Crashing out

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

Lure.

So you're born here in Delaware or born here in Pennsylvania?

Oh, in Delaware.

Okay, in Delaware.

Yeah, Wilmington.

Small talk.

What are your thoughts on Wilmington, Delaware?

Nice place?

Oh, yeah.

Work, family, addiction.

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

He did.

Then came the crash out.

I hear Rah Emmanuel is going to run for president.

Like, oh, boy, there's the answer.

There's the fucking answer.

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

what the fuck?

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.

He's a brand.

And by the way, and God bless him.

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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Brace yourselves!

A brand new bombshell is entering today!

Today explain.

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

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

Yes.

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

Um, it's a pretty broad term.

It basically means to have a meltdown, to reach your limit emotionally,

to lose your cool.

You can either do it privately or publicly.

What do you mean?

Ozzy Osport dies!

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.

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

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

Who's that?

Who's that big fat, ugly girl?

Like, why is my brain?

Why is this?

This should not be legal.

I cannot remain who I am in an atmosphere like that.

And it's so, oh, I'm just so.

I wanna.

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

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

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

Yeah!

Yeah!

When was the last time you personally crashed out?

Oh, God.

Honestly, probably my second to last experience at an airport where,

as everyone knows, there's a lot of delays happening,

just terrible experiences coming and going.

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 this.

No, it was an internal crash out.

Okay, so how did crashing out get on your radar enough for you to write a whole piece about it?

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.

Crash Out for live!

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

Can we normalize Crashing Out?

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.

Specifically on TikTok, it's hard to scroll through your for you page, your explore page without seeing people talking about crashing out.

And when you start tripping, don't hold nothing back, trip all the way.

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

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.

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

You're not getting it.

It's not clocking to you.

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

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.

You are now single and vulnerable.

Where we had a very polarizing contestant named Huda who was having this very

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

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

And you're out of bitch.

You're a bitch.

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

I'm sorry that I was mean.

And you know, I know I'm not the nicest youth all the time,

but

I promise I still care.

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

I did.

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

So I'm not too surprised.

But yeah,

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

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

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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 or to talk about a breakup.

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

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

oh my god, I can't quit crying.

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

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.

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.

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

I guess part of the charm of TikTok is that

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, it unfortunately doesn't seem like it.

It's something that I think about all the time.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Where do you think Crashing Out goes from here?

Hmm.

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

And

it seems like

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.

We love just like civilian drama.

Either they're having an affair or they're just very shunned.

I do think that

that appetite won't necessarily go away.

It may look a little different, but who knows?

I mean, generations change.

They have different priorities.

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

you know, emotional meltdowns and mental health issues with the next generation.

But I think that that appetite for mess will

still be around.

I love the idea of the little alphas being like super buttoned up about their feelings.

No one knows what that baby is thinking

honestly i wouldn't blame them

kendall cunningham covers culture for fox coming up next we're all going to the world's fair jk jk jk uh we're all going to the psychologist

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It's the Smuckers Uncrustables podcast with your host, Uncrustables.

Okay, today's guest is rough around the edges.

Please welcome Crust.

Thanks for having me.

Today's topic: he's round with soft pillowy bread, filled with delicious PBJ.

Are you talking about yourself?

And you can take him anywhere.

Why do you invite us?

And we are out of time.

Are you really cutting me off?

Uncrustables are the best part of the sandwich.

Sorry, Crust.

Oh, when you come crash.

Fails today explained.

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?

I actually

was

on TikTok doing the strange anthropological research I like to do on TikTok.

And I discovered a phenomenon, which I guess we can call it crying TikTok.

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.

What is wrong with me?

I'm really crying because I'm so fucking angry right now

because I've never missed a flight in my life like

Fuck, I'm so mad.

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

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

You're a therapist.

Why did that stand out to you?

I see people cry a lot.

Yes, I'm.

It's part of the gig.

And

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.

But I think crying TikTok is something different.

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.

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

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.

So we are starved for connection.

There's a you know college type student I work with

and

they

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.

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.

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

Wow.

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.

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 person they'd have to, you know, put themselves out to meet.

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

I

remember being high school aged.

And

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?

Meeting.

Me girls.

Yeah, yeah.

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.

That person is just not really there.

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

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

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

I think so.

I think what's so interesting about technology is

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.

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 of us.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I think they're giving people what they want.

I think we want

emotionality from our celebrities and from our influencers.

It's because we're not getting it in real life as much as we used used to.

And what are the consequences of that?

Emotional regulation becomes more difficult to come by.

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.

Sometimes I wonder if they feel more comfortable,

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

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

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

I think right we're

really used to like, okay, we get to see an influencer open up about their feelings or a celebrity open up about their feelings, and we almost get to feel this emotional connection that's safe and behind the screen.

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

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.

And

I think we've been primed to get used to being vulnerable with a not human and so i fear that like the more we start relying on ai

for to get our emotional needs met to for intimacy

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

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

changes the way we understand relationships and intimacy and connectedness.

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

And so pulling up your chatbot might be as

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

Gen Z

is, is, depending on how you look at the data, and you can 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.

What do you think is going on?

What is the tension here?

There was a really interesting study conducted.

It was in Australia, and it was with

Gen Z

kids at school.

And they gave them, I forget, it was eight or 12 weeks of something called dialectical behavioral therapy intervention.

It's like the gold standard in psychology.

It was teaching them mindfulness, language about their therapeutic needs.

It was teaching them skills to manage anxiety and depression.

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

And

I think what happens is as as

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.

And sometimes it is helpful.

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

And it actually

can sabotage people's mental health.

It can cause them to

be overaware and over-conscious that they might not be doing well.

And I think that's

the double-edged sword of therapy culture and therapy speak and all these therapy concepts.

They can be really helpful,

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.

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

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

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.

And then there's about 10%,

maybe less, of people who do group therapy.

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

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

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

and turn outward and understand

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

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

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

Maytal Ayal 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.

Miles Bryan, checked the facts today.

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Explain it to me.

We'll explain it to you on Sunday.

This week's episode is about how much you should tip.

Will JQ dare give you a straight answer?

I hear yes.

I also hear she interviews an economic historian.

I will be there for that.

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It's Today Explained.