9 ms·

It's a much better piece than I expected. Still direct and simple enough, but tackles an important issue and is long enough to give it the treatment it deserves

It's a much better piece than I expected. Still direct and simple enough, but tackles an important issue and is long enough to give it the treatment it deserves. I can definitely relate to the change in how identity is understood compared to Shrier's teenage years (or to mine, for that matter). The modern version just feels like a weird exercise in box-collecting. It's bizarre to see how what people get excited in modern fiction is "[Character] has [identity marker X]!" The excitement isn't about the character being awesome, or deep, or relatable. It's about a stupid box. > The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. I cringe a bit recalling the person I was in my twenties, because she represented an early stage of an ongoing project that I have modified much in the years since. My twenties were an early draft of a manuscript whose sentences I have revised, pruned, and qualified. Ideally, if I keep forcing myself to do hard things, the later drafts of my eternally incomplete manuscript will be more captivating. Here, though, she goes wrong a little. Meaning is made is a somewhat iffy choice of words because it implies we can decide that things are meaningful and I think most of us will agree that it doesn't quite work that way. Yet Shrier is right that by doing hard things you will oftentimes create a sense of meaning, but that meaning is found in the process of engaging with the world, not decided by human will.

solarmist 4y ago
I don’t have the same interpretation of her words. But she glosses over what she means because it involves introspection and this essay is almost anti-introspection. It isn’t, but the author devotes zero inches to it. To me meaning is made retrospectively. She’s right about experiences and so are you, you don’t choose most of what you experience, but afterwards you must assign a meaning to those experiences. As a writer Shrier provably takes that for granted (curse of knowledge). I agree she went too far in her rhetoric, but I still feel it’s an excellent article.
- soundnote 4y ago
  Yeah, that kind of thing happens, like people in retrospect really valuing their time in the military despite getting conscripted and a lot of the experience being on its face awful and full of suffering. But what I was talking about is more realtime, say you pick up an instrument and keep experimenting with it and what can happen is that it starts to click and feel really good and the possibilities for self-expression or just making nice sounding things really hit you and get you excited to play the following day and so on. A sense of meaningfulness and import then and there. It's the stuff that creates motivation and people are waiting for when they want to start doing something, when they should just start.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Oh! Yeah. Play. Unstructured play is super important. And very devalued in modern society as well, but we've realized it's important, so I think this is on the mend (slowly).
    - lordfrito 4y ago
      This. Kids want to explore their world. We've setup so many safe sandboxes and guided activities for them they don't get to explore. This is why 20 somethings are so stressed about dealing with the real world, and wish it would change to accommodate them. Up till this point, everything else has accommodated them.
      - solarmist 4y ago
        Yup. Taking on and handling risk is very important to becoming an adult. But American life sanitizes everything until you’re 18 then throws you to the wolves.
lordfrito 4y ago
> The modern version just feels like a weird exercise in box-collecting. The few teenage women in my family I interact with are obsessed with ticking all right boxes. I get the impression they don't have any idea what they are, but they are desperate to find it, label it, and put it in a box so they can tell their friends. Preferably a trendy box. The anger they have built up around names/labels and which are the right/wrong ones appears deeply unhealthy to me. It's one thing for career woman to talk about systemic sexism in male dominated professional spheres. It's another thing to hear a 20 year old college freshman with practically no life experience passionately parrot what they've heard about wage disparity, glass ceilings, and other things they have literally zero direct personal experience with. You can't fix things by discussing "problems experienced in theory", you can only have meaningful dialog about fixing things when you can discuss "problems experienced in practice". I feel it's deeply unhealthy for this new generation, and I fear that we're facing some sort of epidemic of mental illnesses in the next decade or two. In some ways I think we're already there. I agree that search for identity is a search for meaning. And finding meaning takes a lot of trial and error (the trials being the hard part and the work she refers to). I've changed a lot in my 30 years as an adult, always for the better I think.
- solarmist 4y ago
  I think you’re being too harsh here. Everyone learns by mimicry. Understanding the why always comes after. Even if you know the why before you won’t understand it deeply until you try the thing. You should reflect on it after you try it on, but coping options of those around you is perfectly natural and normal, but at some point you need to reflect if those attitudes reflect your reality and experience.
  - lordfrito 4y ago
    Yeah I have a tendency to be harsh/blunt, I'm mainly talking about the troubling trend I'm seeing. I'm glad everyone is OK to pursue whatever internal dialog and search for meaning they want, in a compassionate world, wherever it leads them. But it seems that what these kids lack is the ability to introspect and reality-check their experience. The label is all that it's about. Yes I'm talking about young adults. I just don't ever remember being that way. When I was a kid I'd argue about why communism or anarchy (being a punk) was the way to go. But I wouldn't get so animated about it with other adults, employers, etc. If this behavior is normal, I guess maybe I expect too much from others. As I said, I don't like the trend. All I see is anger and unhappiness in youth. It's no wonder they're staying home and getting high.

