Are Americans Devolving into Children?

While the Biden administration, to the consternation of many, is trying to tout its record on economic growth, we find yet another way to measure the nation’s health. In this case, its mental health or its emotional well-being.

To be fair, the nation’s mental health was not very good before the advent of Biden. It was not very good before the advent of Trump. Now, it’s worse.

People who want to live a therapeutic life, who see human life as a quest for emotional well being through therapy find themselves having something of a meltdown. You might blame it on Trump, but, after all, he has been all but silent for around a year. 

Better blame it on lockdowns, on social distancing, on school shutdowns, on Zoom meetings, on closed offices but especially on the breakdown in social interaction. Our great therapists imagine that we need but get in touch with our feelings, and all will be well. Now, we are so completely in touch with our feelings that we have broken through the last bit of courtesy that had been keeping them off the public square.

Sarah Lyall has the story in The New York Times. One grocery store clerk declared that people were “devolving into children.” Back in the day it would have been called, getting in touch with your inner child. Now that we have achieved what John Bradshaw was prescribing, it does not feel like such a good idea.

Despite the incoherent gibberish flowing from the mouths of our political leaders, the nation feels broken. The reason is simple. We seem to have overreacted to the virus and have gone for a no-risk approach. We have not measured the cost of the shutdowns, of the school closures, of remote business businesses and of ensuring that people cannot socialize:

It is a strange, uncertain moment, especially with Omicron tearing through the country. Things feel broken. The pandemic seems like a Möbius strip of bad news. Companies keep postponing back-to-the-office dates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps changing its rules. Political discord has calcified into political hatred. And when people have to meet each other in transactional settings — in stores, on airplanes, over the phone on customer-service calls — they are, in the words of Ms. Luna, “devolving into children.”

For all the talk, which we have dutifully chronicled on this blog, about the importance of getting in touch with one’s emotions, we have now discovered that politeness and propriety are essential to social interaction and even to doing business:

Perhaps you have felt it yourself, your emotions at war with your better nature. A surge of anger when you enter your local pharmacy, suffering from Covid-y symptoms, only to find that it is out of thermometers, never mind antigen tests. A burst of annoyance at the elaborate rules around vaccine cards and IDs at restaurants — rules you yourself agree with! — because you have to wait outside, and it is cold, and you left your wallet in the car.

A feeling of nearly homicidal rage at the credit card company representative who has just informed you that, having failed to correctly answer the security questions, you have been locked out of your own account. (Note to self: Adopting a tone of haughty sarcasm is not a good way to solve this problem.)

People are being impolite. Fair enough. And yet, how many times have our leading psycho professionals recommended politeness in our everyday transactions-- in what the social psychologists call weak social ties:

“People are just — I hate to say it because there are a lot of really nice people — but when they’re mean, they’re a heck of a lot meaner,” said Sue Miller, who works in a nonprofit trade association in Madison, Wis. “It’s like, instead of saying, ‘This really inconvenienced me,’ they say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ It’s a different scale of mean.”

Happily enough, for those who care about objective evidence, some research firms have found a way to quantify America’s emotional breakdown:

It’s not just your imagination; behavior really is worse. In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election.

By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil. The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.

“There’s a growing delta between office workers and those that are interacting with consumers,” said Micho Spring, chair of the global corporate practice for the strategic communications company Weber Shandwick, which helped conduct the study.

Civility is dying, and, the funny part is, before the epidemic civility was on life support. Those who argued for propriety and decorum and civility were often met with a barrage of offensive gestures. Well, now that our reaction to the virus has just about killed civility, how does it all feel now?