There's this great scene in Mad Men. In it, aging bon vivant Roger Sterling chastises the slightly younger depressive genius Don Draper over his lack of joy when drinking.
This is a wonderful post and expresses something that has bothered me for a while but haven't been able to put into words why. I find that some of my friends loudly broadcast their depression on social media as if it's a badge of honor, not realizing that the thing that you should be proud of is finding a way to not be depressed. It's like an alcoholic constantly garnering pity for being an alcoholic but still drinking every night.
Yes, I realize these things are hard - I suffered from depression in college, both my parents were alcoholics before dying of alcohol related deaths - but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Talking about your depression is pointless unless it leads to you not being depressed, yet it seems like people don't see that forest for the trees. They instinctually prefer to get attention for being depressed over the feeling of happiness. At some point you need to get on with your life and find better ways of coping because it's a shitty way to spend your time.
It's strange, right? I fully support ending the stigma around depression and mental illness, but it feels like the conversation has shot past that and into... whatever murky weirdness we find ourselves in now. "This thing that I struggle with is not only Not Bad but in fact Extremely Good, Actually."
100% - it's great that we don't have to pretend to be emotionless robots anymore and we can admit vulnerability, but we've swung a little too far over with the incentives. When you're constantly showered with praise for feeling like shit about yourself... it's like they say, don't pet a nervous dog else they'll learn to be nervous to get attention.
There has to be a middle ground between the "rub some dirt on it and get back out there, ya pansy" old-school jock mentality and the "any challenge or setback is a targeted assault on my well-being and that I will not abide and also how dare you?" place we're in right now. The shift happened so fast that we never really experienced the happy middle ground where athletes were allowed to struggle in the spotlight but were still expected to compete and overcome.
Yeah, it's almost like the cultural perspective should just be "get back out there because life goes on and you have to." There doesn't need to be value judgments or name calling, but there also doesn't have to be a coronation. Just life is really hard sometimes for each and every one of us and you'll be much happier if you fight your way through it rather than letting it overwhelm. I've never felt better after quitting and I've always felt better when I surprised myself with my resilience.
Brilliant article. I've suffered from depression my whole life, and I've had major issues with avoidance and playing the victim.
But something has happened in the last few years. Seeing this embrace of victimhood in mainstream liberal culture, combined with the incredibly mean, prosecutor-style nature of Social Justice Politics... it has me thinking "Oh God, that's what I used to look like? Well fuck that. I want outta here."
So I'm doing my best to limit my social media consumption because it's a huge driver of this stuff. I feel for the youngest generation who grew up with this stuff and feel like they can't escape.
About a week ago, I called in to Jesse Singal's Callin show. I said that while I'm on board with the general Millenial/Gen Z attitude that mental health and therapy are important, it doesn't mesh with the whole "Let's aggressively shame and cancel as many people as we can all day every day."
It honestly hurts my ability to just get on with my life sometimes. The assumption is increasingly "well it'll go away when bad things stop happening" because SO much of the depression discussion surrounds "well X bad thing happened and now I am depressed". It's not like that. You can't just tell me to fuck off until I am better or tell me everything is going great why are you sad. There's more acknowledgement that depression exists, but I think there's perhaps LESS acknowledgement that depression is an actual medical condition that can't be cured by luck, exercise, sunlight, and good vibes.
The media coverage of Simone Biles at the Olympics made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Maybe 20 years ago she would've received harsh criticism for choosing not to compete, fearing for her safety. And maybe it's good that we're well past that, especially in a sport like gymnastics that's been rife with both abuse and exploitation. But the lavish praise heaped upon her, calling her a "success" simply for the act of choosing not to compete has a real Emperor's New Clothes vibe going on. And I feel like the chill over being able to say what is obviously true has irreparably damaged the Olympics as a broadcast spectacle in the US.
Having the Winter Olympics in Beijing didn't help the ratings, but maybe lots of people didn't watch because they wanted to see their fellow countrymen/women compete, not opt out.
>Osaka appears in search of a subversion the modern system won’t allow because it embraces performative subversion. In this way, the powers that be have stolen something from the young, making rebellion on major issues a nearly impossible act. The old, terrified of looking out of step, merely validate protests, depriving the youth of the meaning derived from defiance.
I've dealt with the violent campus politics of universities in the developing world (back when it was still expensive to be digitally ever-connected there) and later moved to the US to observe the performative drivel and self-congratulatory #hashtag sloganeering that passes for campus politics here. This quote captures the contrast quite well.
Social media platforms are not just "narcissism traps" but also effectively lobotomizing people with informational/content over-stimulation. There's always some fleeting trend to escape from reality. Caught myself in the same pattern recently when it struck me that there's a war going on and I barely understood it or its potential consequences. Huxleyan dystopia writ large. Martin Gurri (ex-CIA analyst), if I recall correctly, has spoken in similar terms of attempts to de-politicize the polity.
Haven't got round to reading other comments, so apologies if I'm repeating someone else.
Yeah, Ethan I almost feel like you should (assuming sub stack allows it) remove likes from posts/comments just because it's part of the problem you're fighting against. (said after I hearted this comment)
I think social media is a factor, but the driver of unhappiness is the prevalent attitude of You Will Be Made to Care. About racism or CRT or sexism or Ukraine or Afghani refugees or Central American refugees...or whatever. People feel obligated to care, and at times view most of life, through these lenses. And these things 1) are not fun and 2) cannot be fixed by you at all
People need to care about things. But people tend to be happier when those things are 1) enjoyable and/or 2) can be impacted by their actions. For example when I was a young adult I cared about: sports, hanging out with my friends, dating, and working put. I had political opinions but they were just something that were a minor part of my life, like my taste in books or food or clothes.
