There is a growing movement that says life is too easy nowadays and we're handicapping our ability to develop coping strategies.
Life is incredibly easy nowadays. We have more luxury and access to everything than we've ever bad. Crime is at all time lows. We're safer and have an incredible access to just about anything. This leads to self segregation and an atrophy of basic coping skills.
But the media convinces us of the opposite. People are told from birth that their lives are hard, the system is broken, etc. This conditions people to not bother. This atrophies skills or they never develop.
I recently read an article that something like 25% of Ivy league students have a "disability". They don't, but they think being depressed is a disability which enables them. The author made a good case that they were taking advantage of the system, which cheats themselves out of developing their skills. https://reason.com/2025/12/04/why-are-38-percent-of-stanford...
My friends sex addicts group has also touched on a similar thing lately: emotional comfort is not emotional maturity. People today segregate themselves from people to protect their emotions, then they wonder why they can't handle people who disagree with them. It's easy to avoid things.
The main thing I'm saying here is that today's modern life allows us to avoid things we don't like. This leads to a lack of development in many areas. Then we claim everyone is struggling. Then the media reinforces this.
Over time it can become difficult to gauge people's conditions and legitimacy of those conditions. therapist friend of mine and I talk about this a lot. "What's an actual condition and what do people think they have?" is a big issue in modern therapy. People Self-diagnose way too much nowadays. The media convinces everyone that they're broken.
My life experience also mimics this. In college I thought I had crippling social anxiety. Turns out I just needed to be around people more to develop my abilities. I forced myself to work customer service jobs and voila, after a year or two I became a social person. My stutter went away and I became comfortable in groups.
Our perspective is fucked and it creates a cycle of apathy/complacency. Then everyone is "depressed" because they can't handle their latte having soy instead of cows's milk. This is hyperbole but it isn't untrue.
I don't understand why you think that the fact that exposure cured you means you didn't have social anxiety?
Exposure is something a therapist would suggest for social anxiety.
The issue seems to be that you think saying that someone has social anxiety means they are permanently broken (and maybe will give up trying to do anything about it?) but I'm not really sure where you got that idea from.
By that logic now that text to speech has gotten quite good we should stop teaching kids to read.