Crashing out

Speaker 1 Hunter Biden's three-hour interview with Andrew Callahan started out normally enough.

Speaker 2 Lure.

Speaker 3 So you're born here in Delaware or born here in Pennsylvania? Oh, in Delaware. Okay, in Delaware.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Wilmington.

Speaker 4 Small talk.

Speaker 3 What are your thoughts on Wilmington, Delaware?

Speaker 5 Nice place? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Work, family, addiction.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I don't want to tell people how to make crack cocaine.

Speaker 1 He did. Then came the crash out.

Speaker 2 I hear Rah Emmanuel is going to run for president. Like, oh, boy, there's the answer.
There's the fucking answer.

Speaker 2 You have the pod save America, motherfuckers, saying, you know, I don't think South Carolina, that's only

Speaker 6 what the fuck?

Speaker 2 I mean, aren't they out of their fucking minds? I don't have to be fucking nice. Number one, I agree with Quentin Tarantino.
Fucking George Clooney is not a fucking, I don't know what he is.

Speaker 2 He's a brand. And by the way, and God bless him.

Speaker 1 We're not picking on him. Keep coming back, Hunter.
No, in fact, everybody has been crashing out lately. And today on Today Explained from Fox, we're going to ask, what's up?

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Speaker 7 Brace yourselves. A brand new bombshell is entering today.

Speaker 7 Today, explain.

Speaker 4 My name is Kendall Cunningham, and I'm a culture reporter at Fox.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you recently wrote a piece about crashing out.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 1 What does crashing out look like and what does it sound sound like?

Speaker 4 Um, it's a pretty broad term. It basically means to have a meltdown, to reach your limit emotionally,

Speaker 4 to lose your cool. You can either do it privately or publicly.

Speaker 7 What do you mean? Ozzy Osborne dies!

Speaker 11 You shouldn't have any other choice but to give us a roof over our heads, food for our stomachs, and whatever else we need to survive!

Speaker 4 It could look like crying in your room all day, cursing someone out.

Speaker 1 I got my period today, so I look in the mirror.

Speaker 13 Who's that?

Speaker 1 Who's that big fat, ugly girl?

Speaker 14 Like, why is my brain? Why?

Speaker 14 This should not be legal. I cannot remain who I am in an atmosphere like that.

Speaker 13 And it's so, oh, I'm just so, I wanna.

Speaker 4 You'll often see people talking about crashing out on other people, which can unfortunately mean like physically attacking someone.

Speaker 4 And you're doing all this seemingly without any regard for the consequences of that behavior.

Speaker 12 Anyways, in conclusion, tomorrow is not promised, so cuss them out today.

Speaker 15 Yeah!

Speaker 1 When was the last time you personally crashed out?

Speaker 4 Oh, God.

Speaker 4 Honestly, probably my second to last experience at an airport where as everyone knows, there's a lot of delays happening,

Speaker 4 just terrible experiences coming and going

Speaker 4 so I had a probably had a little crash out in the bathroom okay but you didn't attack anyone you were just like let me get in the shower it was an internal crash out

Speaker 1 okay so how did crashing out get on your radar enough for you to write a whole piece about it

Speaker 4 Well, I've been hearing it for a while now. It's not totally new slang.
There have been like early uses of it in rap songs and on black Twitter in like the mid-2010s.

Speaker 4 But it became very popular recently amongst Gen Z and even some millennials over the past year.

Speaker 9 Can we normalize crashing out?

Speaker 16 I really hate for y'all to be having crash out sessions on me and then you turn off your stitches. Girl, turn them back on.

Speaker 4 Specifically on TikTok, it's hard to scroll through your For You page, your explore page without seeing people talking about crashing out.

Speaker 11 And when you start tripping, don't hold nothing back.

Speaker 14 Trip all the way.

Speaker 4 And there have been some high-profile examples over the past few months.

Speaker 4 Justin Bieber has been posting a lot of bizarre and very emotionally raw content on social media lately and has been accused of crashing out.

Speaker 4 He also had like this viral run-in with the paparazzi where he said, I'm a dad, I'm a husband.

Speaker 17 You're not getting it. It's not clocking to you.

Speaker 17 It's not clocking to you that I'm standing on business, is it?

Speaker 4 And so everyone sort of immediately deemed that as like a crash out and sort of like found it relatable weirdly. And there's also been this season of Love Island.

Speaker 10 You are now single and

Speaker 4 where we had a very polarizing contestant named Huda who was having this very

Speaker 4 sort of unwarranted reaction to being uncoupled from her very short-term boo named Jeremiah on the show.

