A Harvard Psychiatrist Explains Our Social Justice Worriers

We call them “Social Justice Warriors,” to poke fun at their self-seriousness. We think of them as the force behind cancel culture—of employee walkouts, “safe spaces”—and so many riots wrecking our streets. But Harvard Medical School Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harold Bursztajn, sees them as something else: anguished and fearful proto-adults.

This is “Generation Z”—born in 1995 and after—and it has little memory of life before the smartphone. Members confess to being online “almost constantly”—over 4 hours per day. Bursztajn believes this experience accounts for this generation’s psychological frailty and its radical politics.

“Cyberspace emphasizes binary logic,” he told me, a heavy Polish-Yiddish accent sleeving his words. “This generation seems to be thinking in either/or terms. One of the things I have always loved about modal logic is you can answer yes and no at the same time. But I think in this cyberspace, everything-goes faster-age . . . people subscribe to more conventional stereotypes and dichotomies, rather than being able to go ahead and take the time to consider complexities; that you can feel both ways about some things.”

Tech lovers often present social media as a creative medium for connecting human beings, but Bursztajn points out that the opposite is true: it is, by definition, utterly defined. He believes that young people are picking up habits of intellectual rigidity from the adamantine nature of their online world.

Harold Bursztajn, M.D., in his office in Cambridge, MA

I met Dr. Bursztajn for the first time almost two years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has treated university students for decades. Last fall, I interviewed him again, over Skype and the phone. He has the gentle manner of a doctor who treads lightly with patients—and the rapid, discursive speech of a scholar whose articulation can barely keep pace with his thought.

Bursztajn was born in Lodz, Poland, to two of a handful of Jewish survivors of the Lodz Ghetto, which at various times housed 200,000 Jews. When they were still teenagers, his mother, Miriam, lost her father and a brother in the Holocaust, and his father, Abraham, lost his parents and all seven of his siblings. Bursztajn is no stranger to the notion that life can be cruel, privations can sting, and that adolescence can be both painful and confusing. But when he describes his parents’ heroic efforts to find each other and cling to life, to make their way to America—he has not pity but admiration.

By contrast, this generation seems helpless and hopeless. Why — I asked him — did this generation possess the highest recorded rates of anxiety, depression and suicide—and the lowest rates of sex or physical intimacy? These young Americans may be as radical as Flower Children, but they seem incapable of organizing a Woodstock or hosting a “Love In.” Where was their Kumbaya? What put the damper on their “Good Vibrations”?

Based on his thousands of hours administering psychotherapy to university students, Bursztajn believes it is the online life they lead which renders them anxious, unhappy, and emotionally malnourished. Social media trains them to divide humanity into allies and enemies. It offers them little basis for hope. Their online world is not a new-age vista of possibility, but rigid series of high-stakes social contests, in which players rack up “likes” and form alliances, but never actual friendships. “To the extent that you’re dealing with a culture of algorithms, not all things are possible—only the things in the algorithms,” he explained.

He is struck that so many among this generation are quick to offer up clichés in place of their own thoughts and feelings, and to identify as being a member of this or that ideological tribe. “I think it’s terrifying for people to be a work-in-progress because in your family if you are a work-in-progress, they won’t kick you out of the house probably. . . But in cyberspace, if you are a work-in-progress, you get kicked out.” You are ridiculed or blocked. Your friends don’t merely tease you or refuse your calls. They make you disappear.

Real intimacy requires “transitional space,” explains Bursztajn—perhaps what we used to think of in a romantic context as “flirting.” A dozen low-risk encounters that help you get to know someone in a casual way, free from mass observation. But social media, with its structural absolutism, does not allow for that. Since anything you say or write can now be permanently memorialized on the internet, there’s little margin of error and certainly no forgiving and forgetting. “You have to get very defensive,” he says. “If you can’t say something stupid to your intimate partner and then say, ‘Oh, yeah, that was kind of stupid’”—and have it be your private experience, and the two of yours alone, then you’ve never allowed yourself the vulnerability real relationships require.

Bursztajn believes the online experience of GenZ kids is not unlike that of Marsyas, the great flutist of Greek mythology, who challenged the god Apollo to a flute playing contest. Confident he would win, Marsyas agreed that if he lost, Apollo could flay him alive. Marsyas played beautifully, but of course, he was no match for a god. In some sense, Apollo defeated him, but in a more important sense—Bursztajn emphasizes—he defeated himself, by competing with a divine standard no human can achieve.


https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/a-harvard-psychiatrist-explains-our?r=a5jtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter


Excellent article and more to read on the link

The internet's always been this way.

I've given up pointing out, for example, that Islamic terrorists have real grievances, and that ordinary Muslims shouldn't be treated differently because of the actions of terrorists -- that instantly brands me as a Muzzie lover who hates the West and loves it when Westerners are killed.

The internet's never been fond of nuance.

Very interesting. I do tend to agree with the outline of this article. There’s definitely something very different about that generation, but doesn't every generation feel they’re somehow wiser than the one below them?

eddie wrote:Very interesting. I do tend to agree with the outline of this article. There’s definitely something very different about that generation, but doesn't every generation feel they’re somehow wiser than the one below them?

Indeed Eddie generations continually change, but this one has grown an artificial extension to their arms. One they are addicted to, which is causing a massive increase in mental health issues especially in teen girls

I think society needs to get out more and live their i-phones behind for the day, they might start seeing what they are missing out on

I also think the problem with the online world, and this transcends generations, is a lack of patience, which the article addresses a bit.

Ah well, give it time ...

Ben Reilly wrote:I also think the problem with the online world, and this transcends generations, is a lack of patience, which the article addresses a bit.

Ah well, give it time ...

Agreed and has made people become more tribal sadly

Ben Reilly wrote:I also think the problem with the online world, and this transcends generations, is a lack of patience, which the article addresses a bit.

Ah well, give it time ...

Talking of having patience, this will make you chuckle Ben

https://www.sunnyskyz.com/happy-videos/10498/Little-Boy-Explains-Why-Gentlemen-Say-039-Ladies-First-039-

Didgee wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:I also think the problem with the online world, and this transcends generations, is a lack of patience, which the article addresses a bit.

Ah well, give it time ...

Talking of having patience, this will make you chuckle Ben

https://www.sunnyskyz.com/happy-videos/10498/Little-Boy-Explains-Why-Gentlemen-Say-039-Ladies-First-039-

Love it.