Emotional repression gets a bad rap
People who repress their
feelings often get a bad rap. It is widely believed stuffing one’s emotions,
particularly the painful and negative varieties, is detrimental to both mental
and physical well-being. And, in certain circumstances, this is the case. While
humans are not steam boilers, their emotions can reach a critical pressure
point that requires a psychological relief valve of some sort. Crying is a
common example. Absent this sort of emotional discharge, we may internalize our
feelings, creating psychosomatic symptoms, anxiety or depression. But not
always.
The bias in favor of venting one’s emotions finds approval
among many mental health professionals. As Freud put it, “Unexpressed emotions
will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier
ways.” What’s more, our expressive-oriented, hyper-sharing, increasingly
uncivil society often derides emotionally reserved folks as rigid, repressed,
buzz killers or shy. Introverts often bear the brunt of these criticisms. It
has long been a predilection among many psychotherapists that, when it comes to
feelings, one should “let it all out.” Entire therapies are based on this
principle (think primal screaming).
In our haste to critically judge reserved people, we fail
to recognize some individuals keep their feelings in check because doing
otherwise has caused them more harm than good. Some victims of childhood trauma
fit this profile. However, others are reacting to their current circumstances,
rather than past wounds. Andrew was a case in point.
“My family is a drama circus,” he told me. “My wife and
relatives are hyper-sensitive to each other’s feelings, including positive
ones.”
In his world, being out there with one’s emotions all but
guaranteed setting off a melodramatic chain reaction. Over time, Andrew
determined that whatever price he paid for holding his tongue paled in
comparison to what he endured when he was emotionally transparent. It was
basically a psychological cost-benefit analysis, and his findings indicated he
should zip it.
Jean faced the same conundrum but with the opposite slant.
She held back her feelings because, when she let them out, she received little
or no response from her spouse and his family. This felt like an implicit
rejection of her personality, as her natural tendency was to be an expressive
type. So, around them, she learned to hold it all in.
“It’s like I’m talking to myself. I discovered early on that
the more I expressed my feelings, the more they became uncomfortable and shut
down,” she explained.
Another instance in which letting it all out can backfire
is if that behavior proves incompatible with one’s innate temperament. Some of
us are not expressive by nature, preferring to relate to our emotions inwardly
rather than manifesting them in the external world. Sometimes, such folks feel
pressured to emote, often by a spouse, partner, family or friends who are far
more demonstrative. Submitting to coercion to morph from their authentic
reserved style into an emotions-on-my-self type involves a denial of self.
Ironically, some emotionally reserved folks encounter this
same denial of self from their therapists. While hopefully less common today,
in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a pseudo-therapy involving “encounter groups” emerged.
The stated purpose was to cast off emotional inhibition and put one’s feelings
out there, and forcefully, for all to witness. If the group members concluded
that one of the participants was holding back their feelings, that individual
was given a card that read, “Cop out.”
Granted, in some emotionally restrained people, their
repression is not healthy for them nor those in their midst. But in others it
may simply reflect who they are, their developmental history or the
circumstances in which they find themselves. Let’s remember that the freedom of
expression also includes the right to hold it in.
--Philip Chard, Out of My Mind
'With this ring, I thee . . . plunge us into serious debt’
Weddings are roaring back with bigger budgets, longer guest lists and grander settings.
Why it matters: Almost every aspect of planning, hosting and attending weddings is getting pricier. Even guests are going into wedding debt.
The average cost of a U.S. wedding ticked up from $28,000 to $29,000 from 2022 to 2023, according to wedding planning website Zola. But the average was far higher in some places, including D.C. ($45,400), New Jersey ($44,219) and Massachusetts ($40,097).
What's happening: Inflation and high demand are driving up costs, as everything from music to flowers to makeup gets more expensive. Plus social media has infiltrated the wedding planning process. More couples feel pressure to spend big to make their events pop.
One in three 2023 couples are looking to TikTok for wedding inspiration, Zola notes.
