Therapist Comes Forward with Millennials' Top Complaint, and It Shows Just How Good They Have It
For a generation that liberals think has never experienced “prosperity,” millennials sure do act like it.
At a time when the economy is booming and college studies are apparently so light that students have time to complain the Founding Fathers were no-good white supremacists, one therapist has published her observations of what’s really troubling young adults.
And it’s not exactly whether President Donald Trump is really an Adolf Hitler in disguise.
In a column this week on CNBC, San Francisco-based psychotherapist Tess Brigham unloaded on what’s really troubling her millennial patients – and it’s a problem many of their parents and most grandparents likely would have envied:
Too many choices about how to live their lives.
“Yes, decision fatigue is a real thing, especially in today’s world, where we are overloaded with information and have an immense pressure to succeed,” Brigham wrote.
“There are so many big life decisions to make — who to marry, what career path to take, where to live, how to manage our money — and so many options.”
There’s no denying the importance of decisions about marriage and families, careers and the like.
That’s why they’re called “life decisions.”
But what makes Brigham’s column so appropriate now – especially given that it was published two days before Independence Day – is that it flies in the face of basically every talking point of every major Democratic liberal figure today.
The most famous – or infamous, depending on your viewpoint – would, of course, be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The freshman lawmaker from New York appears at times to live in some kind of alternative universe from the rest of us.
“An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity,” AOC told Time magazine in an exceedingly long, mostly admiring profile in March.
“I have never seen that, or experienced it, really, in my adult life.”
It’s difficult to know what Ocasio-Cortez thinks of when the word “prosperity” comes to mind, but for the vast majority of human history, it meant having enough to eat today, and being certain there would be enough to eat tomorrow.
That hasn’t been an issue for the vast majority of people in the United States in some time, so AOC’s generation never saw that.
As recently as two generations ago, the United States was locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and global communism, with both sides armed with nuclear weapons that could destroy the planet.
But Ocasio-Cortez and members of her generation, born as the Cold War was being won (thanks in large part to the presidency of Ronald Reagan), never saw that either.
Of course, there was the economic downturn of 2008, and for a generation just entering the workforce that was obviously not much fun, but recessions come and recessions go — nothing is always rainbows and lollipost.
Maybe what she meant to say was “an entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, never saw a day of want – a day when literally any future was not possible to someone with willingness to put whatever God-given talents they might possess to work.”
The children of the agricultural Americans of the 19th century didn’t go running to therapists to complain about having too many choices.
The World War II generation didn’t rank having too much potential as its biggest worry.
Heck, even the benighted Baby Boomers who gave the country the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies had more immediate worries than the AOC-generation clients who make up Brigham’s patient base, and no doubt many another psychotherapist practicing today.
Being a therapist, Brigham filled her column with all sorts of helpful tips for her angst-filled patients – the most important of them probably being “make a plan for what to do if things don’t turn out the way you expected them to.”
Life rarely does. (You learn to deal with it.)
But she left out one thing the generation needs to hear more than it needs to hear about social outrage, or safe rooms, or how the United States isn’t really the greatest country on Earth and is one step away from a “Handmaid’s Tale” dysphoria.
And that’s this:
Relax, kid. You’ve never had it so good.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
