Fixating on catastrophe doesn't help anyone

A passive worldview erodes mental health. It's both a symptom and cause of depression

The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius by Giovanni Battista Gaulli

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Here’s one very quick version of my life story: When I was 20 years old, my mom died. I was on a Mormon mission in Brazil at the time, and was encouraged not to go home. So I sat in a chair and cried for a couple of hours, but didn’t otherwise take any “time off” or return home.

Later, I graduated from college amid the Great Recession. There was no job market. So I earned a masters degree and, once finished, was subsequently rejected from every PhD program I applied to.

Later, a small newspaper hired me for not much more than poverty wages. After two years of covering murder and child molestation trials, I moved to another paper that had three massive layoffs in 18 months. I didn’t lose my job, but knew it was only a matter of time.

Later, a news startup in Los Angeles hired me. The reporting job involved watching things like ISIS beheading videos. Once, I was hit by a molotov cocktail while reporting on a protest. At another protest, I was first robbed and then a group of men chased me through the streets of Milwaukee and only desisted when a hotel security guard confronted them at gun point.

Later still, people camping in the alley by my house burned my garage to the ground, destroying most of the possessions I owned¹. The ensuing financial issues eventually led to us selling the house.

We were priced out of Los Angeles, and finally landed in another city that most recently made headlines for being “boring.” And that’s where we waited out COVID.

Now here’s another story: I grew up in a comfortable middle class family with good parents and schools. I went to an inexpensive college, where I met the love of my life. I earned two humanities degrees that gave me the kind of classic liberal education that’s increasingly hard to come by. College was a blast.

My wife and I traveled the world — something I considered impossible as a kid. We both got jobs we loved. The lingering effects of the Great Recession allowed us to afford a house.

I climbed the career ladder and ended up at what was then a fun and well-funded news startup. The office had unlimited snacks and La Croix. The job sent me all over the country, and even to France. My amazing weather-nerd-of-an-editor let me report on things I cared about even when those topics weren’t huge traffic drivers.

I lived beside one of the world’s greatest donut shops, one of the world’s greatest Thai restaurants, and one of the world’s greatest taco trucks. My wife and I spent two years learning how to do construction on our fixer upper, then sold it for a small profit.

Eventually we had a healthy baby. I found and got yet another job I liked. We bought a house at the beginning of the pandemic, when prices were low. We had two more healthy babies. We’re surrounded by people we love, and just last Sunday hosted a dinner with 30 people — which isn’t out of the ordinary these days.

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Both of these stories are true. But depending on which one you tell, the impression you get is very different. In some cases I’m describing the very same things, just in different terms. So is my life a string of catastrophes, or a progression of amazing experiences?²

I was thinking about this question earlier this week after reading a New York Times piece about middle age millennials who feel unsettled and shortchanged by life. Here’s a key quote from the story’s main subject:

“My whole adult life has been one long crisis,” she said. “Career crises, education debt, watching my I.R.A. lose a quarter to half of its value a couple of times, child care expenses, fraying social fabric, wage pressures and, above all, insecurity. I am a professional married to a professional, but our jobs can go up in smoke at the drop of a hat. We can’t rely on anything but ourselves and can only hold out hope that we won’t eat cat food once our bodies break down and we are forced into impoverished retirement.” She said she knows that sounds dramatic, but it’s how she really feels.

I understand the sentiment there. That’s basically the same framing I used in the first story up above. And many of the specific concerns — job insecurity, childcare, etc. — are things I’ve also faced. But also, the people in the story are not war refugees or medieval peasants. The quote comes from a doctor married to a software engineer.

Maybe I’m just being unempathetic. But as I continued reading I was struck by this passage, which nicely sums up a particular flavor of millennial ethos (italics added for emphasis).

What used to stand out about midlife is that people tended to have a sense of power over their own circumstances. “In midlife, the sense of control is an important component of health and well-being,” Dr. Lachman has written. Even when previous generations had many life stressors, that feeling of control balanced them out.

But for millennials, unfortunately, that is exactly what might be changing; we feel we have lost any semblance of control.

I do agree that many of us millennials feel like we’ve lost a sense of control. And stories like the Times piece keep reinforcing that idea.

But is it really true?

Take housing for example³. Right now the millennial homeownership rate is in the mid 40 percent range, which is lower than the rate for Gen Xers or Baby Boomers.

But the gaps are less pronounced than they initially seem. When you compare these three generations at age 40, the millennial homeownership rate is about 60 percent, compared to 64 percent for Gen Xers and 68 percent for Baby Boomers. That’s a gap, but not a huge one.

Credit: U.S. Census Bureau

Millennials also don’t look so bad when compared to even older generations. In 1940, the homeownership rate for the entire country was only 43.6 percent, far lower than the 65.9 percent homeownership rate today. That means far fewer people of any age owned homes in the first decades of the twentieth century than they do today. I’d rather live now than in 1940.

