Well, this is sad and terrible: “Many experts believe that estrangements between adult children and their parents are becoming an epidemic in the U.S.” “Psychologists say young adults’ definition of harmful parental behavior is changing.” They “consider ordinary conflict to be much worse than it once was” and “have a much broader definition than their elders of psychological harm.” “Many now view repeated criticism, strong disagreements and other painful relationship conflicts as abusive.” “In their minds, they see themselves as more enlightened and therefore more justified to cut off for more reasons.”

I've long wondered why Zoomers are so obsessed with "therapy-speak," self-diagnosing obscure mental health disorders, "trauma", and the like. And today it dawned on me: These are the children of unfathomable levels of divorce, fatherlessness, and familiar dysfunction. Most of them have been catastrophically impacted by that stuff, and their parents failed to inculcate in them a sense of discipline, manners, self-control, toughness, or really any valuable life skills whatsoever. And so, after the damage waged upon them by broken families, all of them are sensitive, idiosyncratic, don't "fit in," and the only way they can make sense of that is by claiming some kind of mental illness. Because it's easier to say "I'm autistic and my trauma keeps me from forming normal social relationships" than to say "my mom was a psychotic whore and my dad was a self-absorbed chronic fornicator and neither of them were remotely capable of raising me correctly." To say the former is to say "I'm OK just as I am, the world needs to bend over backwards for me" -- to say the latter is to admit that despite being dealt a bummer set of cards, the onus is on you to learn all the stuff your nutcase parents failed or refused to teach you.