We Are Too Sensitive, Here's Why

The discussion at hand is about us, every single one of us that has or will have an impact on our society. I’m here to talk about what we all proclaim to be the most progressive, open-minded, and free-spirited group of individuals, us. I, Lash, am one of us, but unlike most, I can’t stand by idly and accept these titles we’ve given ourselves. We as a society cannot. We can’t call ourselves open-minded when we don’t even let others with differentiating opinions to share their thoughts without ridiculing or silencing them. We can’t call ourselves progressive when we value trying over real achievement, and getting angry when life gives us reality checks because said “trying” clearly isn’t achieving much. We can’t call ourselves free-spirited when everything under the sun offends us and devolves us into crybabies. We are nothing more than pampered, thin-skinned whiners. Simply put; we are the most sensitive generation in any point of time in modern, actually, in all of human history. For crying out loud, we have safe spaces on college campuses. You know, colleges, where young adults go for higher education to help them in their adult life. These are the same young adults who shrivel up into fetal positions and cry when they hear a microaggression that triggers them. That’s fancy talk for when someone says a subjectively rude statement and they’re hurt by it, regardless of what has been said is true or not, or if it was directed towards them in the first place. Seriously, why even get mad over something if it isn’t true in relation to yourself?

It’s hilariously sad and ironic to think that we reject reality because it’s too cruel a concept, but everything we get offended by we treat as if it were true. Adding to that, we don’t even verge far from our own set of preferences and habits because they work well for us. This makes us not want to even consider different lifestyle choices, even if they are better for us. For example, maybe your time management needs to be changed because it’s not as efficient as it should be. But you don’t care, you’ve optimized it to give you the most amount of free time instead of actual work done but get mad when people call you lazy even though you do “work”. Or maybe you should start looking into making new friends so you can gain valuable social skills that can help you in the future, but you won’t do it. You think everyone else is boring or annoying and won’t give a second thought to even interacting with them. But the second someone calls you anti-social or plain out mean, you flip out and angrily tell them you have more friends than them. This idea of hostility towards new ideas and opinions that change our own way of thinking is literally anything but being open-minded. Funny enough, that can qualify as a definition of being narrow-minded.

We’ve come to a point where we let emotions rule over facts so that we can comfort ourselves from the cruelty of reality. Hell, two lines into our speech outline and it tells us to make sure not to offend anyone in the class. This goes to show we treat each other like snowflakes that melt to the slightest warmth of reality. We resort to victimizing ourselves when things don’t go our way. We always want to blame something else for our shortcomings, albeit a teacher who presumably didn’t give enough time for a presentation, or a speech, or a friend who doesn’t understand where you come from, which makes it totally okay for you to be mean to them 24/7. This also goes to show we also never want to blame ourselves and our own personal negative traits on our failures in life. We instead blame things that we can’t control like sex, race, upbringing or creed. We shouldn’t use things that can’t be controlled as excuses for our mistakes. We should instead accept our own drawbacks and seek to fix them. Instead, we use irrelevant factors in ourselves and the outside world in order to shield ourselves from taking responsibility for our shortcomings.

Though I say all these things, we are far more than what I belittle ourselves to be, what older generations belittle ourselves to be, what the rest of the world belittle ourselves to be. We can be so much more than thin-skinned, narrow-minded, sensitive whiners. But if that’s a title you want to accept, then I don’t want anything to do with it.