As a Real Adult, I care about different things- family, job,, golf etc. Less fun, but things I have some control over.
Tldr- if everything has a political lens. If everything is a cause. People will not be happy.
I think this is a great point. Growing up, I was inundated with horror stories of the rain forest being clear cut for sport by captain planet villains. It would take the combined caring of all young folks like me to have a chance to save mother earth's immune system (the amazon rainforest). So there's an apocalyptically bad problem, that shows no signs of abating, that you have to do something about, even though you can't really do much about it. Creates a lot of unhappiness and despair.
Great piece. I've been thinking about a lot of these topics lately from the perspective of schools and parenting. A lot of causes meant to protect people may be doing more harm than good. My gut tells me the "anti-bullying" campaign is ineffective at best and may simply promote fragility, entitlement, and a host of other issues. (It might be a crude analogy, but) There's some simplicity in recognizing that you build physical muscle by exercising it, which, in the case of weightlifting, is the process of repairing small tears from the abuse you just subjected your body to. Over time, the same action causes less and less abuse, because your body can handle it. And of course, in exercise or weightlifting, you can overdo it and cause serious, irrecoverable damage. I wonder if mentally there is an analog. If you are subject to challenging social circumstances, you can learn how to recover and become stronger. If everyone is on the lookout to protect people from mental anguish, how can anyone develop coping strategies to persevere or at least, survive future events?
As an aside, Simon Biles has already made it. Same with Osaka. What happens to the millions of regular job 20-year-olds who decide to stop doing their jobs because that's what's best for their mental health? Biles and Osaka are entitled to be high maintenance because they're world class athletes that have proven themselves and are currently very marketable. I don't know that the average person doing the same thing would find much success or even a soft landing spot. It's fine to "prioritize your mental health" and take steps to not get burned out. But imagine some young up-and-comer just not showing up for a big presentation they were supposed to give for a client. What manager is going to trust that person in the future? If you're unreliable, it doesn't really matter why that is.
Finally, as a parent, I worry that I don't even have a plan for how to find the right balance here between comfort and stress. Eddie Rickenbacker grew up in abject poverty and there's a story that his father beat him when he asked a question about the finality of death (as a young child). His father apparently justified this by shouting that it was inappropriate for children to have thoughts like that. (yikes!) Obviously by today's standards his father was a monster but when I read about Eddie's life, his recoveries from multiple plane crashes, surviving in a raft at sea for a month, etc - it made me curious whether his tough upbringing was part of an early forging and tempering which in turn made him so resilient. (Or maybe all these legends come shoehorned with origin stories of rising from humble or difficult beginnings and there's really no generalizable pattern here.)
As much as I hate to admit it, I'm a helicopter parent, and I work very hard to try to bring happiness and comfort to my children. I don't have a strategy for how to exercise their mental health such that they build up resilience. I also know that any negative feedback, be it constructive criticism, bullying, or otherwise, always has the potential to be internalized for motivation or discouragement. As a parent, coach, or team lead, obviously your goal is maximum effectiveness. Some people are going to respond like MJ: "and I took that personally...", and some people are going to self implode.
“ As an aside, Simon Biles has already made it. Same with Osaka. What happens to the millions of regular job 20-year-olds who decide to stop doing their jobs because that's what's best for their mental health?”
This is a great point that I’ve seen made, in other venues and in other ways, as at least a partial explanation of why working class parents are more conservative. If you’re not well off, and have little or no safety net in life, then having Osaka’s attitude is untenable, ruinous. It’s survivable for rich kids, whose parents can fill the gap during periods of self-indulgence, but deadly for poor or working class kids.
Liked. While there are far worse challenges that many parents face, I am very much with. When you have the means and ability to make things extreme comfortable for your kids, it is a real challenge to calibrate how hard they need to have things in order to become a good version of themselves.
Regardless of a person’s role/status/bank account, calling someone that is dealing with mental health challenges a “head case” and telling them to “suck it up” is stigmatizing and only makes the problem worse. You don’t need to lead a pity party for her but this kind of comment just stigmatizes mental health more.
She's just another 'woe is me' snowflake that wants it both ways. First she can't do a press conference, but will gladly make a Netflix series or be on the cover of Vogue in Japan. She also wants sick days from press conferences. That's nuts. She's an embarrassment to the champions like Martina, Steffi and Serena that paved the way for her.
She’s a world class athlete dealing with mental health challenges in a wild west of social media and access. In a vogue shoot or her Netflix series she’s controlling the narrative, a press conference is much different. I agree she needs to do them, but it’s a false equivalence comparing them to the things you mentioned. Calling her a “snowflake” and an “embarrassment” says more about you than it does about her.
Thanks for the lecture. If she's not a snowflake then what is she? She's an unbelievable talent, has more money than god, and has the ability to be in complete control of her life and future. She's 24 years old and will never have to worry about making ends meet in her life. We are all dealing with issues and the vast majority of us don't air or whine about our personal issues in public.
She’s a human that’s clearly struggling. She’s in the public much more than the average person so her struggle is happening more publicly. I don’t understand how anyone could feel anything but empathy for her, calling her names and minimizing her struggle is so unnecessary.
Either she's a great actor or has some significant mental issues that need to be treated. Doing photoshoot after photoshoot and making a series on Netflix isn't probably the best treatment for the latter.