Speaker 15 Literally, Nick is trying to convince him to understand that I'm sitting here crying and he's going and having a great day and always thinking about being with Iris.

Speaker 18 You're a bitch, you're a bitch.

Speaker 4 And she later on went to apologize and admit that she was having a crash out.

Speaker 18 I'm sorry that I was mean.

Speaker 18 And, you know, I know I'm not the nicest tooth all the time,

Speaker 18 but

Speaker 18 I promise I still care.

Speaker 1 Did you by any chance see the Hunter Biden video that just came out?

Speaker 4 I did.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he's been crashing out for a while now, it seems.

Speaker 4 So I'm not too surprised. But yeah,

Speaker 4 I think everyone is sort of labeling that a crash out as well.

Speaker 1 It's something that, as you note in your piece, we tend to associate with Gen Z. Why is that?

Speaker 4 I think if you just go on TikTok, you'll see that a lot of the people posting their crash outs are younger people.

Speaker 4 I think we, in general, just associate a lot of the burgeoning social media trends with that. cohort because they are the most online.

Speaker 4 And I think when it comes to crashing out, Gen Z specifically has been

Speaker 4 more encouraged to go to public platforms to express their emotions.

Speaker 4 A big trend on TikTok before Crashing Out sort of became a thing was just, you know, going to TikTok to cry and to talk about how bad of a day you had and to talk about a breakup.

Speaker 5 Feeling really defeated by, you know, just day-to-day stuff makes you feel stupid.

Speaker 15 I'm trying to go to sleep, but I can't quit crying because I'm thinking of,

Speaker 15 oh my god, I can't quit crying.

Speaker 4 Various sort of private things that Gen Z is very comfortable exposing to a huge audience.

Speaker 4 And a lot of that has to do with like COVID, the fact that, you know, a lot of the communication they're having is on social media.

Speaker 4 And a lot of people may be seeking sort of the immediate validation that you get when something goes viral and you have people sort of immediately sympathizing with you that you may not get in such large numbers in person if you don't have, you know, a community to talk to or friends to talk to.

Speaker 4 So yeah, those are just some of the reasons that it's being associated with Gen Z.

Speaker 1 I guess part of the charm of TikTok is that

Speaker 1 you're supposed to be a little bit messy, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, TikTok is definitely less filtered compared to Instagram and YouTube and even Twitter, which everyone says is like the messiest app, but it's truly TikTok.

Speaker 4 It's a lot of like spur of the moment content.

Speaker 4 You know, people filming themselves right after they've gotten to an argument or like in the middle of an argument, trying to get like the internet's opinion.

Speaker 4 It's a lot of like very raw, diaristic content.

Speaker 1 Do you think the people who post themselves crashing out online, do you think they have any worries about how this might affect them?

Speaker 1 I don't know, like six months from now when everything's fine and you're up for a promotion at work?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it unfortunately doesn't seem like it. It's something that I think about all the time.

Speaker 4 It's so important to realize that like your emotions are most of the time very temporary.

Speaker 4 But I think it sort of speaks to like the desperation of like just wanting connection, wanting people to validate your emotions,

Speaker 4 wanting that immediate sort of comfort, whether it's from, you know, a bunch of people that you'll never encounter in real life and don't know you.

Speaker 4 So I think it really just speaks to like this desperate need for wanting to be heard that a lot of people are having right now.

Speaker 1 Okay, so these kind of trends come and go, and yet we all have emotions and we all always will. And we will all always have to go to the airport and we will all always have a meltdown there.

Speaker 1 Where do you think Crashing Out goes from here?

Speaker 4 Hmm.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think as humans, we love drama and we love mess.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it seems like

Speaker 4 we like observing mess less on like an entertainment level and more amongst just like regular people. I feel like the sort of cold play incident that happened last week was an example of that.

Speaker 4 We love just like civilian drama.

Speaker 17 Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.

Speaker 4 I do think that

Speaker 4 that appetite won't necessarily go away. It may look a little different, but who knows? I mean, generations change.
They have different priorities.

Speaker 4 Maybe we'll see a sort of backlash to this sort of overexposing of our,

Speaker 4 you know, emotional meltdowns and mental health issues with the next generation, but I think that that appetite for mess will

Speaker 4 still be around.

Speaker 1 I love the idea of the little alphas being like super buttoned up about their feelings. No one knows what that baby is thinking about.

Speaker 4 Honestly, I wouldn't blame them.

Speaker 1 Kendall Cunningham covers culture for Fox. Coming up next, we're all going to the World's Fair.
JK, JK, JK. We're all going to the psychologist.

