One of the things that i've realized is that people that are self-reflective, that rely on cerebral horsepower, that pay attention, that think in a detailed way, the more nuance that you're thinking is, the fewer people are going to be like you, which makes you feel more alone.
How do you think people can overcome this?
Well, i would say that hasn't been my experience exactly, Because as I started to make my thoughts more public, they seemed to appeal to more and more people.
And so I don't know if that's a threshold phenomena, because maybe it is.
As you start to become specialized as a scientist, in some sense your vision narrows and narrows, although it gets more high resolution at the level that you're operating.
But you kind of pass through a needle, let's say, out the other side, where the thing you're studying starts to become everything again, and so maybe that's, maybe that's that developmental progression further more yeah, specialization and then Generalization again.
Yeah, I think that you might be right there.
The deeper into the breach thing.
The show that I went to go and see you do in Manchester in 2017 or 18 someone asked a question about the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer.
And you said you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you.
And I think that this is something you see here as well that When you start to think differently, when you start to consider the way that you're living your life in a more detailed, higher resolution, more unique, more nuanced way, you will probably receive pushback, especially you know, speaking from personal experience the normal working class towns people born live, die in these places.
It's insular.
There isn't a huge culture of, especially in the UK, tall poppy syndrome is a huge problem.
The biggest difference that I've noticed, actually between American people and English people, is that American children are told that they can be anything that they want to be.
They're told that they have blue sky vision, they can achieve whatever they want.
And that gives them a lot of confidence.
When us Brits stuffy stiff-upped Brits see Americans on TV, it sounds like everyone's had media training because everybody's just so enthused about whatever it is, even if it's an 18-car pileup.
And then the equivalent in the UK is that deviating from the norm is very very, very quickly mocked.
There's a lot of that in Canada too.
Tall poppy syndrome, it's a big deal.
The Japanese have that saying too, except it's the nail that sticks up above all.
The rest is the first one to be struck down by the hammer.
And there's some truth in that too.
There's some truth in that, but some and all are very different words.
When you roll the clock forward, what you end up with is American children that then become adults who look around at the world and say well, hang on, this wasn't what I was promised.
I was told that I could be anything that I wanted to be.
I was told that I could have anything that I wanted to have.
There's a difference between you can earn everything that is earnable and you deserve everything there is.
So that message can become what you say.
It can become misinterpreted in a narcissistic manner.
And I think that has happened to some degree, especially as people have had fewer and fewer children.
You know, Jonathan Haidt and Luke Yanoff talk about the coddling of the American mind, and they think about that in large part as a consequence of an ideological transformation.
And some of that's true, but it's also useful to look at more fundamental phenomena.
People have children when they're a lot older.
They have way fewer children.
They have way more resources when they have children on average.
You know, if you're one kid of eight, you're pretty much battling it out for attention, for a very finite amount of parental attention, with a lot of intense competition.
And the probability that you're going to come out of that entitled and narcissistic is pretty damn low, because your siblings will definitely punish you for that.
But if you're the only child, especially of older parents, who are also more conservative because of their age and also less willing to take chances with you because there's only one of you, and then you have a lot of resources at your disposal well, that's a whole different developmental milieu.
And we have no idea what the consequences of that are, but the idea that children in that circumstance are more likely to be overprotected and dependent and structured, it's like well Yeah, undoubtedly.
And you know, that that would even be an overabundance of parental virtue in some sense, right?
Well, we just did nothing but pay attention to our child.
Okay, but too much.
What did you expect?
It's so strange because I'm an only child, right?
And all of the well.
Maybe my friends might say differently, but a lot of the commonly held presumptions around only children And I have a couple of friends who are as well
And I don't know whether it's where we're from that the northeast of the UK is very spit and sawdust.
It's salt of the earth people.
It's, you know, grab your bootstraps and your boots and start pulling.
And I just haven't seen that.
What is it through your clinical practice?
This might not be a...
Primarily working class phenomena.
You know the coddled mind phenomena that could easily be a middle class and upper phenomena.
Is there something, was there a common trend?
Or, from your reading, have you found that only children tend to be one way or another?
No, no.
So you just get huge variance in them as well?
I don't know the answer to that at the level of individual psychological data.
There might be a literature.
I'm not aware of it.
For me, that was more a response to Haidt's book on the coddled mind.
I thought, okay, fair enough.
Coddling of the American mind.
What's driving this?
It's not just ideas.
It's a huge demographic switch.
It's a huge transformation in the way we raise children.
We're 10 years older when we have our children now.
That's a lot older.
You know, when you're 18 and you have a kid, you're still a kid.
And there's some wildness that's perhaps not so good about that.
But there's also perhaps a higher proclivity to go off and live your own life.
And then, you know, how much should your children be left on their own?
The answer is as much as they can tolerate.
And how much is that?
Well, you find out with each child.
But it's certainly possible to not deprive your child enough.
What's happening people?
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