Showing empathy and compassion isn’t enabling anything. I’ve been open with the fact that I don’t think she’s handling things well and if I was a friend of hers that could speak to her directly I wouldn’t be telling her that she’s a special flower that can ignore the haters like an enabler I would try and help her figure out how to deal with things more effectively than she is so far. There’s a middle ground between enabling and piling on someone that’s struggling.
I don't think she's struggling. Not any more than I am. She's full of shit, and telling full of shit people that you know they are full of shit is good for them.
Disagree, she is not dealing with anything that the rest of us Earthlings aren't dealing with. Some of us just realize it's called life and work to make it better. No one survives on this planet without receiving deep scars. Survival is at the very core of existence here. for every single organism seeking life. She can fuch right off. Pardon my Deutsch.
I don’t think we disagree as much as you think we do.. I agree 100% she’s not dealing with anything the rest of us aren’t, and she isn’t handling it well like a lot of people aren’t, I’m saying give her the same grace and compassion you would give to your own family member that is struggling. She’s not doing a good job of handling her struggles.. so why can she “Fuch right off”? Because she’s not strong enough to handle her problems as well as you think she should?
I'm with you on the grace and compassion for most folks. But not conmen. And not those who knowingly subvert reason. She labels her cowardice as bravery? Double Fuch Off for her.
When I see her I see a young girl that is dealing with things that most people could never conceptualize or come close to understanding, saying she’s a conman that is knowingly subverting reason just feels like an insane leap for me.. I guess I just don’t understand why people don’t give other people every benefit of the doubt possible.
Maybe you'd understand if you paid attention to people's Motives. She's not at home getting better, she's out making millions off of this grift. I was born on a day, but it wasn't yesterday.
What strikes me about Osaka is just how appalled my therapists over the years would be if I reacted to dysthymia like that. There's nothing wrong with being hyper-sensitive - I AM hypersensitive! - but every mental health professional worth their weight in dogshit endlessly reminds me when I am overreacting or when I just need to suck it up.
I don't want to make this a performance/participation trophy thing but I do think to some extent the problem is simply how BIG athletes are now. If you're Kyler Murray or Naomi Osaka you legitimately have no idea how to lose. they win. That's what they do. That's what everyone expects you to do. So when they loses they feel like something they were promised- something that rightfully belongs to them. The "you suck" doesn't hurt because it's particularly cutting but because for the first time in their lives they actually DO suck relative to their competition. A reminder that all the guarantees by everyone in life that they were unbeatable were mere lies.
I need to preface my critique by saying that I enjoy your writing and that it is indeed thought-provoking. But this piece falls flat for me in a few ways.
Firstly, you allude to it, but this is a wee bit rich coming from you. The first time we ever interracted on one of your ESPN chats many moons ago, I asked you if you actively tried to be a contrarian or if you really just saw things from a different perspective from the mainstream. Your answer touched on being an only child and how that affected how you saw the world. Now here you are not just with your own website, but your entire deal is your individuality and how your perspective is unique from prestige media which is why you had to free yourself of its shackles, yadda yadda. None of that is bad, by the way. But it does seem a mite contradictory to scold athletes from being so self-focused when you've done the same (quite well!).
I think you're missing a key piece of context when it comes to athletes prioritizing their mental health. They are going against the grain of generations upon generations of "toughing it out," quite often to their significant detriment. Why do you think Michael Phelps cheered Biles so loudly? Because he toughed it out and was suicidally miserable. Sports, competition, adversity -- they're all wonderful. But the culture of machismo that encourages people to hurt themselves for other peoples' glory? Feh.
We all know that star entertainers and athletes have huge egos -- that's not new. Self involved athletes in individual sports like tennis and golf strike me as more the rule than the exception. I think the much more interesting critique and case studies are with social media. You raise a great point -- Silver knows that social media is making his product miserable and yet is leaning into it. Why?
I never looked, but was once told by a smart friend that you can draw a pretty straight line between the start of the opioid epidemic and the release of the iPhone. Maybe old people are happier because they haven't had to grow up on instagram.
Or... Ethan isn't seeking acceptance from his peers and is finding self-actualization from being open and honest with his audience? I think it's more selfless to risk your career for a principled stance vs. just mindlessly collecting a paycheck while you write the same article as everyone else in order to not stain your reputation.
Ethan isn't missing that context at all. He's specifically calling it out. I think you're just reading your own perspectives into the article.
PS the start of the opioid epidemic more closely correlates with opioids being widely available via prescription. People were knocking off pharmacies for Oxycontin well before Steve Jobs even thought of the iPhone.
Have to say Michael Phelps did in fact "tough it out" and was much better for it, it isn't wrong to admit you had an issue like Phelps, DD, or someone like Tyson Fury, all learned from that and came out of it they didn't stop mid match and have a breakdown in front of everyone, they dealt with that in personal lives and used it as motivation.
Which goes into what is courage because people in the media aren't putting thought into it? Is it when your surrounded by enemies and you put your hands up and put out the white flag is that courage? Or is it fighting it out till the end?
There's so many examples of courage in history and popular myth and I can't think of one where quitting to wild applause is courageous. 300 Spartan warriors could have walked home but they were carried on their shields but what if one decided to walk home? He would have been a pariah and by the medias concept of courage they'd say he had it, but he he wouldn't have been celebrated and would have rightly been called a coward by his people. I wouldn't call it courage to quit to wild celebration.
