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Notes -
I think removing yourself from a harmful stimulus can be helpful short term. And really, for parents, I’d highly recommend no screens until they are old enough to properly process the material, and even then I’d probably be against unfettered access to media.
At the same time, I would strongly push things like Stoicism CBT/DBT style thinking, teach problem-solving in all spheres of life, and have chores and the like to teach responsibility. I think the sum of those things will build a resilient person much better able to handle the modern world. In fact, these kinds of folk-psychology traditions have built the kind of people who could handle situations far worse than anything we have going on today, including pretty serious oppression (as in it being illegal to be gay at all, legal segregation, hell, actual genocide) serious deficiencies in the environment (things like starvation, injuries before modern medicine, disasters in which no government was there to make you whole). The mindset of the earlier era was certainly more conservative, but it was also one that didn’t expect to live in a Utopian world. The people who experienced the Great Depression were a people who greeted hardship with a “it really do be like that sometimes” attitude. It was an era of the stiff upper lip, stop crying, either fix it or live with it.
And I think that the future will look back on our snowplow everything, feelings focused society as a backwards curiosity. It not only doesn’t work, but it seems to make things worse. Focusing on harms done, traumas experienced, and your feelings seems to create more depression than it solves. When you focus on you life from the view of “this sucks, I’m broken because of (trauma, disability, mental illnesses, etc.” then focus on how awful it feels to be depressed and broken and how bad being depressed and broken makes you feel, not only will you not get better, but you’ll get worse. But this is the dominant mindset, one we teach to our young. We teach them that they’re entering a world that sucks, that experiencing a sucky world is devastating and traumatic, and that you should focus on this and how you feel about it.
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