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 had the exact same reaction to the guy who said "Nobody is ever happy." The less wild version of the advice to not default to asking kids about feelings-as-judgement reminded me of one bit of French Kids Eat Everything*.
The author suggests not asking kids "do you like it?" when they try foods, but to ask them about what they notice descriptively about textures, flavor, etc, so they're approaching the taste with curiosity initially, rather than trying to quickly come to a yes/no judgement.
*note, I read the book, and my kids are still having a picky phase.
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.
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.
But all those things outside yourself are part of what you’re feeling! Like, if you ask me the same question - and I’m actually enjoying the birdwatching (which is generally the case when I’m doing things like this) - I’d respond by talking about my excitement at the birds, the nature, etc. Those really are the feelings that are most salient to me in the moment!
I also had a different interpretation of this, kind of from the opposite direction. Ozy’s the one who’s read the whole book, not me, so I could just be misunderstanding the argument, but: if you asked me at a random moment on a random normal workday, “Are you happy right now?”, I’d probably be like “sure, fine, no complaints”, but it would be pretty unlikely that I’d be feeling the emotion of happiness at that very moment. If you asked me that while I was in the middle of spending time with friends or family, or doing some of my hobbies, the likelihood of my actively being happy right then would be higher!
Sometimes I do have moments when I’m at work and I’m (figuratively) bouncing with excitement that I get to play in my orchestra tomorrow or whatever, but it doesn’t happen that often.
On the other hand, if you asked me on a random workday, “are you happy (in general)?”, that would be a different question and the answer would probably be more positive than “are you happy right this second, at 9 am on a Tuesday, in the office?” Because my general life satisfaction is pretty high even if my emotional state is kind of meh at the moment.
This is how I interpreted Linden, too. I don't think we actually feel emotions that much of the time, or at least not strongly enough to really register. Your brain kind of interpolates between the emotional moments to create a general sense of how you feel, and I think that interpolation is biased to be positive for most people. For example, if I had a timer go off every 10 minutes today and I had to record my emotions, I probably spent far more time neutral or vaguely annoyed than happy today. There were dumb emails, it was cold in my office, I was tired after lunch. But if someone asked me how I felt about the day, I would say it was good - I feel basically contended and satisfied and I'm not thinking about those small irritations. My brain's general abstraction of the day is more positive than a second-by-second inventory of my feelings would suggest. So, encouraging people to monitor their feelings so closely can interfere with that positive abstraction process and make their life seem more negative.
I am reminded of a skit done by a UK comedian - about health and safety for kids specifically - he starts by acknowledging that some kids need them as they are default reckless and cannot recognise danger, and all notices are calibrated to them. But he was a nervous child, and needed to be told the opposite - it will probably be alright, the world will not end.
This seems similar - some kids need to be told to "buck up" and grow thicker skin. Some need to be told it is not their fault and it will be ok. Some respond to being told no, some respond to having it explained why they cannot do something.
The trick is working out which is which.
Current culture went from "buck up" to "nothing is your fault" for everyone without any calibration for which of the above types they were. this was done as many people, often marginalised, were suffering under the "buck up" regime.
Some people did better in this new regime and some did worse. This is a book about those doing worse, which fails to acknowledge those doing better.
Now it may be that overall society is better or worse for this change, but unless we get better at tailoring solutions to individual types we will cause problems as well as solve them.
I teach my students (directly) and my patients (less directly) that emotions are a SIGNAL that something important may be occurring. Each type of emotion is indicating something different.
We can then often combine that emotional info with all sorts of other info (direct perceptions, memories, cultural knowledge, analytic and logical reasoning, other people’s impressions….) to determine what is going on, what our options are, and to choose what to do, or not do.
For example, I am going to fly somewhere, and the thought of flying makes me anxious. Anxiety is a signal that there MAY BE risk or danger. In this case, the anxiety is probably provoked by the fact that through most of humans’ evolutionary history, being locked in an enclosed space with many strangers might be dangerous, and being up very very high was likely dangerous. But right now I know that flying is quite safe, and will allow me to accomplish something I want to do that I couldn’t do otherwise, such as visiting a cool faraway place, being present for a sick family member, or advancing my career. So I can choose to fly, and work on either managing or ignoring my anxiety. If I do this repeatedly, the anxiety will drop because of the repeated message that it doesn’t need to be so high for this situation. (Weirdly, my students understand that last part better by comparing to how we ‘train’ AI.)
On the other hand, if I’m out for an evening with friends, and the designated driver is drinking rather a lot, and that makes me anxious, I can decide that this anxiety signal is a valid and proportional one, and decide to take an Uber home instead.
This helps people understand that both emotion and managing emotion are important. Ignoring it entirely and denying its very existence, 50s Dad Style, deprives us of important information. Which then tends to affect us anyway, except it comes out in all the twisted ways that denial and repression can create.
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.
They say the fastest way to get good advice is to be wrong on the Internet. Ironically something good (this post) came from Shrier's book.