Guests are getting hit, too: 40% of people who've gone to weddings in the past five years went into debt to be there, according to a LendingTree survey.
That jumps to 62% if they were in the bridal party — which comes with obligations like showers and bachelor and bachelorette parties.
Trend to watch: One wedding cost that's declining: attire for the groom. Guys are increasingly opting for a more casual outfit than a tuxedo.
--Erica Pandey, Axios
GenZ’s nonchalance infects the workplace
When it comes to the job market, Gen Z doesn't seem to care all that much. At least that's how some managers and employers feel corralling a generation of workers they believe (erroneously or not) is entitled, lazy and full of pushback. How are "zoomers" affecting the workplace?
What complaints do people have about working with Gen Z?
In a survey, researchers found that "of 1,300 managers, three out of four agree that Gen Z is harder to work with than other generations — so much so that 65% of employers said they have to fire them more often," Rikki Schlott wrote for the New York Post, adding that 21% of managers also believe "entitlement is an issue" with new Gen Z hires. Peter, a hospitality manager based in New Jersey, told the outlet that he feels "kind of hamstrung on what [he] can and can't say," adding that he "doesn't want to offend" anyone and always worries that he'll "get freaking canceled."s most controversial moments
How does Gen Z feel?
Zoomers are making it very clear that their sole purpose in the workplace is to get in, do the job, and get out. Rather than forming emotional attachments to their roles, they prioritize a work-life balance over everything. Perhaps because Gen Z and even millennials are the only generations to have experienced the combined trauma of the debt crisis, gun violence, climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic, losing a job sounds almost like a vacation. "It's not necessarily that different generations hold different attitudes about work," Sarah Damaske, an associate professor at Penn State University, told Vox. "For millennials and for some members of Gen Z, they've witnessed two recessions, back-to-back. This is a very different labor market experience than what their parents and grandparents encountered."
So are they slackers?
"Young workers are not lazy, entitled or keen on slacking off," Kim Kelly argued for Insider: "They're simply choosing to reject some of the practices that previous generations were forced to accept." Not to mention they might also find themselves working under managers that "are so burnt out they have little time to spend training the next generation, or even noticing what their workplace experience is like," Melissa Swift, a partner at the consulting company Mercer, told Financial Times' Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. In other words, Edgecliffe-Johnson summarized, "you can't pin this all on Gen Z."
But while "quiet quitting" and detachment may seem enticing initially, younger workers would do well to remember that the world is constantly growing and evolving. In "slacking off" now, they run the risk of ruining their chances for a job down the line, Allison Schrager, an opinion columnist, wrote for Bloomberg. "Careers are long and so are institutional memories," Schrager said. "The pandemic aftermath may have given workers more power for now, but young staffers with decades of employment ahead should be thinking about what happens when that inevitably changes."
Is Generation Alpha any different?
Generation Alpha, which includes people born in 2010 and after, "will perpetuate our workplace burnout crisis" as a "side effect" of their ambition to "make work and societal change," said a 2020 LinkedIn analysis from Dan Schawbel, a managing partner at research agency Workplace Intelligence. Despite these intense efforts, which will "increase productivity temporarily at the cost of their mental health and long-term value contribution," Alphas "will demand even more from their employers than Gen Z's and millennials," Schawbel said. "They simply won't work for a company that doesn't align with their values and that isn't producing a product that benefits society."
Work and life will be "completely integrated" by the time Alphas enter the job market, where they will choose to work for less at a flexible job that supports their "emotional, physical and mental well-being" rather than deplete their tank for higher pay somewhere else. They will also "shatter old work norms and recreate the workplace based on how they interact in their personal lives," Schawbel concluded.
--Kelsee
Majette, The Week
Why won't corporate America answer the phone?
When I recently called an MRI facility
about an overcharge, a prerecorded voice told me, over and over again for 45
minutes, that call volume was “unusually high” and, by the way, the weather was
compounding a labor shortage.
