(11-29-2023, 07:53 PM)Freija Wrote: ...
I also kind of think many with this victimized personality type have never really faced true hardship or challenges to shape their perspectives or were never taught or shown how to rise above?
This.
An inordinate amount of current teens and twenty-somethings have never know actual hardship. Don't get me wrong - there are those who have - but they are definitely not in the majority.
Modern youngsters, for the most part, have had life handed to them on a silver platter. That's our fault in the older generations - we had this crazy idea that our kids should be gifted with a better life, rather than having to do anything on their own to merit it. Every generation does that, but we had the technology to make it happen nearly effortlessly.
The net result is a generation, maybe two, who have never known actual hardship, an actual "rough life", and therefore have not had to learn, have not had to adjust, have not had to "adapt and overcome". So, what they believe is a "hard life" is what we, years ago, called "Thursday", and what our parents called "breakfast - the day's just startin' ".
I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago. A girl was running across the living room screaming "It's broken! It's broken!" while holding her left arm out at arm's length with her right hand. Her dad, alarmed, asked "What? What is it she broke? Her arm? Her finger? Do we need to take her to the hospital?" and her mom replied nonchalantly "No. It's a fingernail. She broke a fingernail."
I never realized just how true that prophetic cartoon would come to be. It was funny back then. Not so funny now, watching it come to fruition.
It reminds me of the old saw that goes:
"Hard times make hard men.
Hard men make soft times.
Soft times make soft men.
Soft men make hard times."
.