Not everything is cringe or a crisis
Lack of resilience is why you can’t stop making mountains out of molehills.
Over the weekend I went to a show. Rival Schools haven’t played a show in my hometown for probably 20 years, which coincidentally is probably the last time I went to a proper show.
It was great and actually reminded me that once upon a time I actually used to enjoy this. And apart from the general concerns of being slightly claustrophobic, too old for a mosh pit, and too short to stand at the back, it made me question why I had ever stopped.
It then unlocked a memory in my brain of the time I went to a show and had such a bad time that part of me decided I was (for the most part) done.
I’d dealt many times with sweaty strangers, pushing, shoving, and being drenched in spilled drinks but this particular gig was bad because the crowd sucked.
That’s it tbh. That’s the drama.
I actually also think the (incredibly dorky-in-hindsight) ‘punk’ band playing sucked too but the hostile fandom became my villain origin story of sorts.
Losers gonna loser
I now feel silly even saying this aloud, but the incident that upset me so much was that a group of boys, probably not much older than me and my friends, kept turning around and pointing at us and laughing throughout the show. Why? To this day, I have no clue.
We were no older than 16 and just there to have a good time on a school night - not name 3 songs to get in.
Of all the bullying tactics, this is one that still gets my heckles up; it creates such an alarming level of anxiety in my body even just thinking about it. It’s so simple, effective and yet ambiguous in its brutality. I imagine it had the desired effect.
The alternative music scene of the early 2000s doesn’t have great reputation when it comes to gender inclusivity. It’s well documented that, as many female fans as there were, it was a boy’s club filled with an overwhelming percentage of male bands and an even bigger male fanbase. The retrospective misogyny has been journalistically noted.
I remember reading a story that the crowd at one Warped Tour famously refused to catch any girls trying to crowd surf because ‘they don’t belong here’.
Consciously or not, I took the experience - and that sentiment - to heart. It tapped into something that bothered me on a deeper, primal level; the feeling of not belonging, not being enough, and not being welcome.
20 years later and the perils of a problematic sub-culture aside, I realise that part of the thing I was missing in that moment was the confidence and ability to not let something so small ruin my enjoyment.
Resilience can be a dirty word
I recently had to attend a workplace training session on resilience and mental health. I know what you’re thinking… but I didn’t expect it to resonate so much with the idea that resilience is not just what carries us through when times get tough - it’s what keeps us functioning on a daily basis.
I’m not talking about resilience in a ‘I survived the pandemic’ keep calm, carry on sort of way. I mean in the way we handle every day struggles, challenges, and conflicts without having a meltdown or making a big deal about it.
It stands to reason that mental health issues in general are defined by a considerable deficit of resilience. Little Things escalate to Big Things. Big Things grind us down so much that the subsequent Little Things feel much bigger. Coping replaces our ability to remain resilient move on. And coping can get quickly replaced with not coping.
In my many, MANY years of subscribing to Anxiety Daily (new blog name?) I often fell into the habit of letting very little things spoil literally everything else in a BIG way.
A frustrating meeting with a client at work or a slightly snarkily phrased comment could send me into a spiral and ruin my whole day. On some days - in my very worst throes of anxiety - I would teeter on the edge of tears, rage, or a full existential meltdown when the slightest thing went wrong. I also fully submitted to the ‘throw in the towel’ mentality at these tiny mistakes.
“Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face,“ my mam would say whenever I would vow to give up on something or someone.
And I would say; ‘shut up mam!’ And probably slam my door.
All or nothing, black-and-white thinking is very common in people with anxiety (plus other conditions) and it takes a lot to try and unlearn it so you can, well, function in society.
I have written before about how anxiety especially is perpetuated because people with it both live entirely in the past (ruminating on things that have been) and simultaneously worrying about the future (ruminating on the things that could be). Not only does it make dealing with the present feel impossible, it forces you to find ways to mitigate potential bad feelings before they even have the suggestion of a chance to bloom.
The older and better I get at building my own resilience, I’ve noticed more and more that there’s also a widespread shortage of it around me.
