Stronger Than You Think

I used to read a lot.  I was never pulling down 10 books a month but I considered myself pretty well read.  I still read a lot with the family.  While I love that, I decided to challenge myself and get back into reading for me again.  

1 book down, at least 11 to go.

I started off 2025 with a book a friend recommended a couple years ago--The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  Frankly, everyone needs to read it.  It's one of the books of our era (one of the smut-free ones, anyway), and it makes up for the lack of darkly handsome and amoral fey lords by tackling some of the biggest social issues and consequences of our time.

The book focuses on the sharply increasing fragility of the rising generations. I appreciate the authors' assertion that this fragility is not natural.  Humans, Lukianoff and Haidt assert, are actually anti-fragile; we are naturally resilient to trauma and stress.  However, we can be trained into fragility--and we have been. The authors outline three major Untruths that society has formed: 1, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker; 2, always trust your feelings; and 3, life is a battle between good and evil people.  These untruths manifest in many parts of our lives, from the idea that "words are violence" to helicopter parenting to the bureaucratization of universities and many things in between.  There are a constellation of consequences to these false ideas that begin with anxiety and depression and spiral from there.  It is not a pretty picture.

The ideas that Lukianoff and Haidt discuss are timely.  Though the book was published in response to the college protests back in 2015-2018, the thesis is still pertinent.  We've only just started admitting that some of the things we embraced to avoid offense and protect people backfired badly; we've only just started seeing the consequences.  An entire generation has grown up primed and prepped to be terrified of the world--and yet seek to burn it down.

Lukianoff and Haidt pinpoint 2013 as the beginning of this pivot from tolerance to safetyism, or the idea that safety (physical, mental, emotional, verbal, etc) is the paramount virtue and purpose of institutions and society at large.  This is when microaggressions first jumped into the national dialogue, and was the beginning of the Iphone generation--a generation that was fully digital and online in a way that had never been seen before.  When I was reading this book, it was the beginning of the DEI backlash during President Trump's initial weeks in office, and it was shocking to me how many of the tech bros and businesspeople were almost verbatim expressing some of the same concerns in this prescient book--that around 2013, they started noticing that more employees were showing up more interested in activism than developing their careers in the field.  One of the big tech owners mentioned that their new hires seemed to be more interested in dismantling the business than learning it.  Law students stopped wanting to serve as prosecutors even in law school exercises.  Journalist students weren't interested in reporting unless they could share stories that reflected their personal beliefs.  All starting around 2013.

Now, before anyone makes assumptions about this being one of those darned Conservative fantasy books, both the authors out themselves as left-leaning progressives.  The concern over some of these social developments doesn't fall on a Right/Left paradigm, and the authors do a fantastic job with their research and analysis.

One of the topics I particularly enjoyed had to do with justice, what ostensibly prompted the protests the book discusses.  People have an innate sense of justice.  They instinctively dislike injustice, however well intentioned or excused.  This ties directly into equality and equity.  Equality is definitively just--it has to do with equal opportunity regardless of individual trait.  Equity is definitively unjust as it seeks equal outcome regardless of personal choice, effort, or circumstances.  It disregards the differences between individuals both in ability and choice.  This conflict is part of the reason that DEI initiatives have suffered backlash despite aiming for goals and social changes that are broadly agreed on and valued by the vast majority of Americans.

It's about time we're talking about this and other topics.  We can't afford to romanticize the ideas that we agree with and minimize criticism. Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier and Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt are also worth a read, especially if you're concerned by the skyrocketing mental health issues in our kids.

If you're wondering what other propaganda I've picked for this year you can bite me. It's not all social commentary and critique. There's just enough to poke my mind and help explain this dumpster-fire of a decade, and then there's enough beautiful storytelling to make me not want to give up reading altogether. It's all about balance.  In no particular order, here are the books on my reading list.

• The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff ✅
• White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
• Woke Racism by John McWhorter
• The Once and Future King by T.H. White
• Oh No, Not The Home by Peggy Rowe
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne
• Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier
• Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Shahnameh by Ferdowsi