically and trying to understand their pain, which I think would be the right place to start. Nobody says to sleep deprive your kids -I've heard the advice to bustle around the house a little while your kids are napping to help them get used to sleeping through a little noise. I don't think Shrier is arguing at all for all repression all the time. I think she's saying that we've swung too far the other way, and people are being encouraged to think about their feelings long beyond the point of processing and well into rumination, and to entrench their bad feelings as part of their identity.
It feels to me like the world (at least the middle-class American world I live in) needs a bit more of this Shrier-type thinking, in the same way it needs a little more of the Jordan Peterson type of stuff. Just a smidge, not a whole serving. But it's probably impossible to write a book that says, "Mostly what you think is right, but just season it with this other perspective." It would be hard to even be motivated to write that kind of book. So the people who advocate this stuff advocate it full-throatedly. If you can culture-surf a variety of content (as most of us do) without falling too deeply into it, that's probably a good way forward. Then again, I converted to Catholicism last year, so I can testify that there's always a danger of falling the whole way into something that promises to be The Answer.
I can’t overstate how strongly I endorse this. I was raised — with the best of intentions, by people who genuinely thought it was best practice and had worked for them — to suppress inconvenient (to self or others) feelings. It made me very “functional,” and concurrently and quietly made an unholy mess of my life, and I would not recommend it to anyone. Sorry to splat all over your comments section etc but it really cannot be emphatically enough underlined.
I understand what Linden describes as agreeing with you, not disagreeing.
Suppose I'm out looking for birds. If you ask me "What's up?", it sounds pretty good: I'll excitedly tell you about what I've seen and what I hope to see. If you ask me to think about how I'm feeling, it sounds pretty miserable: I'm hot and sweaty and stinky and tired and sore, I'm annoyed by one of many small frustrations (missed a bird, took the wrong trail, binoculars need cleaning AGAIN), I'm either thirsty or need to pee or both.
To me, it sounds like Linden is recommending the same attitude you are: not focusing on those small discomforts, and instead on everything else: the activity itself, pleasant thoughts outside yourself, everything but the details of what you're feeling.
Perfect companion piece to your post on Internet Mental Health Culture. Two extremes, one an overreaction to the other.
I learned of Shrier's existence and her book from seeing her interviewed by Coleman Hughes on his podcast, and I thought throughout that interview Shrier sounded like she was made of good common sense (it helps that I'm already broadly in sympathy with wanting to push back against what we might call "very online therapy culture" which Ozy seems also to be in agreement with), with an exceptional moment here or there: for instance, at some point one of them (I think it was Coleman) seemed to imply that it's good when children are slightly scared of their parents. While there may be some empirical evidence somewhere that children who are slightly scared of their parents stay on the straight-and-narrow and have more positive life/career outcomes or something, this idea still massively creeps me out. But still, overall in conversation, Shrier comes across as reasonable. I think this sequence of posts tearing apart her parenting beliefs as expressed in her book (unless a bunch of these quotes are grossly taken out of context in some way I can't see) show that she's less reasonable "in writing" and that her more deliberate beliefs that she expresses in her work represent a pushback that is righteous initially but goes to an unfortunate far extreme in the other direction.
The part of her interview that stuck in my mind the most, actually, was her line about "We used to ask kids such-and-such; now we ask them about their feelings all the time", which wasn't something that had occurred to me before but I was open to where she was coming from. So I find the response to it in the end of this article interesting. I don't say this with much confidence, but I tend to feel more like Shrier on the issue of how often we're actually feeling the emotion of happiness, although I don't think I'm clinically depressed or at all prone to it (although I have a rather negative outlook at the moment about my future prospects and the world in general which may prevent me from feeling much wholehearted happiness, but that goes for a lot of us. I think perhaps a majority of people relate more to Shrier here. Just yesterday or so, I saw a post from a Tumblr mutual saying they haven't had a single *pleasant* day in years like they used to in the 2010's, only "good given the worse background situation" days. This seems to relate to the same idea. Maybe due to recent shifts in world events most of us have moved in that direction? I don't know.)
I would suggest actually from reading the end of this article that the difference might come not from psychological make-up but from a disagreement over the definition what it means to feel happiness, where Ozy's definition aligns more with what Shrier and I would call "feeling okay".
…honestly, ignoring self-injury is probably the best reaction those kinds of parents are capable of, so good advice, I guess
I think you're arguing with an extreme version of Shrier that doesn't really exist. For example, nobody says in the book to ignore a teenager who is self-harming - the quote is about treating cutting as "a dire crisis". To me, treating a mental health symptom as a "dire crisis" means going to the hospital - not talking to the kid kindly and empathetically and trying to understand their pain, which I think would be the right place to start. Nobody says to sleep deprive your kids -I've heard the advice to bustle around the house a little while your kids are napping to help them get used to sleeping through a little noise. I don't think Shrier is arguing at all for all repression all the time. I think she's saying that we've swung too far the other way, and people are being encouraged to think about their feelings long beyond the point of processing and well into rumination, and to entrench their bad feelings as part of their identity.