I think we have normalized avoiding hard situations. You don't work through anything anymore, you just move on to the next thing. People are always looking for bigger and better when in reality you are likely just going to find "different".
I think it is worse than this though.
I think that rather than people looking for bigger and bigger, they are trying to have less and less pain. And this continual reduction in pain, leads to feeling pain and lower levels. Instead of building increasing resiliency, it is moving in the opposite direction, a weakening.
Many have and will again argue with me on this, citing all kinds of studies that show how people need to be emotionally protected, but to me it seems, the more protection someone has, the more likely they are to suffer depression. Among the younger generations, the most therapized people at any point in our history, we can see just how fragile they have become, unable to make it through a day without being emotionally triggered by even the slightest of discomforts.
Glass people.
Which is my response to the quote above, which was the inspiration for the title of this post. One that I have written about from various angles before, like in Tiptoeing around a fragile mind, from seven years ago.
Have anything yet 
This is a good read on overtherapizing children. And that is what we are doing, even if they aren't seeing a therapist directly, because the entire content ecosystem is being built to encourage raising up the importance of feelings and drive emotional reactions, without control, without self-management. It doesn't teach a progressive shift to facilitate increased resilience, it keeps people emotionally immature, but feeling as if they have advanced.
Dunning-Kruger effect.
Characteristics of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the tendency of people with low ability or competence in a particular domain to overestimate their skills and performance. This phenomenon occurs because individuals who lack expertise or knowledge in a specific area often lack the metacognitive ability to recognize their own incompetence. As a result, they tend to inflate their self-assessments, believing they are more capable than they actually are.
Humans are amazing at surviving difficult situations, but "difficult" is relative and times these days are far, far better than they have been in other periods of time. So, our environment isn't as rich with pain and discomfort as it was, which means even shallow wounds feel like they cut deep.
And I get it, therapy is needed in certain cases and can be incredibly healthy, but it has become a crutch that we lean on from increasingly young ages, rather than learning even the basic skills required to deal with discomfort. Parents want to have teachers sort out schoolyard squabbles, and any time a child behaves badly, they are given a diagnosis and a pill to take, because they are obviously ill.
How do they grow up?
We are starting to see the early answers to this, as the eldest of Gen-Z are in their late twenties and struggling to make meaningful connections in their life, even as they post to their media channels about the meanings of life. The thing is, that nothing meaningful is easy, no one has ever accomplished anything of note by taking the easiest path. Life is filled with challenges and many of them, we might fail to overcome the first, second or tenth time. But, if before we try again, before we learn, we look for a savior, and constantly have a safety net, when do we learn how to cope with the emotional disappointment, the negative feelings, the downs, that make the ups better?
Our range of reference of what is between good and bad has been narrowed, which means the highs are lower and we have become far more sensitive to any reduction. The impact is greater, we feel discomfort faster, feel pain earlier, because for many of us, we haven't ever really gone without, we haven't struggled. We have everything we want at our fingertips.
Want, but not need.
And, this "at the fingertips" mentality has made us less patient, less engaged and far more entitled, because we are used to having things quickly, when we desire them. And when we are forced to wait even for a minor amount of time, we get not only frustrated, we react on our emotion strongly, we overreact. We show our emotions, regardless of whether they are valid responses to the situation at all. Yet, we expect others to never upset us with their actions, reactions, or opinions.
We are products of our environment and our environment has been pretty soft and padded compared to the past, and as a result, our skin hasn't thickened. Everything damages us, scrapes us, slices us and triggers us into some kind of emotional state that wouldn't have been reached earlier. The stoic mind is dead, replaced by the agitated mind instead. A restless mind, unable to still itself, because the skill of attention and focus hasn't been trained, and instead, one that is continually darting from one notification to the next scroll feed has been developed and reinforced.
People can argue all they want with me, and site all the different studies, but just sit back and actually observe a range of people over time, question them, explore their experience, and you might see the same. Not because you are looking for it, but because it has always been there, hiding in plain site.
We just weren't paying attention.
Too busy feeling like we were.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
@bozz