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Speaker 9 All when you come crash

Speaker 1 fails today, explained.

Speaker 1 I'm Noelle King, standing on business with Maytal Ayal. Maytal is a psychologist and writer.
You ended up writing about emotional outbursts online for The Atlantic. How'd you get that assignment?

Speaker 5 I actually

Speaker 19 was

Speaker 19 on TikTok doing the strange anthropological research I like to do on TikTok,

Speaker 19 and I discovered a phenomenon which I guess we can call it crying TikTok.

Speaker 5 It is like I have so much pent-up emotion inside me that until I let it go, I cannot even think of a solution.

Speaker 7 What is wrong with me?

Speaker 5 I'm only crying because I'm so fucking angry right now.

Speaker 5 Because I've never missed a flight in my life. Like,

Speaker 5 fuck, I'm so mad.

Speaker 19 And I found it to be so fascinating and emblematic of a certain cultural moment we're in.

Speaker 19 And it was about this concept of what I'm calling McVulnerability or artificial process synthetic vulnerability online.

Speaker 1 You're a therapist. Why did that stand out to you?

Speaker 19 I see people cry a lot.

Speaker 1 Yes, I'm.

Speaker 10 It's part of the gig.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 19 I think of crying as one of the most vulnerable things you can do. I mean, you take off the mask, you expose yourself, and you show what it's like to be at your rawest.

Speaker 19 But I think crying TikTok is something different.

Speaker 19 And I think to understand why this phenomenon exists, we have to understand the context we're in right now. I think it's almost become cliche to say we're in a loneliness epidemic.

Speaker 19 Touch deprivation is a thing that we should be worried about.

Speaker 19 We're in a time period where the average American man, for every one hour he spends with a person outside the home, he's spending seven hours watching TV.

Speaker 19 So we are starved for connection.

Speaker 19 There's a,

Speaker 19 you know, college type student I work with,

Speaker 19 and

Speaker 19 they

Speaker 19 find it really difficult to put themselves out there with other people. It just feels so scary.
They're very self-conscious, brings up a lot of anxiety.

Speaker 19 So they fell into a habit where they would eat lunch every day and they would sit at their desk and they would put their lunch in front of them and they would set up their computer and they would open it and they'd put on YouTube.

Speaker 19 And they'd every day put on YouTube with one of their favorite influencers who was also eating lunch.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 19 And just opening up about their day-to-day lives and what's hard and you know the difficulties they're facing. And that's how my client would spend their lunch time.

Speaker 19 And it felt easier to be, you know, getting that sort of like intimacy connection hit from the influencer rather than from a real person they'd have to, you know, put themselves out to meet.

Speaker 1 You know, I weirdly see both pros and cons in here. I

Speaker 1 remember being high school aged, and

Speaker 1 do you remember the old cliche that when you didn't have anyone to sit with, you'd go in the bathroom and kind of just like eat your lunch in a stall, right? It was, what's the movie? Um,

Speaker 1 me girls. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I don't remember doing that specifically, but I do remember like going outside by myself. So you have a young person here who at least has someone to sit and eat with.

Speaker 1 That person is just not really there.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, some of what's happening here seems pretty emotionally like dysregulated.

Speaker 1 We talked in the first half of the show about crashing out, about young people like just exhibiting these huge emotions online.

Speaker 1 Is something going on with Gen Z where they feel bigger feelings where they are less regulated in their emotions?

Speaker 5 I think so.

Speaker 19 I think what's so interesting about technology is

Speaker 19 it lets you, instead of just regulating yourself emotionally, and like, you know, if you feel bored or you feel really angry or you feel really sad, the best thing you can do is find ways to soothe yourself so that emotion kind of calms down.

Speaker 19 But I think what happens if we always have a phone in hand, you know, it's not just Gen Z, it's all of us.

Speaker 19 If we always have a phone in hand, anytime we feel big emotion, we can just turn straight to our screens.

Speaker 19 And that doesn't really allow us to go through the process of feeling through an emotion, letting it dissipate, letting us calm down.

Speaker 19 We almost just sort of short-circuit it and distract ourselves and numb out. And then I think we don't actually learn to self-regulate because of technology.

Speaker 1 I think I hear you saying that the emotion is real. We shouldn't assume that because someone is doing this online, they're faking it or they're just trying to get attention.

Speaker 19 No. And I think like with crying TikTok, I don't think it's just, you know, a bunch of navel-gazing influencers and celebrities pretending to cry so they can get likes.

Speaker 19 I think they're giving people what they want. I think we want

Speaker 19 emotionality from our celebrities and from our influencers. It's because we're not getting it in real life as much as we used to.

