Why Are Gen Z Girls Suffering So Much? - Freya India

[Victor van Rijn]

This well spoken young (24) guest on this podcast shares some balanced perspectives on the current mental health of today's girls and young women.

 

[Emerald]

I suspect it has to do with the fact that girls/women tend to be more emotionally and intuitively attuned to pain and suffering compared to boys/men who tend to be a bit more detached. And the internet has given a direct window into all the sufferings of the world. 

I know it impacts me very strongly because I can feel the pain of the world as a constant looming presence far more than I ever did before.

My ignorance and the lack of the internet (in the capacity it is today) in my teens and early 20s kept me insulated from taking on all the pains of the world. But now everything has opened up to reveal all the profound suffering in ways that weren't as front and center as they are now.

And I've thought "Jeez! I'm glad that I wasn't constantly experiencing this soup of worldly suffering in my formative years and that I was numbed out from it because my world was allowed to be smaller."

There is an almost maternal instinct to want to alleviate the sufferings of the world... and yet no one takes these vulnerabilities seriously and just brush it off as "wokeness" or moralization or being a killjoy... etc.

This is probably also why you see a divide politically between young men and women. 

Young women tend to be very progressive and attuned to all the problems going on globally and use the internet to connect with others who are involved in similar progressive causes... while young men tend to be more focused towards individualistic forms of content around self-betterment.

So, young men may have ways of keeping themselves insulated from the sufferings of the world via individualistic focus, self-improvement focus, anti-wokeness, and other ways of feeling individualistically empowered and ignoring and detaching from collective pain and trauma.

But these things are difficult not to feel and notice for more Feminine individuals who are more attuned to under-currents of pain. This is especially difficult when there is very little that can be done to move the needle to create relief for the suffering.

 

Edited March 8 by Emerald

[Schizophonia]

Why girls ? 

[Michael569]

10 hours ago, Emerald said:

There is an almost maternal instinct to want to alleviate the sufferings of the world... and yet no one takes these vulnerabilities seriously and just brush it off as "wokeness" or moralization or being a killjoy... etc.

This is probably also why you see a divide politically between young men and women. 

what I noticed is that there is a tendency among women (but also men) on the internet to almost try to create self-suffering where there isn't one. It is almost as if the demand for suffering has far outweighted the supply of it in western societies where the basic anxieties of survival are fully covered. Hence all the gender wars, Gaza discussions, constant cries about inquality, intolerance, opression of masculine patriarchy. 

Its like we have run out of problems and we are trying very hard to create them so that we have something to bicker about? 

[Emerald]

4 hours ago, Michael569 said:

what I noticed is that there is a tendency among women (but also men) on the internet to almost try to create self-suffering where there isn't one. It is almost as if the demand for suffering has far outweighted the supply of it in western societies where the basic anxieties of survival are fully covered. Hence all the gender wars, Gaza discussions, constant cries about inquality, intolerance, opression of masculine patriarchy. 

Its like we have run out of problems and we are trying very hard to create them so that we have something to bicker about? 

Personally, I've had plenty of struggles in my own life... material and otherwise. (And that certainly isn't uncommon, even for people in first world nations as suffering is everywhere)

But I still have a hard time stomaching all the suffering of the world. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I was a teenager with this much access. It's just technology allowing for a widening of the circle of concern for sensitive individuals.

Edit: It reminds me of the case study on chimps where researchers were studying chimps and there was a group of depressed chimps among them. And so, they separated out the depressed chimps from the rest of the group to see what would happen to the depressed chimps and non-depressed chimps.

And what happened is that the whole group of chimps died.

It's just that the depressed chimps were extra sensitive and functioning like a canary in the coal mine. And the other less sensitive chimps couldn't heed the warning signs with the depressed chimps gone.

Edited March 8 by Emerald