Naomi has no idea what proper heckling is, see I hate Christian Laetner for a proper example, I don't know what's wrong with her but the way she's dealing with it doesn't appear to be the healthiest when one fan saying something brings her back 14 years to another person and she can't deal with it, then decides to call it out right after. Get help, find ways to cope with the stress as every athlete ever has had to do on large stages, her reaction is a manifestation that she isn't getting help.
Also Phelps cheered Biles because he was an announcer and if he didn't he'd have been excoriated by the media for it, as Novak was when his first reaction to Naomi was to say "do your job" essentially, then he took the heat and walked back.
I think a lot of younger people are going to be stuck in a dark place for a while. Having most of your interpersonal connections being primarily digital, working from home all the time, etc., all makes it very difficult to really pour yourself into the consideration of others (as Ethan noted with the Klosterman reference). I keep seeing teens and 20-somethings posting on social media sites about their extreme anxiety and depression. The most common thread is loneliness. Yes, there are plenty of people who will suffer from these conditions regardless of their circumstance, but there is something I think we all recognize about regular connection with humans we care for that really helps fight that sadness away.
Maybe someday through advances in technology and human adaptation, we'll be able to happily exist in a world where most or all of our interaction is digital. But we aren't there today, yet we've been conditioning young people to think we are. Technology is amazing and can solve an endless number of problems. It cannot, yet at least, perfectly replace having a coffee with an old friend or playing tag with your kid.
As for the athletes? They suffer from being brought up on the same lies, that technology is the new way for us to connect. But they're also dealing with, as Ethan has pointed out many times, millions of strangers talking about them all the time.
The younger generations have a lot better standard of living compared to older ones. And that can lead to finding things to worry about that seem absurd to people who had to fear polio or Russian nukes (wait, what?). But the level of physical isolation that tons of younger people deal with (not just through the pandemic) is something that would be a massive struggle for any generation.
Yes, I realize people still get together in person. I realize most schools and jobs are in person. Spend time around any teenager or person in their early 20s and it's quite clear how much time they spend in the digital world, even if they are physically near others. I'm not faulting them as this is what our society has pushed toward pretty collectively. But I am saying people aren't conditioned to be happy while living that way.
Another home run. Just haven't been missing recently, Ethan. I've noticed this trend of the unhappy athlete, as well, but haven't been able to quite pinpoint exactly what it is. You just did. Keep it up
Holy shit, Ethan. Thanks for taking all the loose crumbs of semi-thought that've been skittering around my brain for months (years?) and turning them into something. Reading this was better than going to the fucking doctor.
Another great article. The moments I spend with my 3 and 5 year old boys l, where I am truly present and focused on them and what they want is pure bliss.
So this got me thinking of a similar thought I had about athletes being so thin skinned today vs in the past, and the player that got me thinking was Russell Westbrook. After his most recent surly response to a legit question to the media (his childish response is he has no "vision" of anything, which was not the dunk he thought it was it is an indictment of his game, oh so that's why he does horribly idiotic things to end games) I happened to catch I Hate Christian Laetner on ESPN.
Christian was before my time, I was annoyed with him because he ruined the Dream Team but I never had an opinion about him, but it wasn't until watching that doc that I realized he was actually hated, and talk about hate! That's the kind of hate that you can't help but respect, he had a whole crowd of LSU fans chanting homophobic slurs at him and he didn't let it bother him, in a time when being gay wasn't like it is now. Every athlete, like Russ, or Naomi should watch that and realize they have it light.
Lastly why didn't you bring up Happy Gilmore? It used to be a lesson you had to learn, if some fan heckles you the reaction isn't to punch Bob Barker, it's to stay calm as Happy learns and win one for Grandma... which plays into your point that the best way to not be so sensitive is to have someone else in your life your playing for, like your grandma.
Great piece. I'd like to see a real comparison between two (it seems to me) reasonably similar stories: Simone Biles and Makaela Shiffrin. I think the key difference here is that Biles proclaimed herself in physical danger, while Shiffrin proclaimed herself feeling great and skiing well, even though she had a terrible Olympics. But both play dangerous sports. Both were marketed as faces of the Olympics. Biles did her thing. Shiffrin was the opposite--she was clearly upset by the results, but she picked herself up, did the press conferences, owned it, and kept trying. I think, honestly, the media/NBC did not know what to do with this. Because it flies in the face of the Biles/Osaka driven narrative. It's the more traditional narrative of resilience and perseverance even in the face of (god forbid we should say it) choking. (Query the degree to which there is a gendered element here as well. This is different from playing through mental-health challenges or even not coming to work. Both Biles and Shiffrin just failed. To be clear, this is fine. I hate the narrative of the choking athlete--you win some, you lose some. Much better that the narrative be about resilience and a comeback than the shame of failure. But NBC was legit flummoxed about what to do with Shiffrin, because Shiffrin refused to jump in on the Biles narrative. There are lots of differences between the two stories and the two sports (I don't know anything about skiing (though perhaps the Olympics are, as in tennis/golf/soccer etc. just not the main event), but gymnastics is a clear shit show in ways far beyond the sport itself. I do think the media point is fascinating.
This is a wonderful post and expresses something that has bothered me for a while but haven't been able to put into words why. I find that some of my friends loudly broadcast their depression on social media as if it's a badge of honor, not realizing that the thing that you should be proud of is finding a way to not be depressed. It's like an alcoholic constantly garnering pity for being an alcoholic but still drinking every night.
Yes, I realize these things are hard - I suffered from depression in college, both my parents were alcoholics before dying of alcohol related deaths - but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Talking about your depression is pointless unless it leads to you not being depressed, yet it seems like people don't see that forest for the trees. They instinctually prefer to get attention for being depressed over the feeling of happiness. At some point you need to get on with your life and find better ways of coping because it's a shitty way to spend your time.
