You know our humorous-unusual section entitled The Bag of Crisps.
I read there the other day that a 31-year-old German model paid $160,000 to have telescopic metal rods inserted into her legs to gain six inches.
It’s extremely painful, she says, but she’s satisfied except for the “hate wave on the web.”
Béatrice Martin, alias Cœur de pirate, confided for her part that she has been injecting Botox for five years.
She is… 33 years old.
Anxiety
These young women, who have serious problems in my humble opinion, are just the tip of the iceberg.
I have been teaching at the university for 20 years. I also remember my own youth.
Honestly, I have never seen young people as anxious and depressed as Gen Z and Y.
All the figures on which I got my hands confirm this.
To varying degrees, they are preoccupied, even obsessed, with the climate crisis, racism, their gender identity, their body image, the judgment of others, mass killings, and more.
The pandemic has come to exacerbate all these concerns already present. Have you ever tried to explain to a young person that because of demographics, he doesn’t have to worry about running out of work?
He will still stress, because he wants the “perfect” job.
You can feel annoyed (it happens to me), but they are largely the products of an era manufactured by their elders.
Gen Z spends an average of 10 hours a day online, which doesn’t leave much time for playing sports or having meaningful human connections.
When she’s looking for answers, she’ll often fall back on TikTok, a quackery flea market.
It’s as if she couldn’t tell the difference between scratching her sore and trying to understand this sore in solution mode.
Many, fortunately, do not hesitate, unlike us in the past, to admit their problems and to go to psychologists.
A student recently asked me: “You, who have had an intense and sometimes stressful political and media career, how did you manage to preserve your mental health, to avoid burnout?”
I couldn’t think of anything better to say than my little personal truth.
In my time, I replied, we did what we had to do, we endured, we gritted our teeth, I didn’t even know what “burnout” was.
However, we have known recessions, bitter defeats, cruel disappointments, blocked horizons, financial worries, family crises, marital setbacks, the internet revolution, etc.
Live
Of course, it doesn’t help to tell them to toughen up.
Above all, they want clarity, stability, benchmarks, less confusion.
It’s as if they aspire to a perfect life and, as soon as it isn’t, it’s a tragedy.
This is perhaps the real positive message to deliver to them: it has never been easy to live, and it never will be.