Healing not coping

No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. 

Adrienne Rich, Sources. 

High modernity was a reaction to trauma. Two world wars, a great depression, the holocaust, nuclear bombs, millions dead, cities laid waste. The economic growth and materialism that went on through the second half of the 20th century was driven in large part by the need to rebuild. But it was also driven in large part by the need to get past the trauma. We couldn't dwell on the past because it was too overwhelming. We had to 'get on with it'. 

You can see this in the extreme work fixation of the interwar silent generation and the post war baby boomers. The US parliament, to take one example, is stacked with members of this generation who cannot fathom retirement. The most obvious is Dianne Feinstein, who refused to step down at 90 years of age despite obvious dementia and a frequent inability to attend office owing to a variety of illnesses. She seemed committed to being carried out of the senate in a coffin. 

Another example is my colleague Chris from my days as a tennis coach, a top bloke and almost an uncle to me in that era. He was a migrant to Australia from Eastern Europe. For nearly his entire life he worked from 7am – 3pm as a skilled technician, then came down to the club to coach for another 4 hours. By the time I knew him in his 60s he had retired from his technical job but was still coaching. He was divorced and his daughter had moved out, so he owned a house too large for him in the most expensive part of Sydney and seemed kind of bored to me. Once a month he'd sit me down to tell me how "you've got to work f**ckin' hard Mark". It was a bit ironic because I was at the club from 7am – 9pm 6 and a half days a week either training, coaching, groundskeeping, or running the clubhouse. The bigger irony was that it seemed to me like Chris had too much money from working and too few fruits of other sorts of labours. When you're grinding 12 hours a day, it doesn't leave much time for hobbies, relationships, holidays, art, or the other things that give life verve. 

For Chris and Feinstein's generations, it didn't matter so much what you did with your life as that you did something, preferably all the time. In contrast, my generation, the millennials, are often disparagingly referred to as 'the meaning generation'. Money and stuff doesn't hold the same allure, perhaps because we are priced out of real estate anyway. But more importantly, we need a reason why we are doing something, especially a job that we don't especially like. We refuse to 'get on with it' because it doesn't seem like we're getting anywhere. 

There is a growing sense among the youth that we have 'arrived' economically. (For a treatment of this idea from a political-economy perspective, see Trebeck & Williams, 2019). There isn't a need for more growth, and there certainly isn't a need to swallow our frustrations or sacrifice our happiness in order to grind out a bit more income. Our society is post-scarcity, it's just a matter of redistribution, or even just using what we've got more effectively. Cuba has the same literacy rates and life expectancy as the United States despite having only an eighth of its GDP. We're also cooking the planet with our energy needs, killing biodiversity with our farming, and trashing the environment with all the stuff we buy. Maybe 'getting on' with whatever it is that we're doing isn't such a good idea. 

If there's no need to 'cope' with long work hours, bosses pushing their swallowed shit down the hierarchy for validation, exploitative firms, or ravenous capitalism, if there's no need to "eat bitterness", as Xi Jinping counselled China's youth, then we can focus instead on 'healing'. That means an honest, painful, wholehearted reckoning with past traumas like colonialism, comfort women, and slavery. As Beyoncé sings in Amen, the closing track of her incredibly metamodern album Cowboy Carter: "we'll be the ones that purify our father's sins". It means new waves of resistance to toxic behaviour, whether sexual harassment in the Me-Too movement, racism in Black Lives Matter, or exploitation in quiet quitting and its Chinese equivalent, lying flat. 

Healing not coping also means normalising mental health issues and going to therapy. You see this in popular culture. Ted Lasso is one example. Another, my favourite, is the Harley Quinn Animated Series, which is peak metamodern media. In canon, Harley Quinn is the long-suffering girlfriend of the villainous Joker in Batman. This animated series, which is more subversive cartoon comedy than drama, picks up after Harley finally ditches her psychopathic "puddin'" and goes solo. She shacks up with many of the relatively minor villains of the DC comics universe, including Killer Croc, Mr Freeze, and her long-time friend and simmering love interest Poison Ivy. The first few seasons basically revolve around them all helping each other to heal from the abandonment, bullying, abuse, grief, and other traumas that led them to villainy in the first place. It recalls Harleen Quinzel's pre-crime life as a psychotherapist at Arkham Asylum, where she met the Joker. In the third season, Harley convinces Bruce Wayne to heal from the death of his parents through therapy with an episode hilariously titled: "Holy post-traumatic stress disorder Batman!". 