On another recent day, I needed to
resolve a problem with a company with no listed phone number at all — which is
how I found myself furiously pounding the keyboard in conversation with, yes, a
chatbot at a vegan meal delivery service.
It shouldn’t be this hard to speak to
a human. But, increasingly, companies large and small are making it difficult
to access a real, live person when help is needed. Contact numbers are hard to
find. Wait times to speak to an operator are long — one industry
analyst estimated the average wait tripled from 2020 to 2022 and says
he believes they still are a third worse than before the pandemic. Some phone
lines are seemingly staffed entirely by robots, forcing you to go through menu
after menu in quest of a live, real person. Or, increasingly, companies don’t
offer a telephone option at all.
This is not simply inconvenient. It’s
contemptuous. And consumers pay the price in emotional aggravation, in precious
time and in literal money, as people give up on legitimate financial claims
because they are unable to surmount the barriers in their way.
“It’s an absolute disaster,” says
Abraham Seidmann, a professor of information systems at Boston University’s
Questrom School of Business. “It’s a major abdication of corporate
responsibility.”
Companies say they are reducing
options for human contact by popular demand. They claim customers often prefer
a virtual option — so said Frontier Airlines after it recently ceased
offering customers access to live phone agents, directing them to text, chatbot
or email instead. But as the Wall Street Journal noted late last
year, Frontier is simultaneously telling its investors that call centers are
“expensive,” while use of chatbots eliminates the customer’s ability to
negotiate.
There are nods to surveys
showing millennials and Gen Z’ers prefer online contact. (Little wonder, since
they’re naturally phone-shy, but it’s worth noting that they have also come of
age in a world of dreadful phone service.) Employers also say that in the
post-pandemic world, they can’t hire enough help.
All of this is, for the most part,
excuse-making. If there are humans clamoring to end customer contact, it’s the
ones in the c-suite, where the suits are happy to save a few pennies on call
services at your expense.
“I don’t want to put nefarious intent
in people’s mouths, but I’m positive that a lot of these companies looked at it
and went, ‘Hey, our service levels went down [during the pandemic], and we
didn’t lose customers over it, so let’s keep them a little lower. Let’s see how
hard we can make this before they start pushing back,’” says Jeff Gallino, the
chief technical officer at CallMiner, an analytics firm.
A survey by OnePoll in 2021
found that more than two-thirds of respondents ranked speaking to a human
representative as one of their preferred methods of interacting with a company,
while 55 percent identified the ability to reach a human as the most important
attribute a customer service department can possess. “When people are anxious
or have problems, they really, really want to talk,” says Michelle Shell, a
visiting assistant professor also at the Questrom school. “You need human
contact.”
As for the claim they can’t find
willing employees? Yes, turnover is traditionally high in the call
center industry, and even higher in the wake of the Great
Resignation. On the other hand, given that call centers are located around the
globe, that’s quite the worker shortage.
What’s really going on here is a
question of power. Increasingly, leverage belongs not to the customer paying
the bills but to the company offering the needed service — sometimes one for
which there is no competition. Foisting the work onto the consumer is a bet
that the customer has no other options or won’t choose to exercise them. And
often, that bet is a good one.
None of this to say is that it’s
always necessary to speak to a human. It’s easy enough to make a restaurant
reservation online. But we need a human touch when things go wrong. We want
help, not to spend hours looking for a useful phone number for Facebook (in
case you were wondering, it doesn’t exist) or navigating endless phone trees.
There are some models for better
regulation. In 2018, for example, California passed legislation mandating
that chatbots disclose when there isn’t a human on the other side of the
conversation. But there is no pending legislation in Congress that demands
companies offer a human point of contact.
The difficulty of reaching humans for
customer support is an imposition on both our time and our finances, forcing us
to spend what can be hours of labor — sometimes known as shadow work or
a time tax — to resolve what should be simple problems. It’s one factor
contributing to the sense that we as American consumers are fighting our
battles alone, as so much prey for Big Business. And it’s not so unreasonable
to say we deserve better than that.
--Helaine Olen,
Washington Post