The resilience drought
wrote about this better than I ever could. To summarise, Gen Z in particular (I promise this is not becoming a Gen Z diss blog) appear to have swung in the opposite direction to our Boomer parents. Resilience as a concept is not a bad thing, but too much or too little creates a litany of problems because neither deals with adversity in a healthy way. 
We know why it sucks to downplay trauma but at the other end of the scale, everything becomes a trauma. I often see jokes about how much people hate answering phone calls or that they stay awake at night thinking of the embarrassing thing they said 3 weeks ago, but you don’t need me to tell you that these things are not *actual* traumas. Or do you?
The abject terror Gen Z have about being ‘cringe’ never fails to blow my mind. I used to find it funny when Jack Remington would ask his followers to send him their ‘icks’ and you’d get insane replies like ‘when he orders dessert’. It’s all fun and games until you realise some people are being deadly serious. Gen Z’s aversion to even the most normal level of awkwardness or embarrassment (both first and secondhand) should be studied in a lab. I’ve never known young people to be SO painfully self aware that all carefreeness and joy is seemingly sucked from their lives.
(Much of this, I expect, is a symptom of being chronically online and too well-documented. But the internet isn’t real life, so whatever happened to just laughing and then moving on?!)
It’s not just Gen Z. There’s also an entire Millennial internet culture built on the despair of being inconvenienced. If I had a penny for every ‘how your email finds me’ meme I have both sent and received, I probably would have a lot of pennies. I hate last minute changes of plans, curt WhatsApp messages, and having to sit in traffic on the way to work as much as the next guy, but I can’t just opt out of life things.
You can’t grow as a person without *some* discomfort. So I hate to break it to everyone, but occasionally you might actually have to find a way to get over it.
Not every challenge is cringeworthy or a crisis - and often the solutions are simpler than you think. And sometimes yes, they involve answering your phone.
Life isn’t meant to be constantly laborious, but it isn’t meant to be easy. The assumption that it is meant to be easy will make it feel laborious. When boundary setting and self-advocacy goes so far that we develop an allergy to the chaos of human existence, we have lost our resilience. We have become unregulated in the opposite sense.
It’s not that big of a deal
I wish that after that particular show, I had someone to remind me that a couple of strangers trying to make me feel stupid was; annoying, yes, upsetting, maybe - but not actually a big deal. And that actually, it’s loser behaviour to not only waste money going to see a band you’re not watching, but to spend that time taking the piss out of a bunch of young girls who’ve also paid to be there - and have just as much right to be there as you.
I also wish that every time I’ve gone off the deep end over something minor, I had the ability to check myself on what matters and what doesn’t.
Granted, sometimes it is genuinely harder than others. I do still cringe at things I’ve said and done long ago much more than I should. I do struggle to let it go when someone is being loudly wrong about something. It does still prick my emotions when I get a shitty email, or a joke that hits a little too close to bone, or some lunatic aggressively beeping at me in traffic.
Perhaps emotional regulation and a lack of fucks to give comes with age.
Being resilient is of course, a great tool for helping you tackle the bigger things but it also helps you glide right through those smaller, uncomfortable moments too without much incident. It stops them from ruining your day, and from stopping you doing things. Or better still, from ruining your life.
Not everything warrants a life or death response.
Sometimes you just need to be able to say ‘so anyway…..’ .
Thanks for reading. I still have the paywall down on my archived content for new subscribers so why not take a look and like, comment, or share!
I also really want to hear the craziest or funniest thing you’ve spiralled over because we’re all friends here…
Great post as always. I could have a blog dedicated to replying to your blog posts as they always get me thinking.
In defence of getting overwhelmed by nowt...I think small, trivial things are probably triggering because they unlock echoes of other trauma. That's perhaps why one small thing can get to us while we easily brush off other small things.
In defence of Gen Z, they spent their developmental years going through COVID which was a massive existentially traumatic event. When the entire world can get flipped upside down seemingly out of nowhere when you're growing up, that's going to have a major effect on how you experience life going forward. When every day life is traumatic, maybe every day life can become triggering.