"If there's a rise in suicides and depression among young people, maybe we should be looking at the philosophy being promoted everywhere that influences kids.
Rates of teenage depression and suicide in America are rising.
Attempts to explain this increase have centered around ideas that are now pervasive in academia and entertainment media: identity politics, victim-culture, the unearned “self-esteem movement,” and the dreaded post-modernism (as it applies to philosophy and the humanities, not the arts).
I contend that a lot of these ideas ultimately serve to destabilize young people’s sense of their own individuality and wreck their ability to deal with reality in ways that are most likely to leave them depressed and despondent.
The SCARF Model
In part, I began thinking about this because my colleagues at the Foundation for Economic (FEE) and I have recently started to import some ideas from David Rock's "SCARF" model for the media we produce, and I became curious about how this might apply to society at large.
For those unfamiliar with the idea, “SCARF” is built around the concept that people are constantly seeking to avoid pain and get more rewards for their activities and that most of these behaviors center around five specific motivations (which together make up the acronym "SCARF"):
- Status
- Certainty
- Autonomy
- Relatedness
- Fairness
...these are the emotions that motivate employees...
It makes a lot of sense.
If you know that people are often motivated by improving their relative status among their peers, then you know that by offering people public praise, you’re bolstering their sense of pride in their work and helping them achieve their status-seeking goals and, on the flip-side, you know that if you berate them publicly, you’ll be smashing their sense of status among their peers and that embarrassment may ruin their desire to continue working effectively..."
Read all.
It makes a lot of sense.
If you know that people are often motivated by improving their relative status among their peers, then you know that by offering people public praise, you’re bolstering their sense of pride in their work and helping them achieve their status-seeking goals and, on the flip-side, you know that if you berate them publicly, you’ll be smashing their sense of status among their peers and that embarrassment may ruin their desire to continue working effectively..."
Read all.
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