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 had the exact same reaction to the guy who said "Nobody is ever happy." The less wild version of the advice to not default to asking kids about feelings-as-judgement reminded me of one bit of French Kids Eat Everything*.
The author suggests not asking kids "do you like it?" when they try foods, but to ask them about what they notice descriptively about textures, flavor, etc, so they're approaching the taste with curiosity initially, rather than trying to quickly come to a yes/no judgement.
*note, I read the book, and my kids are still having a picky phase.
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.
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.
But all those things outside yourself are part of what you’re feeling! Like, if you ask me the same question - and I’m actually enjoying the birdwatching (which is generally the case when I’m doing things like this) - I’d respond by talking about my excitement at the birds, the nature, etc. Those really are the feelings that are most salient to me in the moment!
I also had a different interpretation of this, kind of from the opposite direction. Ozy’s the one who’s read the whole book, not me, so I could just be misunderstanding the argument, but: if you asked me at a random moment on a random normal workday, “Are you happy right now?”, I’d probably be like “sure, fine, no complaints”, but it would be pretty unlikely that I’d be feeling the emotion of happiness at that very moment. If you asked me that while I was in the middle of spending time with friends or family, or doing some of my hobbies, the likelihood of my actively being happy right then would be higher!
Sometimes I do have moments when I’m at work and I’m (figuratively) bouncing with excitement that I get to play in my orchestra tomorrow or whatever, but it doesn’t happen that often.
On the other hand, if you asked me on a random workday, “are you happy (in general)?”, that would be a different question and the answer would probably be more positive than “are you happy right this second, at 9 am on a Tuesday, in the office?” Because my general life satisfaction is pretty high even if my emotional state is kind of meh at the moment.
This is how I interpreted Linden, too. I don't think we actually feel emotions that much of the time, or at least not strongly enough to really register. Your brain kind of interpolates between the emotional moments to create a general sense of how you feel, and I think that interpolation is biased to be positive for most people. For example, if I had a timer go off every 10 minutes today and I had to record my emotions, I probably spent far more time neutral or vaguely annoyed than happy today. There were dumb emails, it was cold in my office, I was tired after lunch. But if someone asked me how I felt about the day, I would say it was good - I feel basically contended and satisfied and I'm not thinking about those small irritations. My brain's general abstraction of the day is more positive than a second-by-second inventory of my feelings would suggest. So, encouraging people to monitor their feelings so closely can interfere with that positive abstraction process and make their life seem more negative.
I am reminded of a skit done by a UK comedian - about health and safety for kids specifically - he starts by acknowledging that some kids need them as they are default reckless and cannot recognise danger, and all notices are calibrated to them. But he was a nervous child, and needed to be told the opposite - it will probably be alright, the world will not end.
This seems similar - some kids need to be told to "buck up" and grow thicker skin. Some need to be told it is not their fault and it will be ok. Some respond to being told no, some respond to having it explained why they cannot do something.
The trick is working out which is which.
Current culture went from "buck up" to "nothing is your fault" for everyone without any calibration for which of the above types they were. this was done as many people, often marginalised, were suffering under the "buck up" regime.
Some people did better in this new regime and some did worse. This is a book about those doing worse, which fails to acknowledge those doing better.
Now it may be that overall society is better or worse for this change, but unless we get better at tailoring solutions to individual types we will cause problems as well as solve them.
I teach my students (directly) and my patients (less directly) that emotions are a SIGNAL that something important may be occurring. Each type of emotion is indicating something different.
We can then often combine that emotional info with all sorts of other info (direct perceptions, memories, cultural knowledge, analytic and logical reasoning, other people’s impressions….) to determine what is going on, what our options are, and to choose what to do, or not do.
For example, I am going to fly somewhere, and the thought of flying makes me anxious. Anxiety is a signal that there MAY BE risk or danger. In this case, the anxiety is probably provoked by the fact that through most of humans’ evolutionary history, being locked in an enclosed space with many strangers might be dangerous, and being up very very high was likely dangerous. But right now I know that flying is quite safe, and will allow me to accomplish something I want to do that I couldn’t do otherwise, such as visiting a cool faraway place, being present for a sick family member, or advancing my career. So I can choose to fly, and work on either managing or ignoring my anxiety. If I do this repeatedly, the anxiety will drop because of the repeated message that it doesn’t need to be so high for this situation. (Weirdly, my students understand that last part better by comparing to how we ‘train’ AI.)
On the other hand, if I’m out for an evening with friends, and the designated driver is drinking rather a lot, and that makes me anxious, I can decide that this anxiety signal is a valid and proportional one, and decide to take an Uber home instead.
This helps people understand that both emotion and managing emotion are important. Ignoring it entirely and denying its very existence, 50s Dad Style, deprives us of important information. Which then tends to affect us anyway, except it comes out in all the twisted ways that denial and repression can create.
Perfect companion piece to your post on Internet Mental Health Culture. Two extremes, one an overreaction to the other.
…honestly, ignoring self-injury is probably the best reaction those kinds of parents are capable of, so good advice, I guess