It's strange, right? I fully support ending the stigma around depression and mental illness, but it feels like the conversation has shot past that and into... whatever murky weirdness we find ourselves in now. "This thing that I struggle with is not only Not Bad but in fact Extremely Good, Actually."
100% - it's great that we don't have to pretend to be emotionless robots anymore and we can admit vulnerability, but we've swung a little too far over with the incentives. When you're constantly showered with praise for feeling like shit about yourself... it's like they say, don't pet a nervous dog else they'll learn to be nervous to get attention.
There has to be a middle ground between the "rub some dirt on it and get back out there, ya pansy" old-school jock mentality and the "any challenge or setback is a targeted assault on my well-being and that I will not abide and also how dare you?" place we're in right now. The shift happened so fast that we never really experienced the happy middle ground where athletes were allowed to struggle in the spotlight but were still expected to compete and overcome.
Yeah, it's almost like the cultural perspective should just be "get back out there because life goes on and you have to." There doesn't need to be value judgments or name calling, but there also doesn't have to be a coronation. Just life is really hard sometimes for each and every one of us and you'll be much happier if you fight your way through it rather than letting it overwhelm. I've never felt better after quitting and I've always felt better when I surprised myself with my resilience.
Brilliant article. I've suffered from depression my whole life, and I've had major issues with avoidance and playing the victim.
But something has happened in the last few years. Seeing this embrace of victimhood in mainstream liberal culture, combined with the incredibly mean, prosecutor-style nature of Social Justice Politics... it has me thinking "Oh God, that's what I used to look like? Well fuck that. I want outta here."
So I'm doing my best to limit my social media consumption because it's a huge driver of this stuff. I feel for the youngest generation who grew up with this stuff and feel like they can't escape.
"I have a medical condition, I’m not a pussy." That's extremely well put.
About a week ago, I called in to Jesse Singal's Callin show. I said that while I'm on board with the general Millenial/Gen Z attitude that mental health and therapy are important, it doesn't mesh with the whole "Let's aggressively shame and cancel as many people as we can all day every day."
In fact it's hypocritical in the extreme.
It honestly hurts my ability to just get on with my life sometimes. The assumption is increasingly "well it'll go away when bad things stop happening" because SO much of the depression discussion surrounds "well X bad thing happened and now I am depressed". It's not like that. You can't just tell me to fuck off until I am better or tell me everything is going great why are you sad. There's more acknowledgement that depression exists, but I think there's perhaps LESS acknowledgement that depression is an actual medical condition that can't be cured by luck, exercise, sunlight, and good vibes.
The media coverage of Simone Biles at the Olympics made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Maybe 20 years ago she would've received harsh criticism for choosing not to compete, fearing for her safety. And maybe it's good that we're well past that, especially in a sport like gymnastics that's been rife with both abuse and exploitation. But the lavish praise heaped upon her, calling her a "success" simply for the act of choosing not to compete has a real Emperor's New Clothes vibe going on. And I feel like the chill over being able to say what is obviously true has irreparably damaged the Olympics as a broadcast spectacle in the US.
Having the Winter Olympics in Beijing didn't help the ratings, but maybe lots of people didn't watch because they wanted to see their fellow countrymen/women compete, not opt out.
Yep. I felt the same way. Found myself wondering what happened to "she withdrew, which is understandable, but also not the greatest thing ever?"
Glad this ended up being about more than just the athletes. Some stray thoughts:
1) The athlete bits, in particular, the traits we celebrated in them sort of connect to this piece that was making the rounds recently.
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/on-hustle-culture
2) This quote really struck a note with me:
>Osaka appears in search of a subversion the modern system won’t allow because it embraces performative subversion. In this way, the powers that be have stolen something from the young, making rebellion on major issues a nearly impossible act. The old, terrified of looking out of step, merely validate protests, depriving the youth of the meaning derived from defiance.
I've dealt with the violent campus politics of universities in the developing world (back when it was still expensive to be digitally ever-connected there) and later moved to the US to observe the performative drivel and self-congratulatory #hashtag sloganeering that passes for campus politics here. This quote captures the contrast quite well.
Social media platforms are not just "narcissism traps" but also effectively lobotomizing people with informational/content over-stimulation. There's always some fleeting trend to escape from reality. Caught myself in the same pattern recently when it struck me that there's a war going on and I barely understood it or its potential consequences. Huxleyan dystopia writ large. Martin Gurri (ex-CIA analyst), if I recall correctly, has spoken in similar terms of attempts to de-politicize the polity.
Haven't got round to reading other comments, so apologies if I'm repeating someone else.
This is excellent. Thank you, and please enjoy the dopamine hit.
Yeah, Ethan I almost feel like you should (assuming sub stack allows it) remove likes from posts/comments just because it's part of the problem you're fighting against. (said after I hearted this comment)
Hell no, I need these Like ego biscuits!
/hollers from the cheap seats: YOU SUCK, STRAUSS.
Wait don't say that! He might stop during the middle of an interview and start crying and preaching to the camera.
I think social media is a factor, but the driver of unhappiness is the prevalent attitude of You Will Be Made to Care. About racism or CRT or sexism or Ukraine or Afghani refugees or Central American refugees...or whatever. People feel obligated to care, and at times view most of life, through these lenses. And these things 1) are not fun and 2) cannot be fixed by you at all
People need to care about things. But people tend to be happier when those things are 1) enjoyable and/or 2) can be impacted by their actions. For example when I was a young adult I cared about: sports, hanging out with my friends, dating, and working put. I had political opinions but they were just something that were a minor part of my life, like my taste in books or food or clothes.
