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Notes -
I think a lot of WEIRD people are stunted. And I don’t think men would do much better in a similarly worded “would you rather” scenario aimed at them. The issue is that the way we raise kids and the way we’re taught (or more properly mis-taught to judge risks, rewards, and dangers) tends to create an entire culture of infantile adults who can’t understand let alone handle the real world. And we do it to ourselves.
The first issue is extreme safetyism. We’ve gone from being a frontier people who were used to handling our own lives and the risks that came with it, to a people that are suffering from anxiety and depression in probably the safest environment humanity has ever known: a country that hasn’t had a war on her own soil in almost 200 years, where the biggest health risks are diseases of gluttony or old age, where most people face the workplace dangers of paper cuts, and where we commute strapped into cars that are designed to withstand collisions going much faster than they normally go. And I think a lot of it is down to safetyist lifestyles that not only don’t teach people to reasonably handle a risk, but create a mindset in which you’re taught to ruminate on the idea of injury death, insult and loss.
The second thing we’ve been taught is to put our own feelings on the level of facts. I’m not suggest that your feelings don’t matter at all, but I do think that we’ve put them much too far forward in our thinking process, which leads to all kinds of problems. First of all, feelings about a subject are not always true. You might be afraid of spiders, but if they aren’t actually dangerous to you, that fear is only going to harm you by diminishing your own life and your ability to live it. Second, focusing on feelings especially negative feelings just makes you feel worse. Focusing on positive emotions isn’t all that great either if you get so attached to the good feelings that the loss of them is catastrophic to you, or leads to unrealistic expectations of what life is like. Negative emotions are normal, and losses are common. You will experience both often. And if you’re focused on feelings, you’ll be miserable.
The third thing is that we aren’t taught to look to facts. Nobody is asking whether a thing they believe is actually true. They aren’t taught statistics, probability or logic in school, so they have no real toolsets to use to decide what is real or not or whether a thing they read or see is true. What are the actual facts on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza? Would this not change how we think about what to do in those situations? What is the actual cause of inflation? Would knowledge of the cause change what we do to solve it?
I think the best things to teach kids are sensible risk taking, stoicism and not getting attached to luxury, and good sound thinking and truth-seeking. These things can be taught, and to be honest we used to teach them. In STEM and philosophy we still do. It’s just that we’ve removed most of this from the curriculum of people who don’t need to use them for work and then wonder why our systems don’t work and problems don’t get solved.
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