The Kids Aren’t Alright

Photo by Conner Baker on Unsplash

I did not leave any of my belongings in the locker room. I changed into my one-piece swimsuit at home, slipped on loose-fitting cotton yoga pants, and wandered into the El Pomar Natatorium (what a word!) feeling lost and old. The college students, whom I feared, did not once look my way or register that I was a decade out of touch, that four (yes, FOUR!) gray hairs sprouted from the side of my head, or that exactly 13 years ago TO THE DAY I had moved into my freshman dorm (thanks, Facebook, for the reminder).

I did not leave my belongings in the locker room because nearly every locker had a clean round padlock over the handle and because this was not my building, my natatorium. This place was for the students and I had the very crisp thought that few spaces exist purely for them. I would not take up any more of their limited space with my belongings, the interloper I was. I also did not want any students to assume that I stupidly thought I belonged when I was clearly an ancient elder who may or may not have wandered out of the old folk’s home, dazed and confused, attempting to find my octogenarian water aerobics course. 

I have not spent much time with people under 25 since I graduated from my Master’s program and wrapped up my teaching assistantships. But what I remember from that time is really liking the students, though finding them a little intimidating with their gusto and drive, and thinking that perhaps I’d like to work with this age group of “barely adults” someday in the future ( I finished graduate school as a barely adult of 24 years old). 

Feeling that same intimidation again (and feeling even older and less cool), I schlepped my bag of scuba gear out onto the pool deck, wading through crowds of college kids who looked (yes, it’s a cliché) even younger than I’d remembered. 

As the students arrived, I quickly realized I was the only non-student attending this scuba certification course and besides one returning ed student who happened to be my age, I believe I was the only person besides the instructor over 21. 

The instructor had offered me private lessons on a different night of the week so that I didn’t have to take the class with college students, but I thought, Oh, why make him show up another night? I’m sure I can keep up with the kids.

But as I stood there tugging at the swimsuit I’d purchased as a freshman in college (which was perhaps a little more snug than it had been 13 years prior) trying to talk with the instructor over the blaring music and a horde of 50 or so frat boys launching two massive canoes into the open end of the pool while trying to sink one another with buckets and squirt guns, I began to wonder if I’d messed up. 

This was an easy week. No tanks or oxygen, just freediving with fins and snorkels to get the feel for our gear. I began to worry, What if I can’t keep up with them? What if I’m not fit enough to do this? 

I thought about those students at the University of Colorado Boulder I taught seven years ago who were scaling 14ers, learning to rock climb, backcountry skiing, and trying to become the next National Geographic reporters and photographers — students who wanted to do everything and did.

Meanwhile, I was now 31, saying things like “Man, I used to be so fit,” regularly, and generally feeling unsure if I could manage the very small task of popping a regulator into my mouth and taking breaths underwater. 

These kids are going to destroy any shred of confidence I have, I thought as I fiddled with the plastic straps on my mask.

The instructor lined us up on the side of the pool deck and I stood slightly off to one side trying to give the students space, trying to say with my body, “I know I do not belong. Please tolerate me.” They looked small and lean and indifferent. 

“Okay,” the instructor said, shouting over the music. “Today we’ve got a swim test and a tread water test. You need to swim 150 meters without stopping, then we’ll tread water together for 10 minutes in the deep end.” 

I can do this, I said to myself. And because I have no concept of distances (or any spatial reasoning for that matter) I had no idea how long 150 meters was, but assumed it would take us quite a while to finish. Just don’t finish last, I said to myself. Just don’t finish last.

“That’s going to be down and back four times,” the instructor said. 

Wait, what? I thought. That’s barely 10 minutes of swimming leisurely.

“Also,” the instructor added, “Does anyone not know how to tread water?” I snorted, assuming it was a joke. Fifteen nervous little faces immediately turned to stare at me. Several hands shot into the air. 

I nudged the only other guy in his thirties standing next to me. “Wait, is he serious?” I whispered as the instructor slowly explained to the class how to tread water. 

“Confident swimmers, head to the deep side of the pool,” the instructor said. “If you’re at all worried you won’t be able to complete the test or worried about drowning, stay where you can stand.”

Are you fucking kidding me? I thought as I hopped into the deepest lane and started my laps. The other students stayed in the shallow end. Four quick laps later, I did not have to worry about finishing last. I was the first one out of the pool. 

Over the next 20 minutes, several of the students were clinging to the side of the pool sucking down air, others were choking on water trying (and failing) to doggy paddle. Still others just walked along the bottom of the pool, having completely given up. 

When the last stragglers finished their swim, we all headed for the deep end of the pool for 10 minutes of treading water. The students dropped like flies. 

“I hate this,” one of the students said to me as I floated around introducing myself (per the instructor’s request). “I hate this so much.” We weren’t even two minutes in. 

“Try floating on your back,” I said. “Give your arms a break.” 

“I can’t!” They yelled. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever done!” They swam over to the wall and grasped on for dear life.

I tried chatting with the rest of the students, but they barely acknowledged me. I couldn’t even get names from half of them and they turned away from me as if I must be speaking to someone else. Was there something on my face? Did I really look like such a witch?

The ten minutes closed out with several of the kids clinging to the wall (no idea what the instructor planned to do with them) and the student who had claimed this was the “worst thing they’d ever done” was in the fetal position, clutching their head, quietly puking onto the pool deck next to all of our gear (just 10 steps away from a convenient grassy lawn, I might add). 

What in the actual fuck is going on? I thought as I moved my gear away from this disaster of a child, slipped on my fins, mask, and snorkel, and got back into the pool. 

