The Age of Coddling

An Age Without Negativity; a Heart Afraid of Wounds

Once, after listening to a young researcher's presentation, I gently offered a few points I thought might be improved. In an instant the mood turned cold. Later someone quietly let me know: "Professor, these days if you speak like that, people get hurt." I fell silent. On the way home I thought about it for a long while. When did it become impossible for us to say painful things to one another? An age in which everyone says only "well done, wonderful." I call this age the Age of Coddling.

The Age of Coddling is a gentle age. No one wants to wound anyone carelessly. Criticism grows cautious, and social media overflows with "I love it." On the surface, no world could be warmer. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han called our age an age with an excess of positivity. If the old illness came from repression and prohibition—from "no"—today's illness comes from an endless "yes." The Age of Coddling is precisely that world where only the "yes" remains. The power to say "no," the words that wound, in short, negativity, has vanished.

And then something strange happens. In this gentle age, people grow weaker instead. They collapse at the smallest criticism, cannot bear even a little pain. Why? The answer is unexpected. It is because the wound has disappeared. As we will see in detail later, living things grow through a measure of wounding. Muscle thickens only when it is finely torn; immunity strengthens only when it meets a germ. A world that has erased the wound entirely is not a safe place but a sterile room, robbed of every chance to grow.

The Age of Coddling is a gentle age and, at the same time, an age afraid of wounds. And it rears a certain kind of person: one who fears being wounded. Afraid to be hurt, he never truly stakes himself. Instead, he swells. Here the first distinction of this book begins. Swelling and growing are entirely different things.

Growing is being filled from within. When a tree grows, it carves one more ring within itself. Its density rises; it hardens. But swelling is thinning outward. As a balloon grows larger, its rubber skin thins and thins. And at its very fullest, it is weakest. What falls first to the storm in the forest is not the small tree but the great one, grown tall while hollow within.

Growth gains density; expansion loses it.

The psychologist Carl Jung explained this distinction with an ancient image. The social face we present to the world he called the "persona"—the actor's mask. The mask is not a bad thing. It is indispensable for living. But when a person mistakes that mask for himself and swells himself into it—Jung called this "inflation"—he becomes a shell, large-seeming but empty within. True growth, by contrast, turns not toward the mask (the outside) but toward the Self (the inside). To integrate a scattered self from within and grow solid—the path Jung called, all his life, individuation—that is growing. Swelling is the inflation of the mask; growing is the deepening of the Self.

Then why does a person swell? Not from confidence. Quite the opposite. It is because real failure frightens him. Real failure is giving your all and still falling short. A verdict upon one's very being: I staked everything, and this was all it came to. Dreading that verdict, a person holds his best in reserve. Psychology calls this self-handicapping. It is the heart of the child who deliberately does not study the night before an exam. Work hard and score low, and the verdict remains, "This is simply my level"; do nothing and score low, and the alibi remains, "I would have done well if I had tried." A best never given cannot fail. But a best never given cannot succeed either.

The Age of Coddling encourages this flight. Since no one says "no, that's not enough," a person never even gets the chance to run up against his own limits. Nietzsche said that "learning to see" is the power not to react at once to a flood of stimuli but to be able to say "no." In the place where that "no" has vanished, a person lingers safely within an untested, infinite possibility. Only, he does not grow. Interestingly, the Bible has a sentence that points precisely to this swelling. "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." (1 Corinthians 8:1) To puff up and to build up—the difference between expansion and growth is already here.

Han divides this power in two. The power to "be able to do" something, and the power to "be able not to do." With only the former and not the latter, we become machines that merely react to every incoming stimulus. Unable to stop, unable to refuse, and so unable to grow. The mark of a mature person is not the ability to do anything, but the ability to refrain. And when you think about it, the boundary is the very place where that power lives. A small gap between stimulus and response where one can raise a "no," the space of negativity. What the Age of Coddling has erased is precisely this gap, and what this book seeks to recover is precisely this gap.

If I am honest, I too have that fear. Once, climbing a mountain in Banff, Canada, I picked up my pace to keep ahead of the people coming up behind me, unwilling to lose, acting well below my age. My heart rate climbed to its maximum and my head swam, yet inwardly I kept repeating, "I'm a professor of physical education." What was that pride, really? An unwillingness to lose—in short, a dread of having my own limits exposed. We all, a little, swell so as not to be hurt.

And so this book is one that invites back the wound the Age of Coddling has erased. So that gentleness may not erase growth, so that pain may again become the place of growing. To grow rather than swell, to pass through the wound rather than avoid it. For fear grows small not when we hide it but only when we face it. Come, now let us begin that journey.

References

Carl Jung, the concepts of persona, the Self, and individuation · S. Berglas & E. E. Jones (1978), self-handicapping · Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols ("learning to see") · Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society · 1 Corinthians 8:1