Obviously millennials are struggling with things like student debt, childcare and more. But I mention housing because it’s one of many areas in which millennials as an entire generation have allegedly “lost any semblance of control,” but where the numbers offer a much more complex picture.

Again, I’m not suggesting life is easy. There’s no shortage of challenges for today’s near-middle age Americans. But it’s also hard not to be in awe of how much more stable life is today compared to both the recent and distant past. Unlike previous generations, American millennials were never forcibly conscripted into any wars. Millennials experienced a remarkable period of prolonged economic growth after the Great Recession. Energy prices have been relatively stable, at least compared to the fuel crisis of the 1970s. We lived through a plague, and it was bad, but it was also vastly better than numerous historical plagues, which routinely wiped out double digit percentages of the populations they struck.

I could go on and on about how history is littered with famines, city sackings, mass murder, slavery, and so on — none of which have happened to twenty-first century Americans. But you get the idea. The fact that we can worry about the “fraying social fabric” and not about surviving a hostile army or a year of crop failure is a testament to how aberrantly stable modern life has become⁴.

So yes, millennials do appear to be financially worse off than Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. But we're also probably the third or fourth⁵ most privileged generation in history. It really just depends on how you look at it.

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Of course people can tell whatever stories they want about their lives.

But I bring this up because fixating on catastrophes isn’t healthy.

A day before the Times piece, Jonathan Haidt — a social psychologist and co-author of the Coddling of the American Mind — weighed in on why some groups (specifically liberal girls) have seen their mental health decline more severely than others. And Haidt points out that “catastrophizing,” or overblowing the potential harm of a situation, is both a symptom and a cause of depression.

Writers David Brooks, Matthew Yglesias and Jill Filipovic — notably three people at different places on the ideological spectrum — have also all recently made the same point. As Brooks notes, catastrophizing doesn’t help solve problems, and treatment for depression often involves people working “to break the cycle of catastrophic thinking so they can more calmly locate and deal with the problems they actually have control over.”

Haidt also writes about the concept of “locus of control”:

…this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

The Times story captures this idea. The author literally claims millennials lack “control” over their lives. It almost feels like the Times piece is evangelizing on behalf of an external locus worldview.

Catastrophizing is also on display in the Times piece. Surely things like a fraying social fabric and a fluctuating retirement account are worthy topics for reflection. But are they catastrophes? Do they warrant a high degree of day-to-day emotional stress? Does their existence justify a catastrophic narrative of victimization?

I suspect not. And Haidt’s thesis suggests that choosing to tell such a story is going to have adverse effects on the teller’s mental health — which is exactly what’s happening to the middle aged millennials in the Times piece.

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This situation has implications for the mental health of an entire generation. I also suspect the millennials-as-passive-victims thesis underestimates the precarity other generations have felt.

But more than that, I’m concerned about how the passive, external locus mentality transfers from one generation to another. We millennial parents risk bequeathing a worldview to our kids that is more likely to make them depressed.

We also risk committing the same transgression we often pin on the Baby Boomers, namely obliviousness about the younger generation’s hardships. So, millennials might mention being priced out of the housing market, to which Baby Boomers reply that they too had a hard time. And then the millennials will roll their eyes because the Boomer had the gall to suggest their own victimhood was anything like what’s going on today. I’m guilty of doing this myself.

But what happens when the next generation comes along? Someday when our kids argue that we had it pretty easy by comparison, will we give up a lifetime of catastrophizing? By framing ourselves as the biggest victims, we’re setting ourselves up to repeat the same generational conflict that’s happening now, except next time we’ll be on the other side.

In my case, I’d ultimately much rather model an internal locus, non-catastrophizing outlook. And when I think about the two versions of my life story, I want to choose the one in which I’m an active participant rather than the one where I’m a passive victim. That’s not always an easy choice to make, but it is one that has made me happier⁶. And in the end that's the legacy I'd like to pass down.

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1. The house was very small and in a state of being slowly remodeled, so most of our stuff was stored in the garage at the time. Things like clothes, furniture, books, photos, journals, etc. burned up.

2. I mean, it’s obviously a progression of amazing experiences. The point I’m trying to make, though, is that if I wanted I could choose to focus just on the catastrophes.

3. I write professionally about the housing industry.

4. At least for Americans. The war in Ukraine and other conflicts abroad are a reminder that violent conflict is still problem.

5. Fourth if you include the silent generation.

6. Obviously I’m not remotely close to what anyone could describe as a victim. I’ve had a great life. But something that stands out to me is that many of the people I’ve met who have it significantly worse in life — refugees, people living in under-developed parts of the world, etc. — have tended to have internal locus outlooks. And I suppose that exposure to such folks has convinced me that if they can do it, I and my fellow American millennials probably can too.