The rest of the session went about as poorly as the first half: kids who couldn’t navigate their gear, who were too afraid to put their heads underwater with the snorkel, who couldn’t swim a single length of the pool even with fins on. While practicing equalizing our ears underwater, several kids claimed they were confused because they had never once in their lives pushed the pressure out of their ears by squeezing their nose and blowing. 

“What are we supposed to be doing?” several of them asked the instructor as I dove and surfaced over and over again.

At the end of class, I quickly toweled off, threw my pants back over my still-damp swimsuit, and chucked my gear into my bag, ready to bolt out of the building. A boy stood next to me, arms wrapped tight around his chest, shivering violently. Having lost all of my compassion by this point, I looked over at him with a face that clearly said, “What the fuck do you need?” 

“Do y-y-y-you,” he stammered through chattering teeth, “know if I can get a towel here?” 

“Um,” I said, taking a deep breath, trying not to be a complete asshole. “I’m pretty sure this is a bring-your-own towel kind of situation.” 

“Shit,” he said, looking at his pile of dry clothes. 

“Here,” I said, offering him my damp towel. He wiped off the bottom of his feet and handed the towel back to me, still soaking wet, still shivering.

“Seriously dude,” I said, passing the towel back to him. “Just dry off.” 

“Sorry,” he said, lightly dabbing my towel around his body. “This is just like, really weird.” And with that, I took the towel back and practically ran out of the gym to my car, desperate to put as many miles between myself and this absolutely useless group of humans. 

What Is Going On?

I am still trying to process what exactly happened last Thursday. I am still trying to get my nervous system to come down from the chaos and the feeling that I was almost certainly going to see someone drown. I am emotionally preparing for this week’s class in which we have a full two hours to learn how to clear water out of our masks while underwater. What horrors will these children drum up?

This one dive class has completely consumed the inside of my noggin for the last week. I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop talking about it. I’ve been analyzing it and trying to figure out exactly what went down and whether or not this was normal or the strangest night of all of our lives.

Here are the questions I cannot find answers to (and would love your thoughts on):

• Why on god’s green earth would you sign up for a scuba diving class if you didn’t know how to swim? Is this bravery, stupidity, or just purely not thinking it through?

• Are all young people like this now, or was this just a coincidence of some of the most useless young people all coming together at once? (Several folks who have been teaching for a long time have shared that in the last decade or so, kids seem unable to do much of anything when it comes to common sense and basic strength and fitness, so my guess is this is a sign of a generation of hapless people).

• Am I giving myself too much credit or was I also this stupid, useless, and unaware at 18? (I do recall getting on the city bus for the first time when I was 18, realizing I was heading in the wrong direction, and thinking this is fine because all bus routes loop so eventually I’ll get to where I need to go. I have no idea why I thought that and the poor bus driver also did not know why I thought that and felt very bad when she had to leave me at the edge of the city at 1am because she was at the end of her line and wanted to go home and go to sleep.)

• Who do I blame for these kids’ complete lack of ANY skills? The parents? Phones? Social media? The pandemic? A subpar university? Something else? All of these things?

I know I sound so harsh. I also know that I’m going to be very afraid in another week when I have to put that regulator in my mouth, descend to the bottom of the pool, and try to breathe underwater. I want to be clear that I know this is scary stuff. In fact, I’m learning to scuba dive because it’s scary.

But I suppose I think about it like this: Learning to mountain bike was also a fairly scary endeavor, but at least I had the goddamn foresight to ensure I — at a bare minimum — knew how to at least RIDE A BIKE before attempting to send that bike down steep mountains filled with rocks (and also that I could ride said bike for a couple hundred meters without laying down to puke on the side of the road). But even that doesn’t feel like the right metaphor. Because at least mountain biking is hard. Swimming a couple of laps in a pool seems like the athletic equivalent of having to walk one lap around a track. Just prove you have a pulse and can exist comfortably in your meat suit for a couple of minutes. But half these kids couldn’t even do that. 

The kids are not alright. In a piece for the Conversation last year, clinical psychologist and professor Simon Sherry shared this:

“Some psychologists propose that overprotection can morph into what they call “safetyism,” which teaches kids negative thought patterns similar to those experienced by the anxious and depressed. Safetyism can over-prioritize a young person’s safety to the exclusion of other practical and moral concerns.

It is natural to want to avoid problems, but avoiding things that bring us discomfort can reinforce a belief that we cannot handle certain issues and, over time, make us less capable.”

When you combine extreme aversion to discomfort with near-constant exposure to fantastical images of people doing incredible (i.e. difficult) things on social media, you end up with a class full of students for whom treading water for 10 minutes is “the hardest thing they’ve ever done” who also believe they’re entitled to that sick whale shark diving shot for TikTok. 

I think we are all at risk of this comfort crisis (as Michael Easter put it), but kids especially so — they’ve been exposed to it their entire lives.

“I’ve written a lot about the importance of empathy and compassion in parenting, for both our children and ourselves. The essence of well-being is the ability to care about and be kind to our own experience—there’s nothing I believe more firmly,” said Psychotherapist Nancy Colier in a piece for Psychology Today. “And yet, for the first time ever, I’m questioning whether our generation may have swung too far from previous generations, when “suck it up” was the only advice for kids who found themselves in a hard situation. While a dismissive admonishment to “suck it up” doesn’t help children to develop an emotionally healthy internal life, treating every irritation and struggle as something that's monumental, shouldn’t exist, and must immediately be fixed--might not be the right solution either. Perhaps the work, for now, is in parents learning to tolerate our children’s discomfort—and our own as well.”

Which of course brings the hammer of irony crashing down, as I’ve spent the majority of this week pondering if I want to switch to the private sessions because watching these kids in so much discomfort and distress is putting me in a state of discomfort and distress, and I’m not sure I want to tolerate it for the next eight weeks. Maybe I’m just as bad with discomfort too.