Why Does the Older Generation Seem More Resilient, While Young People Are More Prone to Depression?

@废姐​：This question itself is full of nauseating survivorship bias and a cheap romanticization of suffering.

I've worked on the front lines of psychiatric clinics for years, facing dozens of desperate faces every day. I'm sick of the clichés that equate numbness with strength and suppression with virtue. The so-called resilience you see in the older generation is largely a defensive dullness formed by chronic trauma. The so-called fragility of young people, on the other hand, is precisely because their perceptual systems are still functioning normally; they are still trying to find human dignity in this pathological, overloaded society.

Let's talk about the older generation first.

You see them enduring hardship and never complaining. You conclude that this is resilience. This is not resilience at all; in psychological terms, it is alexithymia.

The survival logic of that era was simple: stay alive. To stay alive, any emotional reaction that consumed energy was a burden. Fear would make your legs give out while fleeing, sadness would burn extra calories during a famine, and anger could get you killed in turbulent times. So, their brains were forced to sever the connection between emotional feelings and conscious awareness. This is a biological shielding mechanism.

I've encountered countless elderly patients like this in the outpatient clinic. They never say they feel miserable when registering; they only complain of headaches, backaches, burning stomachs, or shortness of breath. You run a full-body checkup—CT scans, MRIs, endoscopies—and the results show their organ functions are better than mine. But they are still in pain. This is called somatic symptom disorder. Their pain has no outlet, so the brain converts spiritual despair into physical pain. This is not resilience; it's the visceral manifestation of psychological trauma.

According to relevant data from The Lancet, the proportion of undiagnosed depression among people over 60 globally is as high as 12% to 20%, and among those with physical illnesses, this number soars to over 40%. They go undiagnosed because they don't know how to express "I am sad"; they only say it hurts here or there, or they simply choose to end their lives in silence. Do you know how high the rate of resolute suicides by drinking pesticide or hanging is among rural elderly? They don't give their own lives any chance for intervention.

Is this resilience? This is complete surrender following learned helplessness.

The cost of this silence is the total loss of their capacity for empathy. They are cruel to themselves, and they are cruel to their children. Because subconsciously, they believe that living is suffering, so this little bit of pain is nothing. This emotional shielding mechanism is passed down intergenerationally and becomes what you call "strength."

Now let's talk about young people.

Why do young people seem prone to depression?

Because the survival environment has changed. The evolutionary speed of the human brain is far slower than the pace of change in social structures.

Our prefrontal cortex was designed to identify beasts in the jungle and maintain relationships within a tribe. It was not designed to process tens of thousands of fragmented pieces of information daily, to cope with this 24/7 social surveillance, or to compete for a tiny scrap of survival resources in a pool of hundreds of millions of people.

The brains of young people today are in a chronic state of allostatic load.

This is a very core concept. Allostatic load refers to the physiological price the body pays to adapt to repeated chronic stress.

The stress of the older generation was pulsed. No food? Work desperately. Full? Stress relieved, and the brain circuits could rest. Today's stress is diffuse and ambient. Mortgages, KPIs, peer pressure, class solidification, workplace gaslighting. These stressors are like PM2.5 in the air—invisible and intangible, but corroding your hippocampus every second.

This continuous, low-intensity stress is more lethal than an acute survival crisis. Because it keeps your HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) in a state of hyperarousal around the clock, with cortisol levels remaining persistently high. High concentrations of cortisol directly cause hippocampal atrophy. That is the core area responsible for memory and emotional regulation.

This is visible physical damage in clinical imaging. I've seen brain scans of twenty-year-olds where the hippocampal volume is sometimes worse than that of a fifty-year-old. This is a physiological pathology, not just "overthinking" or "being dramatic."

Let me throw out another piece of data. The heritability of mental illness is around 37%. But this doesn't mean genes determine everything. Epigenetics tells us that environmental stress can activate those otherwise silent susceptibility genes. The current social environment is a massive, highly efficient incubator for inducing depression.

You accuse young people of being sensitive.

I say sensitivity is an evolutionary gift, but in a pathological society, it becomes a curse.

Young people's nervous systems have extremely high resolution. They can capture subtle malice in interpersonal relationships, perceive the absurdity behind grand narratives, and feel the alienation of human nature in assembly-line work.

This was supposed to be the driving force of human civilization. It is precisely because of sensitivity to pain that humans invent anesthetics, reform systems, and create art. But in a society that demands people become cogs in a machine, this high-resolution perception becomes the greatest source of suffering.

It's like installing a top-tier graphics card and the latest AAA game on an old computer that can only run DOS. The system will obviously crash. The older generation is the DOS system, running simple commands, stable and durable. Young people are high-precision neural networks requiring complex calculations and massive computational support. Once overloaded, it's a system-level crash.

I must share a real scene from my clinic.

It was a father and son. The father was in his fifties, weathered face, calloused hands. The son was twenty-three or twenty-four, a recent graduate programmer in a plaid shirt, eyes vacant, curled up in the chair trembling.