As a Real Adult, I care about different things- family, job,, golf etc. Less fun, but things I have some control over.
Tldr- if everything has a political lens. If everything is a cause. People will not be happy.
I think this is a great point. Growing up, I was inundated with horror stories of the rain forest being clear cut for sport by captain planet villains. It would take the combined caring of all young folks like me to have a chance to save mother earth's immune system (the amazon rainforest). So there's an apocalyptically bad problem, that shows no signs of abating, that you have to do something about, even though you can't really do much about it. Creates a lot of unhappiness and despair.
Great piece. I've been thinking about a lot of these topics lately from the perspective of schools and parenting. A lot of causes meant to protect people may be doing more harm than good. My gut tells me the "anti-bullying" campaign is ineffective at best and may simply promote fragility, entitlement, and a host of other issues. (It might be a crude analogy, but) There's some simplicity in recognizing that you build physical muscle by exercising it, which, in the case of weightlifting, is the process of repairing small tears from the abuse you just subjected your body to. Over time, the same action causes less and less abuse, because your body can handle it. And of course, in exercise or weightlifting, you can overdo it and cause serious, irrecoverable damage. I wonder if mentally there is an analog. If you are subject to challenging social circumstances, you can learn how to recover and become stronger. If everyone is on the lookout to protect people from mental anguish, how can anyone develop coping strategies to persevere or at least, survive future events?
As an aside, Simon Biles has already made it. Same with Osaka. What happens to the millions of regular job 20-year-olds who decide to stop doing their jobs because that's what's best for their mental health? Biles and Osaka are entitled to be high maintenance because they're world class athletes that have proven themselves and are currently very marketable. I don't know that the average person doing the same thing would find much success or even a soft landing spot. It's fine to "prioritize your mental health" and take steps to not get burned out. But imagine some young up-and-comer just not showing up for a big presentation they were supposed to give for a client. What manager is going to trust that person in the future? If you're unreliable, it doesn't really matter why that is.
Finally, as a parent, I worry that I don't even have a plan for how to find the right balance here between comfort and stress. Eddie Rickenbacker grew up in abject poverty and there's a story that his father beat him when he asked a question about the finality of death (as a young child). His father apparently justified this by shouting that it was inappropriate for children to have thoughts like that. (yikes!) Obviously by today's standards his father was a monster but when I read about Eddie's life, his recoveries from multiple plane crashes, surviving in a raft at sea for a month, etc - it made me curious whether his tough upbringing was part of an early forging and tempering which in turn made him so resilient. (Or maybe all these legends come shoehorned with origin stories of rising from humble or difficult beginnings and there's really no generalizable pattern here.)
As much as I hate to admit it, I'm a helicopter parent, and I work very hard to try to bring happiness and comfort to my children. I don't have a strategy for how to exercise their mental health such that they build up resilience. I also know that any negative feedback, be it constructive criticism, bullying, or otherwise, always has the potential to be internalized for motivation or discouragement. As a parent, coach, or team lead, obviously your goal is maximum effectiveness. Some people are going to respond like MJ: "and I took that personally...", and some people are going to self implode.
“ As an aside, Simon Biles has already made it. Same with Osaka. What happens to the millions of regular job 20-year-olds who decide to stop doing their jobs because that's what's best for their mental health?”
This is a great point that I’ve seen made, in other venues and in other ways, as at least a partial explanation of why working class parents are more conservative. If you’re not well off, and have little or no safety net in life, then having Osaka’s attitude is untenable, ruinous. It’s survivable for rich kids, whose parents can fill the gap during periods of self-indulgence, but deadly for poor or working class kids.
Liked. While there are far worse challenges that many parents face, I am very much with. When you have the means and ability to make things extreme comfortable for your kids, it is a real challenge to calibrate how hard they need to have things in order to become a good version of themselves.
I think about this all the time
Time to relax and go watch Busters' shenanigans on Arthur.
Osaka is a total headcase. Suck it up you spoiled brat.
Regardless of a person’s role/status/bank account, calling someone that is dealing with mental health challenges a “head case” and telling them to “suck it up” is stigmatizing and only makes the problem worse. You don’t need to lead a pity party for her but this kind of comment just stigmatizes mental health more.
She's just another 'woe is me' snowflake that wants it both ways. First she can't do a press conference, but will gladly make a Netflix series or be on the cover of Vogue in Japan. She also wants sick days from press conferences. That's nuts. She's an embarrassment to the champions like Martina, Steffi and Serena that paved the way for her.
She’s a world class athlete dealing with mental health challenges in a wild west of social media and access. In a vogue shoot or her Netflix series she’s controlling the narrative, a press conference is much different. I agree she needs to do them, but it’s a false equivalence comparing them to the things you mentioned. Calling her a “snowflake” and an “embarrassment” says more about you than it does about her.
Thanks for the lecture. If she's not a snowflake then what is she? She's an unbelievable talent, has more money than god, and has the ability to be in complete control of her life and future. She's 24 years old and will never have to worry about making ends meet in her life. We are all dealing with issues and the vast majority of us don't air or whine about our personal issues in public.
She’s a human that’s clearly struggling. She’s in the public much more than the average person so her struggle is happening more publicly. I don’t understand how anyone could feel anything but empathy for her, calling her names and minimizing her struggle is so unnecessary.
