Okay, I have to confess that Matt Yglesias definitely didn’t say what my headline does exactly. The word snowflake does not appear in his latest essay but I do think that’s a close approximation of his actual argument. And here I want to say that, while I may appear to be mocking it a bit, his piece is actually really good and worth reading. I’m not writing about it because I think it’s outrageous or wrong. I’m writing about it because I think it’s insightful and probably right.

So the backdrop for this is the discussion that has been bouncing around lately about why teenagers, especially teen girls, are so depressed. And really at this point there isn’t much doubt coming from anyone about the fact that teens are experiencing a mental health decline. Jonathan Haidt is working on a book which will argue the decline is being driven, primarily, by the adoption of smart phones and social media.

Simply put, in the old days you might be bullied or peer pressured at school but at home you were insulated from all that. But since about 2012 that’s not true anymore. In the era of selfies and Instagram and whatever else, some teens are on a 24/7 treadmill of ugly group dynamics. And if you find yourself on the bad side of those dynamics or just fear you’re going to find yourself there, that’s pretty awful at 14 or 15 years old. It’s especially awful for girls who, in my experience, tend to care more at this age about what their peers think.

This conversation is also being driven by some recent CDC research which confirmed the mental health crisis (1 in 3 high school aged girls have seriously considered suicide) if not the cause. Reactions to this have basically split into two camps along partisan lines. Conservatives, who were already suspicious of the social media giants, have taken the lead in denouncing them and calling for additional regulation. Progressives have, to a greater degree, been arguing alternative theories about why teens are so depressed. Probably the low point in leftist argumentation was a tweet last week from Taylor Lorenz which I wrote about here. “People are like “why are kids so depressed it must be their PHONES!” But never mention the fact that we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” she wrote.

But not everyone is reacting in such a knee-jerk way. Michelle Goldberg recently wrote a column for the Times which I praised here. Goldberg admitted that she was initially drawn to the topic by the possibility that this was one more thing for which progressives could pin the blame on a certain former president. But instead of running with that, she actually looked at the evidence and found that it actually seemed to support the case that Haidt and some conservatives like Josh Hawley were making, i.e. social media may be making teens, especially girls, a bit crazy. “Technology, not politics, was what changed,” Goldberg wrote.

And that brings us back to Matt Yglesias who has been following this argument and wants to add something. Yglesias isn’t denying Haidt’s thesis that smart phones and social media have a lot to do with this. He’s also not embracing the idea that politics explains it all. But he does highlight something which Michelle Goldberg mentioned in her column. For some reason, left-leaning kids are consistently more depressed than right-leaning kids. Here’s what Goldberg wrote about that.

It’s long been known that liberals tend to be more depressed than conservatives, which you can interpret as either a cause or an effect of their unhappiness with the status quo. But innate factors couldn’t explain why, among the 12th graders the study examined, the gap in depressive symptoms between liberals and conservatives appeared to be growing. Nor could those factors explain why, after several years in which liberal girls and liberal boys endured roughly equal rates of depression, girls who identified as liberal had started having a much harder time.

And here’s Yglesias on how to explain that divide:

I think the discussion around gender and the role of social media is an important one. But I also don’t believe that liberal boys are experiencing more depression than conservative girls because they are disproportionately hung up on Instagram-induced body image issues — I think there’s also something specific to politics going on.

Some of it might be selection effect, with progressive politics becoming a more congenial home for people who are miserable. But I think some of it is poor behavior by adult progressives, many of whom now valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment.

There’s a fine distinction he’s trying to make here. He’s not saying that politics are causing liberal teens to be depressed (because they’re more attuned to the problems in the world, etc.). Instead he’s saying that there is a culture of catastrophism on the left which rewards people for getting depressed about the news. There’s some personal stuff (for Yglesias) here which involves his own experiences with depression. The point of bringing it up is mostly to say that he knows something firsthand about what it feels like and also about what overcoming it via therapy usually involves. And, curiously, those things are almost the opposite of what modern progressive culture seems to value socially.

Life is complicated, and this is difficult. But for a very wide range of problems, part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize. People who are paralyzed by anxiety or depression or who are lashing out with rage aren’t usually totally untethered from reality. They are worried or sad or angry about real things. But instead of changing the things they can change and seeking the grace to accept the things they can’t, they’re dwelling unproductively as problems fester.