solarmist 4y ago

I don’t have the same interpretation of her words. But she glosses over what she means because it involves introspection and this essay is almost anti-introspection. It isn’t, but the author devotes zero inches to it. To me meaning is made retrospectively. She’s right about experiences and so are you, you don’t choose most of what you experience, but afterwards you must assign a meaning to those experiences. As a writer Shrier provably takes that for granted (curse of knowledge). I agree she went too far in her rhetoric, but I still feel it’s an excellent article.

soundnote 4y ago
Yeah, that kind of thing happens, like people in retrospect really valuing their time in the military despite getting conscripted and a lot of the experience being on its face awful and full of suffering. But what I was talking about is more realtime, say you pick up an instrument and keep experimenting with it and what can happen is that it starts to click and feel really good and the possibilities for self-expression or just making nice sounding things really hit you and get you excited to play the following day and so on. A sense of meaningfulness and import then and there. It's the stuff that creates motivation and people are waiting for when they want to start doing something, when they should just start.
- solarmist 4y ago
  Oh! Yeah. Play. Unstructured play is super important. And very devalued in modern society as well, but we've realized it's important, so I think this is on the mend (slowly).
  - lordfrito 4y ago
    This. Kids want to explore their world. We've setup so many safe sandboxes and guided activities for them they don't get to explore. This is why 20 somethings are so stressed about dealing with the real world, and wish it would change to accommodate them. Up till this point, everything else has accommodated them.
    - solarmist 4y ago
      Yup. Taking on and handling risk is very important to becoming an adult. But American life sanitizes everything until you’re 18 then throws you to the wolves.

lordfrito 4y ago

> The modern version just feels like a weird exercise in box-collecting. The few teenage women in my family I interact with are obsessed with ticking all right boxes. I get the impression they don't have any idea what they are, but they are desperate to find it, label it, and put it in a box so they can tell their friends. Preferably a trendy box. The anger they have built up around names/labels and which are the right/wrong ones appears deeply unhealthy to me. It's one thing for career woman to talk about systemic sexism in male dominated professional spheres. It's another thing to hear a 20 year old college freshman with practically no life experience passionately parrot what they've heard about wage disparity, glass ceilings, and other things they have literally zero direct personal experience with. You can't fix things by discussing "problems experienced in theory", you can only have meaningful dialog about fixing things when you can discuss "problems experienced in practice". I feel it's deeply unhealthy for this new generation, and I fear that we're facing some sort of epidemic of mental illnesses in the next decade or two. In some ways I think we're already there. I agree that search for identity is a search for meaning. And finding meaning takes a lot of trial and error (the trials being the hard part and the work she refers to). I've changed a lot in my 30 years as an adult, always for the better I think.

solarmist 4y ago
I think you’re being too harsh here. Everyone learns by mimicry. Understanding the why always comes after. Even if you know the why before you won’t understand it deeply until you try the thing. You should reflect on it after you try it on, but coping options of those around you is perfectly natural and normal, but at some point you need to reflect if those attitudes reflect your reality and experience.
- lordfrito 4y ago
  Yeah I have a tendency to be harsh/blunt, I'm mainly talking about the troubling trend I'm seeing. I'm glad everyone is OK to pursue whatever internal dialog and search for meaning they want, in a compassionate world, wherever it leads them. But it seems that what these kids lack is the ability to introspect and reality-check their experience. The label is all that it's about. Yes I'm talking about young adults. I just don't ever remember being that way. When I was a kid I'd argue about why communism or anarchy (being a punk) was the way to go. But I wouldn't get so animated about it with other adults, employers, etc. If this behavior is normal, I guess maybe I expect too much from others. As I said, I don't like the trend. All I see is anger and unhappiness in youth. It's no wonder they're staying home and getting high.