Either she's a great actor or has some significant mental issues that need to be treated. Doing photoshoot after photoshoot and making a series on Netflix isn't probably the best treatment for the latter.
That's hysterical. Snowflake only entered my vernacular after this covid nonsense started!
You are what's called an enabler.
Showing empathy and compassion isn’t enabling anything. I’ve been open with the fact that I don’t think she’s handling things well and if I was a friend of hers that could speak to her directly I wouldn’t be telling her that she’s a special flower that can ignore the haters like an enabler I would try and help her figure out how to deal with things more effectively than she is so far. There’s a middle ground between enabling and piling on someone that’s struggling.
I don't think she's struggling. Not any more than I am. She's full of shit, and telling full of shit people that you know they are full of shit is good for them.
Disagree, she is not dealing with anything that the rest of us Earthlings aren't dealing with. Some of us just realize it's called life and work to make it better. No one survives on this planet without receiving deep scars. Survival is at the very core of existence here. for every single organism seeking life. She can fuch right off. Pardon my Deutsch.
I don’t think we disagree as much as you think we do.. I agree 100% she’s not dealing with anything the rest of us aren’t, and she isn’t handling it well like a lot of people aren’t, I’m saying give her the same grace and compassion you would give to your own family member that is struggling. She’s not doing a good job of handling her struggles.. so why can she “Fuch right off”? Because she’s not strong enough to handle her problems as well as you think she should?
I'm with you on the grace and compassion for most folks. But not conmen. And not those who knowingly subvert reason. She labels her cowardice as bravery? Double Fuch Off for her.
When I see her I see a young girl that is dealing with things that most people could never conceptualize or come close to understanding, saying she’s a conman that is knowingly subverting reason just feels like an insane leap for me.. I guess I just don’t understand why people don’t give other people every benefit of the doubt possible.
Maybe you'd understand if you paid attention to people's Motives. She's not at home getting better, she's out making millions off of this grift. I was born on a day, but it wasn't yesterday.
Best video to define an entire generation (be sure to play it with sound).... https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=246511827630154
What strikes me about Osaka is just how appalled my therapists over the years would be if I reacted to dysthymia like that. There's nothing wrong with being hyper-sensitive - I AM hypersensitive! - but every mental health professional worth their weight in dogshit endlessly reminds me when I am overreacting or when I just need to suck it up.
I don't want to make this a performance/participation trophy thing but I do think to some extent the problem is simply how BIG athletes are now. If you're Kyler Murray or Naomi Osaka you legitimately have no idea how to lose. they win. That's what they do. That's what everyone expects you to do. So when they loses they feel like something they were promised- something that rightfully belongs to them. The "you suck" doesn't hurt because it's particularly cutting but because for the first time in their lives they actually DO suck relative to their competition. A reminder that all the guarantees by everyone in life that they were unbeatable were mere lies.
I need to preface my critique by saying that I enjoy your writing and that it is indeed thought-provoking. But this piece falls flat for me in a few ways.
Firstly, you allude to it, but this is a wee bit rich coming from you. The first time we ever interracted on one of your ESPN chats many moons ago, I asked you if you actively tried to be a contrarian or if you really just saw things from a different perspective from the mainstream. Your answer touched on being an only child and how that affected how you saw the world. Now here you are not just with your own website, but your entire deal is your individuality and how your perspective is unique from prestige media which is why you had to free yourself of its shackles, yadda yadda. None of that is bad, by the way. But it does seem a mite contradictory to scold athletes from being so self-focused when you've done the same (quite well!).
I think you're missing a key piece of context when it comes to athletes prioritizing their mental health. They are going against the grain of generations upon generations of "toughing it out," quite often to their significant detriment. Why do you think Michael Phelps cheered Biles so loudly? Because he toughed it out and was suicidally miserable. Sports, competition, adversity -- they're all wonderful. But the culture of machismo that encourages people to hurt themselves for other peoples' glory? Feh.
We all know that star entertainers and athletes have huge egos -- that's not new. Self involved athletes in individual sports like tennis and golf strike me as more the rule than the exception. I think the much more interesting critique and case studies are with social media. You raise a great point -- Silver knows that social media is making his product miserable and yet is leaning into it. Why?
I never looked, but was once told by a smart friend that you can draw a pretty straight line between the start of the opioid epidemic and the release of the iPhone. Maybe old people are happier because they haven't had to grow up on instagram.
Or... Ethan isn't seeking acceptance from his peers and is finding self-actualization from being open and honest with his audience? I think it's more selfless to risk your career for a principled stance vs. just mindlessly collecting a paycheck while you write the same article as everyone else in order to not stain your reputation.
Ethan isn't missing that context at all. He's specifically calling it out. I think you're just reading your own perspectives into the article.
PS the start of the opioid epidemic more closely correlates with opioids being widely available via prescription. People were knocking off pharmacies for Oxycontin well before Steve Jobs even thought of the iPhone.
Departure of good working class jobs + drugs = crisis. Nothing to do with the iPhone whatsoever.
Have to say Michael Phelps did in fact "tough it out" and was much better for it, it isn't wrong to admit you had an issue like Phelps, DD, or someone like Tyson Fury, all learned from that and came out of it they didn't stop mid match and have a breakdown in front of everyone, they dealt with that in personal lives and used it as motivation.
Which goes into what is courage because people in the media aren't putting thought into it? Is it when your surrounded by enemies and you put your hands up and put out the white flag is that courage? Or is it fighting it out till the end?