The father kept slamming the table. He said, "Doctor, just prescribe him some medicine and get him better so he can go to work. He just doesn't want to work, right? Who wants to work? I've worked for thirty years and it hasn't killed me. Kids these days just haven't suffered; throw him into our era and he'd behave in three days."

I interrupted him right then. I pointed to the dense scars on his son's wrists.

I asked that father, "Do you think this is about being afraid of hard work?"

The boy looked up, his eyes hollow, and said to me, "Doctor, I'm not afraid of exhaustion. I can write code for thirty hours straight, but I don't know why I'm writing it. I feel like a piece of code that's still running but has lost its meaning. I want to delete myself."

This is the fundamental difference.

The suffering of the older generation was external; the enemy was on the opposite side. You could hate the landlord, hate the weather, hate fate. This hatred had a target; it had power.

The suffering of young people is internal; it is an existential crisis. When food and clothing are no longer the problem, the lack of meaning becomes the biggest killer. They can't find an enemy. The enemy is this massive system, it is nothingness, or even themselves. This powerlessness gets internalized into an attack on the self, leading to severe self-loathing.

The father was stunned into silence. He couldn't comprehend this kind of pain. In his cognition, pain must have a physical carrier, like a wound or hunger. He couldn't understand that the collapse of the mind is more painful than the rotting of the flesh.

There is a concept in sociology called relative deprivation. The older generation derived satisfaction from vertical comparison in universal poverty: eating meat this year is better than last year, so they were happy. Young people derive frustration from horizontal comparison in relative affluence: open your phone, and everyone on the internet makes a million a year; if you make eight thousand, you're trash. This omnipresent social comparison destroys young people's self-esteem systems every single moment.

What's more terrifying is that young people today have been stripped of the right to go crazy.

In the past, if people were unhappy, they could curse out loud in the fields or get into fights after drinking. Now? Lose your temper in the office, and HR talks to you tomorrow, and you're "optimized" the day after. Vent online, and you might get doxxed. The channels for emotional release are highly controlled; all negative emotions can only be compressed inward. This inward high-pressure compression ultimately creates a high incidence of depression.

Depression is essentially an inward turning of aggression. When a person cannot change their environment, cannot attack the abuser, or even identify the abuser, their only target of attack becomes themselves.

I also want to emphasize a point about the changing diagnostic criteria.

The development of psychiatric medicine over the past few decades has refined the granularity of our understanding of mental health. Fifty years ago, unless you were running crazy in the streets or completely catatonic, no one thought you were sick. Now we have the DSM-5; we can identify mild and moderate mood disorders.

This is not just an increase in prevalence; it is an improvement in recognition rates.

Data shows that the diagnosis rate of mood disorders among global adolescents has risen by more than 24% in the past decade. This is not entirely a bad thing. It means more people are starting to face their mental states and are asking for help.

Don't mistake this cry for help as weakness. Admitting you are sick takes immense courage.

In my clinic, those young people who dare to sit down, look me in the eye, and clearly describe their suicidal thoughts are much braver than those who just grit their teeth and eventually explode in silence. They are fighting against the survival instinct in their genes, fighting against social stigma, and fighting for a little right to breathe.

The resilience of the older generation is, to some extent, an arrogance born of survivorship bias. They survived, gained the voice of authority, and began to redefine history, whitewashing their past helplessness as an active choice.

They accuse young people of being fragile because they are afraid. They are terrified to admit that the suffering they endured was actually meaningless, and they are terrified to admit that they too are terminally ill. Acknowledging the pain of young people would be equivalent to negating their entire life's survival philosophy.

I want to tell all the young people reading this text.

Your depression is not your fault, nor is it your weakness.

It is your body and your brain protesting on your behalf against this crazy world.

When a system not only demands you work 996 but also requires you to be grateful; when a culture not only exploits your surplus value but also demands emotional stability; when a society offloads all structural contradictions onto individual lack of effort.

Depression is your last remaining honesty.

Do not try to imitate the resilience of the older generation. That resilience is an iron shirt bought by castrating the soul. What we want is not to be wrapped in that blood-soaked shirt; we want to live authentically as flesh-and-blood human beings. Even if it means living in pain.

If you feel like you can't hold on anymore, go see a doctor, take your medication, and rest. There is no shame in that.

A neurotransmitter imbalance in the brain—abnormal concentrations of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine—is a purely physiological issue, just like insufficient insulin secretion in a diabetic. No one would accuse a diabetic of not being strong enough, so no one has the right to accuse you of why you can't just be happy.

As for those who continue to feed you the idea that suffering is a blessing—

stay away from them. Their suffering is their epitaph; it doesn't need to be your motto.

Every generation has its own purgatory. The older generation walked out of the wasteland of hunger; we are traversing the desert of meaning. There are no signposts in this desert, and the compass is spinning wildly. In this process, getting lost, becoming dehydrated, or even collapsing in despair are all normal reactions.

Don't let anyone's arrogance define your pain.

In this hard-hearted world, staying sensitive and vulnerable is itself the highest form of rebellion. Because it proves that you haven't been completely alienated into a cold, unfeeling stone.

Understand?

Stay sensitive to pain. Stay angry. That is the proof that you are alive.