You would have heard the slogan: "it's okay to not be ok". I don't think that we take this sentiment quite seriously enough yet. People are more understanding of anxiety, depression, bereavement, being 'a mess', and other short term mental health issues than they use to be. Many workplaces now offer mental health leave, and it's not taboo to be in counselling or on anti-depressants. People are also more accommodating of neurodiversity. What we still don't give people permission for is to simply fall to pieces. 

Sometimes in life you get hit so hard that you can't go on, either because you're totally debilitated by something like resurfacing trauma, or because your worldview is so rocked that you can't see anywhere to go to. We spoke about such 'descents' in chapter 5.5. You can't rush the descent, and sometimes you wander in the underworld for a very long time before you stumble on way out. 

The problem with people falling to pieces in this way is that they become dependent. They're someone else's problem because they're not quite (or not at all) capable of caring for themselves. We can't rely on them to 'get their shit together' on their own. And often pushing them to be more self-sufficient, or rushing to get them sorted, delays the process of healing substantially. Crisis reoccurs. At times like these we need to offer a very deep and generous kind of care. 

Our culture, at least at the macro level, seems incapable of this. For decades we have outsourced responsibility for these sorts 'health' and 'unemployment' issues onto the state. But the associate policy systems are grounded in efficiency doctrines that don't tolerate people falling to pieces. Welfare payments typically demand that people work or look for work, and they don't engage with the narrative arc of a person's life or help them to discover a sustainable path forward. Mental health services overwhelmingly rely on cognitive behavioural therapy, which while 'evidence based' is substantially a treatment for mental illness symptoms rather than causes. People in the underworld usually need a more involved and extensive talk therapy, but that's too expensive and uncertain for the state. So we need people to step in – friends, family, community. It's not just that "it's OK not to be OK, go deal with it, we can wait"; we need to go over to traumatised people and help them. That's a big ask but the younger generations seem increasingly willing. 

I see some signs that older generations are misunderstanding the youth here. For example, a spat broke out in the late 2010s between Gen-X psychologists and university students over the supposed intolerance of the youth for anything confronting. Protest groups were deplatforming controversial speakers, administrators were setting up 'safe spaces' with puppies for students to retreat to when an idea was too horrible to deal with, and lecturers were being encouraged to include 'trigger warnings' in their teaching materials for things like racism when teaching the history of slavery. 

The psychologists raised the alarm, publishing books like The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. They were giving talks and publishing op eds telling kids that they were "resilient" and "antifragile" – they would grow stronger from exposure to hard realities but become brittle if everything was sugar coated. 

I think there is a lot of good sense in the psychologist's argument, but it misses the sentiment of the youth: they don't want to live in a toxic world that requires resilience. We expect the youth to lack wisdom, but here it's the common sense of the older generations that is lacking. There's this belief that people need to be "hard" to deal with a hard world. Like my tennis coaching colleague Chris kept repeating, like a mantra, "you've got to work f**king hard". If you can achieve that, you'll make lots of money. But we've got lots of money now; what we want is a softer world. 

A softer world doesn't 'churn and burn' graduates in 'prestigious' jobs for 80 hours a week. It doesn't call in militarised police to break up student protests against a genocide that their own government is supplying with weapons. It doesn't subsidise fossil fuels while youth climate anxiety skyrockets. It doesn't trap young people in colossal amounts of education debt just to get started in the economy. I could go on. The world is nasty, and universities are often active producers of that nastiness. It's not surprising that sensitive, smart, young people who have grown up in relatively idyllic suburban environments find adulthood confronting. These youth shouldn't be pampered, but we should acknowledge that they have a point. 

What the youth need to do is coalesce around the metamodern project of defining this better world and making it happen. What should it look like? We need to ask the question of chapter 1.3 at the societal level – what should we use all our material abundance for? The answer certainly isn't war, or petrol imperialism, or simply "more". We need to think like Star Trek. In a future where science has secured nearly limitless, cheap energy and thereby enabled us to 3D print basically anything for free, money means nothing. Materialism is dead. What does that society do? In Star Trek, it adventures across the stars, spreads peace, life, and prosperity, and celebrates the stories of diverse civilisations and heroes. We could be a bit more like that right now if we stop coping and start healing. In fact, parts of the world are already looking like that, and we'll explore some in the next section of this book… 

• This is an extract from Beyond Happy: How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfillment by Mark Fabian, published 10 April (Bedford Square, £20)