I also worry even more deeply about this assumption that the phrase "protecting my mental health" is somehow being abused. This is not to rag the tweet I quoted. I'm just hearing this a lot more these days. First, nobody would ever, ever say that about physical health.

Secondly, we should all be happy that there is a lot more public awareness about how easy it is to destabilise mental health. It is truly a great thing that people know more. It means we are so many more steps closer towards the help we need.

Of course there are many inaccuracies being traded, and formal diagnoses are always far more reliable when coming from trained professionals. But. We don't blame someone in a gym lifting just what they know they can handle. But we will pile on someone mentally until they break?

Inaccuracies in any mental health info going round can tell us so much. Where and who people are learning from. What is resonating with them. What worries them and why. What questions they have. THEN we can recalibrate the next phase of public education to course correct.

Also. Judgement on a level of discomfort is a very subjective thing. If I say "it's mild" about what could be someone else's "severe", and expecting my mild to be the winning vote, that says a LOT about how I view myself in relation to the other person, and why.

There are multiple other factors at play, also, and one is our idea about which demographics should be okay suffering and why. An example: the reason it took a 21st century pandemic to reassess the alarming blood clot risk profile of hormonal birth control? It is obvious.

The idea that only harm, trauma and pointless suffering can build authentic resilience is what I am pushing against here. Gen Z are athletes. Content creators and digital mavens. Readers. Artists. People with dreams. It is not tenacity and grit they are refusing. It is harm.

Our athletes sometimes forage for food as they train. Other athletes have calories calculated in strategic, provided-for-free meals. Imagine what our athletes could do with more given to them. Gen Z push against pointless suffering which is intentionally disrespectful.

Nobody refuses to suffer when the suffering can bear fruit that makes sense to us. But the bullying and other varied nonsense is what they are saying no to. And also their no is strong and essential commentary on the amount of harm we think is normal and acceptable.

As a country we have an alarming and unhealthy obsession with praising much harm people can show they can take. We congratulate teen girls for doing an exam 30 minutes after giving birth. A girl was praised for rowing her pregnant mother to hospital at night in an emergency.

Boys are so often praised for surviving subhuman school conditions, like broken, old, rusty, dirty facilities. They are praised for doing without the care that is actively being withheld from them and told it makes them more manly. That slope is a slippery one.

My last thought: it is each generation's job to make sure life is easier for the next. That is why we side eye the Kenyans whose Kenya had buses on a timetable, for not handing over THAT Kenya to us. If Gen Z are still suffering things we could have lifted, that's on us.

TL;DR- - No shade in any way to the quoted tweet and the tweeter, just disagreement on points I have laid out - Gen Z won't take pointless suffering. This is good - Gen Z have different values. This is okay - The more mental health discourse, the better /Zagadat

@njokingumi

@BeeCee_MD Pole Daktari. It's worth considering that if so many of us all saw this one interpretation, something may not have come across like you intended. Good day.

@njokingumi Gen Z simply chooses not to suffer unnecessarily

@njokingumi Stoicism is not about suffering in silence tho

@njokingumi If anything they are much more self aware than Millennials are. They don't have the ability to persevere for social and societal benefits because they can see there aren't any. They have nothing to lose because tbh they see how failed the millennial generation was.

@njokingumi @Mochievous