A woman at an event tells me a story about lobsters.
She says that every year or so, lobsters “get uncomfortable” and shed their shells to make room for the new ones.
“We need to let kids get uncomfortable,” she says, “So they can grow, too.”
Sure, I think. Kids indeed need to be challenged to grow. I don’t think lobsters “get uncomfortable,” and if they do, we’re hardly in a position to know. It may simply be instinct that triggers the shedding of their shell. Perhaps a change in water temperature or sunlight serves as a trigger.
It’s hard to know what a lobster “thinks” given it has no language and a teeny tiny brain.
If you eat lobster, by the way, you’d better hope it can’t think anything, because if their old shell makes them uncomfortable, how do they feel about you boiling them alive?
But I don’t say any of this. I simply nod. I’m on a business trip. No need to fight with someone who is client-adjacent.
Then she says we need to get kids off anxiety medications and force them to cope with the world and all its complexity.
Now I can’t resist.
“All of them?” I ask. “Get every kid off anxiety medication.”
“Pretty much,” she says. “We didn’t have anxiety medication when we were kids, and we did just fine.”
It takes every bit of strength in my body not to respond. Again, she’s client-adjacent, so I’m trying to behave myself.
“By the way,” she adds. “I use that lobster story a lot.”
I could tell.
I disengage as quickly as possible, suddenly realizing I was dealing with a simpleton — someone with a black-and-whte world view who is upset about how things have changed and how destabilizing it feels for her to be living in a place that does recognize as something akin the world of her youth anymore.
These are some of our world’s most problematic people. They fixate on the changes that make them uncomfortable and cite them as societal problems while embracing changes in technology, medicine, manufacturing, transportation, and entertainment.
They pick and choose, blaming the changes that violate their sense of self or complicate their worldview while celebrating those that fit well into their lifestyle and have made their lives easier and more profitable.
Is anxiety medication overprescribed to children today?
Maybe. I don’t know. I wouldn’t presume to know. I’m not a doctor, nor am I a public or mental health expert.
Neither is lobster lady.
But am I absolutely certain that anxiety medication has helped some young people enormously and made their lives indescribably better?
Yes, I am.
Meanwhile, the lobster lady was getting drunk on wine and needed help walking into the restaurant for dinner a few hours later.
Why?
Like the lobster, maybe she was uncomfortable being sober.
Maybe she was using alcohol to take the edge off her own anxiety.
Maybe she was self-medicating with a non-prescription, mood-altering substance.
I don’t know, nor would I presume to know.
Either way, black-and-white simpletons are annoying.
