Suffering in the eyes of the snowflake generation

It's not just Generation Z (born from1997) either!

Young adults in the West are often referred to as "snowflakes" because of their fragility, that is, their inability to endure adversity, with their intolerance of an opposing point of view and their belief in entitlement erupting from the self-centredness typical of the 21st Century. In this, there does seem to be an inability to transfer the concept of "No pain, no gain" from the world of outdoor activities to a situation where accepting sharing and self-sacrifice is embraced as foundational for personal wellbeing as well as for the health of the community.

As a consequence of being brought up in a way that shapes today's mindset of immediate personal satisfaction as central to a good life, and that the causes of suffering or struggle are marks of aggression, we increasingly see a lack of resilience in the face of difficulty, little sense of direction and the loss of meaning in life. Of all these attributes of the future leaders of society, the inability to recognise the value of suffering on the journey through life is possibly the most damaging to their psyche.

Writer Oliver Burkeman goes deeper into this matter in his review* of Jordan Peterson's Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life published this year. Burkeman, an award-winning writer on issues relating to psychology, identifies areas of public confusion about suffering:

The confused public conversation about Peterson arises, if you ask me, from the fact that there are two main kinds of suffering. There is the kind that results from power disparities between groups: racism, sexism, economic inequality. Then there is the universal kind that comes with being a finite human, faced with a limited lifespan, the inevitability of death, the unavoidability of grief and regret, the inability to control the present or predict the future and the impossibility of ever fully knowing even those to whom we’re closest. Modern progressives rightly focus much energy on the first kind of suffering. But we increasingly talk as if the second kind barely counts, or doesn’t even exist – as if everything that truly matters were ultimately political. Peterson, by contrast, takes the second sort of suffering very seriously indeed.

How to regard personal problems:

The widespread reluctance among progressives to see life as anything but a matter of power struggles helps explain, among many other examples, why a writer for Vox might perceive Peterson to be telling his followers that “the world can and should revolve around them and their problems”. He isn’t; but he does write as if each reader had a moral responsibility to treat their own situation, and the development of their own character, as a matter of life and death for them, because it is. His worst fans (whom Peterson could certainly do more to disown) make a similar mistake. The resentful whiners of the men’s rights movement imagine he’s taking their side in an identity-based fight, when in fact he reminds them – incessantly, on page after page after page – that resentment and the nursing of grievances are a direct road to psychological hell. (Rule 11: “Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.”)

Is there escape from suffering?

Still, in the end, it’s a good thing that there’s space on the self-help shelves for a book as bracingly pessimistic as this one. Ours is a culture dedicated to a belief in the perfectibility of social institutions, in our limitless capacity to know the world, and to bring it under our control, and in the infallible rightness of present day moral judgments. Peterson offers an invaluable reminder that we’re finite and inherently imperfect; that we can’t control everything, or even very much[...] Above all, we can’t escape suffering, or, as Peterson puts it with characteristic extravagance, “anxiety, doubt, shame, pain, and illness, the agony of conscience, the soul-shattering pit of grief, dashed dreams and disappointment, the reality of betrayal, subjection to the tyranny of social being, and the ignominy of aging unto death”. And our only hope of making it bearable lies in facing it, alongside others, as fully as we can.

The best stance in the face of pain:

Peterson’s final rule is to “be grateful in spite of your suffering”. This carries the implication that you ought to accept your lot in life – which is an offensive thing to say, of course, to someone fighting the impact of poverty, sexism or racism. But it’s very wise advice for anyone facing the universal catastrophe of having been born. Even if we managed to achieve the utopia of justice and equity, we’d still be stuck with the pain of being human. And courage and love – plus the laughter you won’t find in the pages of this book – really are the only ways to cope with that.

* Read the review in full here.
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