Speaker 1 And what are the consequences of that?

Speaker 19 Emotional regulation becomes more difficult to come by.

Speaker 19 And I think there's a, what I've noticed the most, I think especially with Gen Z, is there's a diminishing with this distress tolerance, this ability to kind of sit and endure uncomfortable human, messy emotion.

Speaker 19 Sometimes I wonder if they feel more comfortable

Speaker 19 or what I see is they will feel more comfortable posting about their deepest emotions than they will sitting face to face

Speaker 19 telling someone behind closed doors, this is how I'm feeling.

Speaker 19 I think what has been happening with social media is just priming us for what's next, something much bigger.

Speaker 19 I think right we're

Speaker 19 really used to like, okay, we get to see an influencer open up about their feelings or a celebrity open up about their feelings.

Speaker 19 We almost get to like feel this emotional connection that's safe and behind the screen.

Speaker 19 And I think it's priming us for what's about to happen.

Speaker 19 And what's about to happen is AI is going to become so deeply embedded into our day-to-day lives, not just as you know, a productivity agent, but as a confidant, as a friend, as a therapist.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 I think we've been primed to get used to being vulnerable with a not human.

Speaker 19 And so I fear that, like, the more we start relying on AI

Speaker 19 for to get our emotional needs met, for intimacy,

Speaker 19 our expectations start to change for what we want out of relationships. We start expecting the person who's across from us listening to us to be more like AI,

Speaker 19 to never be in a bad mood, to never be angry, to never be unavailable, to be hyper-validating.

Speaker 19 Changes the way we understand relationships and intimacy and connectedness.

Speaker 1 This all comes down to: we have a generation that has grown up with technology from infancy, right?

Speaker 1 And so pulling up your chat bot might be as

Speaker 1 second nature as calling a therapist and saying, you know, I'm dealing with a lot of stuff here. Gen Z

Speaker 1 is, is, depending on how you look at the data, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, but Gen Z seems to have a lot of experience with therapy and with therapeutic talk, but it doesn't sound like that is necessarily leading the generation to greater happiness, greater resiliency.

Speaker 1 What do you think is going on? What is the tension here?

Speaker 19 There was a really interesting study conducted. It was in Australia.
And it was with

Speaker 19 Gen Z.

Speaker 19 kids at school and they gave them, I forget, it was eight or 12 weeks of a something called dialectical behavioral therapy intervention. It's like the gold standard in psychology.

Speaker 19 It was teaching them mindfulness, language about their therapeutic needs. It was teaching them skills to manage anxiety and depression.

Speaker 19 And by the end of the study, what they found is the mental health of the teens got worse.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 I think what happens is as

Speaker 19 people become more and more aware of concepts like trauma and concepts like anxiety and depression, they actually, you know, you think, okay, this is going to be so helpful and allow people to deal with it.

Speaker 19 And sometimes it is helpful. But sometimes what it actually does is it draws more and more attention to what might be wrong.

Speaker 19 And it actually

Speaker 19 can sabotage people's mental health. It can cause them to

Speaker 19 be over aware and over conscious that they might not be doing well.

Speaker 19 And I think that's

Speaker 19 the double-edged sword of therapy culture and therapy speak and all these therapy concepts. They can be really helpful,

Speaker 19 but we can also start to drown in them. We can also start to perceive our world through diagnoses and mental health issues and therapeutic concepts, actually to our detriment.

Speaker 1 And so are there better options than therapy for young people?

Speaker 19 So about 70 to 80 percent roughly of the type of therapy people engage in is individual therapy.

Speaker 19 So it's sitting alone, one-on-one with a therapist, turning inward on yourself and just excavating, excavating, excavating who you are, what you want, what you're afraid of, so on and so forth.

Speaker 5 And then there's about 10%,

Speaker 19 maybe less, of people who do group therapy.

Speaker 19 And I actually think group therapy, it should be the reverse.

Speaker 19 We should be doing way more work with group therapy and working on our sort of relational fitness.

Speaker 19 And instead of just sitting one-on-one and turning further and further inward, I think it would be really helpful to sit in a group with other people

Speaker 19 and turn outward and understand

Speaker 19 how other people are doing and understand our patterns as we relate to other people.

Speaker 19 I think right now, in this like era of loneliness and atomization, and everyone is so self-turned, we need to turn back outwards.

Speaker 19 And I think group therapy would be a really good alternative to individual therapy.

Speaker 1 Maytal Eyal is a psychologist who wrote for The Atlantic about why everybody's crying online. Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Ibarra and Devin Schwartz.
It was edited by Amina El-Sadi.

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