The Illusion of a Frictionless Existence

This self-reinforcing sense of fragility among young people has been an emergent trend since at least 2015, when researchers Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote their seminal essay for The Atlantic about the rise of safety-ism on college campuses. This movement, they wrote, “elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm” in the form of, for instance, demands for trigger warnings on books like “The Great Gatsby” or “Things Fall Apart,” as well as protection from perceived or accidental slights (now deemed “microaggressions”).