For many graduating college students, having to leave the campus bubble and enter the real world is something of a rude awakening. That's because in the real world, there aren't as many "safe spaces" available for coddling bad habits and neuroticism, including some young people's apparent belief that they're always right, even when they're actually wrong.
In a series of Twitter posts, Carol Blymire, a "[c]ommunications and public policy executive, branding consultant, professor, (and) writer," illustrates this point by telling the story of a young, aspiring female journalist she recently overheard lamenting the fact that the young woman's employer dared to call her out for misspelling the word hamster.
Rather than accept this constructive criticism like a mature professional would, the young woman instead challenged her boss by insisting that the word is actually spelled hampster, with a p. Because the young woman had always incorrectly spelled hamster as hampster, she responded to her boss, this somehow makes it correct in her own mind, even though any dictionary will quickly reveal that this is an incorrect spelling.
But in the age of "my truth is different than your truth," there was simply no getting through to this young woman with the facts. The young woman and her boss went back and forth about this, Blymire claims, until eventually the young woman, struggling to fight back tears, was basically told that she needed to accept the fact that hamster is spelled without the letter p.
"Let's look over the rest of the piece so I can explain the rest of my edits," the young woman's boss tried to tell her, remaining calm, cool, and collected, as the young woman became increasingly triggered over the fact that she was even being challenged at all over her incorrect spelling of the word hamster.
"I know edits can be difficult to go over sometimes, especially when you're working on new kinds of things as you grow in your career, but it's a necessary process and makes us all better at what we do," the boss went on to state, further attempting to reason with the young woman, who refused to hear any of it.
Parents need to correct their children when they're wrong, not affirm them in their wrongness
According to Blymire, after the boss got up from the table and returned to her office, the young woman, who was "barely" able to "hold it together," moved to a table in the common workspace area, loudly dropped her stuff on the table, and began to text someone. About a minute later, the young woman's phone rang and she answered it, as her mother was on the other end.
The young woman then put her mom on speakerphone, in front of the entire office, and began to whine and complain about what her boss did. And rather than correct the young woman, her mother actually affirmed her child's derangement – revealing precisely the consequences of what happens when an entire generation is never corrected or disciplined, but instead given a pat on the back for being wrong.
"I don't know what to think about this whole thing," Blymire commented. "If the young woman is neuroatypical, it seems as though the editing process might be something to approach in a different way."
"Based on the way her mom spoke to her and the way they spoke to one another, it seemed as though this young woman had never been told she was anything but perfect by family," Blymire went on to explain. "And that kind of child rearing is quite difficult on people when they grow up, and frustrating for professors, teachers, bosses, and colleagues of people who were raised that way."
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