There's so many examples of courage in history and popular myth and I can't think of one where quitting to wild applause is courageous. 300 Spartan warriors could have walked home but they were carried on their shields but what if one decided to walk home? He would have been a pariah and by the medias concept of courage they'd say he had it, but he he wouldn't have been celebrated and would have rightly been called a coward by his people. I wouldn't call it courage to quit to wild celebration.
Naomi has no idea what proper heckling is, see I hate Christian Laetner for a proper example, I don't know what's wrong with her but the way she's dealing with it doesn't appear to be the healthiest when one fan saying something brings her back 14 years to another person and she can't deal with it, then decides to call it out right after. Get help, find ways to cope with the stress as every athlete ever has had to do on large stages, her reaction is a manifestation that she isn't getting help.
Also Phelps cheered Biles because he was an announcer and if he didn't he'd have been excoriated by the media for it, as Novak was when his first reaction to Naomi was to say "do your job" essentially, then he took the heat and walked back.
Some want the glory but not the pain.
I think a lot of younger people are going to be stuck in a dark place for a while. Having most of your interpersonal connections being primarily digital, working from home all the time, etc., all makes it very difficult to really pour yourself into the consideration of others (as Ethan noted with the Klosterman reference). I keep seeing teens and 20-somethings posting on social media sites about their extreme anxiety and depression. The most common thread is loneliness. Yes, there are plenty of people who will suffer from these conditions regardless of their circumstance, but there is something I think we all recognize about regular connection with humans we care for that really helps fight that sadness away.
Maybe someday through advances in technology and human adaptation, we'll be able to happily exist in a world where most or all of our interaction is digital. But we aren't there today, yet we've been conditioning young people to think we are. Technology is amazing and can solve an endless number of problems. It cannot, yet at least, perfectly replace having a coffee with an old friend or playing tag with your kid.
As for the athletes? They suffer from being brought up on the same lies, that technology is the new way for us to connect. But they're also dealing with, as Ethan has pointed out many times, millions of strangers talking about them all the time.
The younger generations have a lot better standard of living compared to older ones. And that can lead to finding things to worry about that seem absurd to people who had to fear polio or Russian nukes (wait, what?). But the level of physical isolation that tons of younger people deal with (not just through the pandemic) is something that would be a massive struggle for any generation.
Yes, I realize people still get together in person. I realize most schools and jobs are in person. Spend time around any teenager or person in their early 20s and it's quite clear how much time they spend in the digital world, even if they are physically near others. I'm not faulting them as this is what our society has pushed toward pretty collectively. But I am saying people aren't conditioned to be happy while living that way.
Another home run. Just haven't been missing recently, Ethan. I've noticed this trend of the unhappy athlete, as well, but haven't been able to quite pinpoint exactly what it is. You just did. Keep it up
Holy shit, Ethan. Thanks for taking all the loose crumbs of semi-thought that've been skittering around my brain for months (years?) and turning them into something. Reading this was better than going to the fucking doctor.
Another great article. The moments I spend with my 3 and 5 year old boys l, where I am truly present and focused on them and what they want is pure bliss.
So this got me thinking of a similar thought I had about athletes being so thin skinned today vs in the past, and the player that got me thinking was Russell Westbrook. After his most recent surly response to a legit question to the media (his childish response is he has no "vision" of anything, which was not the dunk he thought it was it is an indictment of his game, oh so that's why he does horribly idiotic things to end games) I happened to catch I Hate Christian Laetner on ESPN.
Christian was before my time, I was annoyed with him because he ruined the Dream Team but I never had an opinion about him, but it wasn't until watching that doc that I realized he was actually hated, and talk about hate! That's the kind of hate that you can't help but respect, he had a whole crowd of LSU fans chanting homophobic slurs at him and he didn't let it bother him, in a time when being gay wasn't like it is now. Every athlete, like Russ, or Naomi should watch that and realize they have it light.
Lastly why didn't you bring up Happy Gilmore? It used to be a lesson you had to learn, if some fan heckles you the reaction isn't to punch Bob Barker, it's to stay calm as Happy learns and win one for Grandma... which plays into your point that the best way to not be so sensitive is to have someone else in your life your playing for, like your grandma.
Great piece. I'd like to see a real comparison between two (it seems to me) reasonably similar stories: Simone Biles and Makaela Shiffrin. I think the key difference here is that Biles proclaimed herself in physical danger, while Shiffrin proclaimed herself feeling great and skiing well, even though she had a terrible Olympics. But both play dangerous sports. Both were marketed as faces of the Olympics. Biles did her thing. Shiffrin was the opposite--she was clearly upset by the results, but she picked herself up, did the press conferences, owned it, and kept trying. I think, honestly, the media/NBC did not know what to do with this. Because it flies in the face of the Biles/Osaka driven narrative. It's the more traditional narrative of resilience and perseverance even in the face of (god forbid we should say it) choking. (Query the degree to which there is a gendered element here as well. This is different from playing through mental-health challenges or even not coming to work. Both Biles and Shiffrin just failed. To be clear, this is fine. I hate the narrative of the choking athlete--you win some, you lose some. Much better that the narrative be about resilience and a comeback than the shame of failure. But NBC was legit flummoxed about what to do with Shiffrin, because Shiffrin refused to jump in on the Biles narrative. There are lots of differences between the two stories and the two sports (I don't know anything about skiing (though perhaps the Olympics are, as in tennis/golf/soccer etc. just not the main event), but gymnastics is a clear shit show in ways far beyond the sport itself. I do think the media point is fascinating.