FIRE
The Eternally Radical Idea
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the sixth part of a multi-part series updating developments since the publication of “
Future articles can be found here.
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt and I identified a total of six causal threads that helped explain why Gen Z (roughly the generation born from 1996 to 2015) is so different from prior generations in terms of everything from higher rates of anxiety and depression, to attitudes about freedom of speech.
One of those causal threads was “paranoid parenting,” which includes “safetyism,” and the irrationally exaggerated fear of extremely low probability events, like stranger kidnapping. We also discussed a slightly different type of parenting paranoia, focused on academic performance, starting as early as preschool and leading to the soul-stealing and anxiety-producing “resume arms race” to be accepted into the extremely limited spots at a handful of elite colleges, lamented by William Deresiewicz in “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.”