Part of dealing with depression is making yourself consider that things are rarely as bad as they feel and that fixing them might not only be possible but relatively easy to do. Now think about how that sort of advice would play if given to a collection of campus activists for any left-wing cause. It doesn’t matter if they’re climate change activists, anti-police activists, anti-white supremacy activists, trans activists, take your pick. They absolutely do not want to hear that the problem they are focused on is anything but the most dire problem we are facing. They want to hear that it’s so dire it’s worth going beyond the bounds of civil society and maybe even sitting down in front of traffic, sabotaging a pipeline or even literally setting yourself on fire. In every case, it’s the people who catastrophize the most who have status within the organization while people who share the same concerns but refuse to catastrophize are treated as heretics.

Yglesias brings all of this back to the habit of campus activists to claim “harm” for what might be called mild offense by a somewhat hardier personality.

I went to a Chris Rock show recently where he made a bunch of spicy and not-very-PC jokes on racial and gender topics, and there’s a role for this sort of humor in society.

But an undergraduate whose professor started doing Chris Rock bits would have legitimate grounds for a complaint and importantly, I think, should not need to ground that complaint in a kind of hyper-vulnerable posturing about harm. There are flagrant abuses of these kinds of college reporting systems, especially when anonymity comes into play, but there’s also just something more fundamentally wrongheaded about them. It’s wrong to suggest that someone needs to adopt the undignified posture of having been injured in order to stand up for herself. And it’s wrong to teach people that the right way to respond to someone else’s real or imagined misbehavior is to dwell on it and maximize their own pain. Yet even though I think it’s pretty broadly acknowledged that this is a bad way to live one’s life, our educational institutions have increasingly created an environment where students are objectively incentivized to cultivate their own fragility as a power move.

I think he’s absolutely right. The people who needed a “safe space” because some comic or speaker was invited to campus became a kind of running joke on the right years ago. The whole idea of a safe space was just a way to manifest the idea that delicate snowflakes were in danger of being harmed…again, by jokes or by a conservative speaker’s ideas.

Now it’s just universal. It’s what happened in the NY Times newsroom when James Bennet was fired. The internal group Black@NYTimes claimed they’d been put in danger by an op-ed. It played in to what happened to Dave Weigel at the Post (how much harm did one quickly retracted retweet actually do?). And I think you could find many more examples like this for almost every campus controversy and cancel culture outbreak over the past several years. There’s always some group or individual claiming, rather implausibly in my view, that they’ve been gravely harmed when in fact they are trying to exercise power over someone else’s freedom or livelihood.

And I think it’s fair to say that conservatives have been pointing out this dynamic for years. The mockery of safe spaces and special snowflakes was always meant to emphasize that the fixation on harm seemed excessive and unconvincing. Many on the left, including most of the media, treated this as if the right was mocking the disabled, i.e. making fun of something people can’t change. But in fact, I think the right was often giving the left more respect than that. They were mocking them precisely because so much of it seemed “put on” and something from which adults could separate themselves at will if they were so inclined. The right wasn’t beating up on the weak it was laughing at people who were often pretending to be weaker than they actually were.

Of course anything can be taken too far. It’s fair (in my view) to mock the incessant claims of harm and victimization coming from privileged students at expensive colleges. It’s not fair to turn that same mockery on every single person who tries to argue that climate change is a real problem or that policing could be improved even when they aren’t crying Cassandra. But separating the adults in the room from the people who are acting injures is an ongoing problem. It’s one reason, for instance, why I pretty much tune out any environmentalist who is anti-nuclear power. It’s a sign that they are part of a cult, not someone who has actually thought about the scale of the problem they’re discussing.

Anyway, I still think a lot of the teen depression story is going to turn out to be connected to social media and cell phones but I do think it’s plausible that the problem is worse on the left because the left has found being a victim of harm caused by someone else very useful to their politics. But teaching teens to catastrophize everything of importance is probably not a good life lesson. On the contrary, the job of a good parent is to make kids resilient and strong, not someone liable to fall over at a harsh word from a stranger.