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The Laura Dowling Experience
Navigating Adolescence in the Digital Age: Insights on Masculinity, Social Media, and Mental Health
Dr. Darragh McCashin joins us to explore how the online world affects our boys' mental, emotional and social development, offering insights on navigating digital challenges while supporting healthy masculinity.
• Different responses to toxic online content: some boys consume and ignore, others parrot without understanding, some believe and embody, and some gradually adopt beliefs over time
• Research shows social media bans don't reduce overall usage—children simply "make up for lost time" outside restricted hours
• Critical digital literacy is more effective than restriction, teaching young people to recognize manipulation and question sources
• The term "toxic masculinity" can be counterproductive, potentially pathologizing boyhood itself
• "Pre-bunking" techniques can help children identify misinformation patterns before encountering them
• Open conversations about masculinity provide space for boys to develop healthy perspectives
• Screen time is less important than what it's replacing—sleep, physical activity, in-person social connections
• Collaborative approaches to setting digital boundaries work better than unilateral restrictions
• The psychological impact of digital communication patterns on Gen Z's workplace preferences and social interactions
• Prevention strategies for online harms must consider individual differences and family dynamics
Check out the Anti-Bullying Centre website and search "Masculinity Influencers" for free resources to help navigate these conversations with the young people in your life.
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That television series Adolescence was very stark. It made us all take a deep look at our boys and how the online space and social media and the shite they are fed can maybe affect them mentally, socially, physically, emotionally.
Speaker 2:I think Adolescence captured in such a simple way the cluelessness of parents, the boys that are using emojis, this codified language, all with reference to incel, culture or Tate, and also the diversity of boys.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you were saying there's the boy that will consume it and ignore it, there's a boy that will parrot it, there's a boy who will go off and actually believe it and live it.
Speaker 2:There's this kind of blanket assumption, this binary of engaging with Tate and everything he says good, bad, much more nuanced, the detective's own son, I know, in that scene of Dad I think you need to look at this and that that becomes integral to understanding Jamie's behavior. But it wasn't affecting the detective's son. And then there's other boys in the school who are presented in more of an accomplice kind of way, and then there's others that aren't affected by it kind of way, and then there's others that aren't affected by it. So what was it about Jamie, or what was it about that family or that ecosystem that he's in at that school that led to that awful crime? And what can we then take from that?
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the Lower Down Experience podcast, where each week, I bring you insightful and inspiring guests that will open your mind and empower your life. Today's podcast is a must listen for any parent trying to navigate the online world and understand how it's affecting their children. I'm joined by Dr Dara McCashen, assistant Professor of Psychology at DCU and one of the leading voices on digital mental health, online safety and the impact of technology on young people. We focus a lot in this podcast on our boys, our young men, and we explore how we can better support them and shape healthier, more positive online spaces for their growth and well-being and, as a result, have a knock-on positive effect for everyone in this country. Before we get into today's episode, I would love to ask you for a little favour. If you like this podcast and I know so many of you do you could really help me out by giving it a nice rating, sharing it with your friends and subscribing to the podcast. It may not seem like a big deal, but actually this really helps to keep the podcast high up in the charts, and that means that I can keep bringing you brilliant guests who are insightful, inspiring and full of wisdom that we can all learn from. Thanks a million.
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Speaker 2:Very well.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining me for what I think is a really important topic, although I do wonder are we going to be gabbing for hours and hours, because it's a huge area?
Speaker 2:And it's exploding as well, isn't it? In Ireland, every second news story is, whether it's online safety regulation, whether it's another big tech controversy, whether it's a criminal case. You know, schools have that environment, changing the voice of young people. It's good, it's on the agenda, but it's a real. It's actually quite fast paced.
Speaker 1:It is Absolutely. And the reason why I got you on, the reason why we reached out to you in the first place and I was explaining this to you earlier was because that television series Adolescence was very stark. It made us all take a big, deep look at our boys, our wonderful boys, and how the online space and social media and the shite they are fed can maybe affect them mentally, socially, physically, emotionally. So where do we start?
Speaker 2:Maybe we could just compare notes as to what we saw around us in the reaction to it, Because I think there was probably we were talking earlier a bit about how quick the news cycle is, but at the same time, adolescence had a good what two or three weeks, maybe.
Speaker 2:It really did, because people watched it over a staggered period of time. So in the reactions that I saw I saw things like okay, we need to immediately enforce this in schools. Everyone needs to watch this. That was one big one. We saw that happen in the UK, discussed in Parliament. We saw parents and young people themselves and women and girls really, really concerned about oh gosh, is this what's happening in the lives of boys and what do we need to do about it? We heard terms like toxic masculinity come front and center again and maybe a little bit of panic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was. There was definitely an awful lot of panic, even to the point that, say, one of my kids is going into secondary school now and there is a WhatsApp group about them not being allowed their phones or them having a balanced phone which will not allow them access to social media, etc. There is that dilemma with parents. Kids nowadays have learnt to contact each other via social media, via the Snapchats, the WhatsApps, whatever it is. So if you take that away from them, are they the only one that's left out of their class, unless there's a big group of them? How did you get into this whole space? First of all, as a clinical psychologist. What was it that made you that piqued your interest in it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, technically not a clinical psychologist, clinical psychology research, but I wouldn't be a practitioner. But I am obsessed with the research angle to it.
Speaker 1:We need people like you.
Speaker 2:Gosh, I actually got into it originally through criminal psychology.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I did sociology, social policy that was my original interest, always with an ambition to get into psychology. So, interestingly, it was around the time I was graduating that the Rhine Report in Ireland came out, so that national conversation about how is it that the institutions court in Ireland come out. So that national conversation about how is it that the institutions, religious orders, can cover up their perpetration of abuse. It's a massive question that just was fascinating to me as an undergraduate student. I then almost took a version of that question as it related to the online world, when I went in to do applied criminal psychology as a master's. When I went in to do applied criminal psychology as a master's. What is it about the internet that potentially produces a new type of sexual offender or diversifies for want of a better word a contact offender that just simply goes online?
Speaker 1:What is it about this online space? What do you mean? A new type of sexual offender?
Speaker 2:So someone that would only look and never commit a contact offence. So someone that views indecent imagery, for example, but would never, and it has a clean bill of criminal health in terms of never perpetrating a contact sexual offence. There was evidence huge North American evidence that it suggests that the internet has actually made a new type of offender. So that stuff was kind of fascinating to me and then I kind of went into looking at the good side of tech. How do we use whether it's the online world, games, how do we drop that into therapy? We can remember a world without the internet Young people. It is their world, so it has to be arguably a part of how we deliver mental health interventions. How do we do that in an evidence-based and ethical way? So I always kind of summarize myself as I'm fascinated by the good and bad of tech and the online world and how it impacts particularly young people. That was the original motivation, but it's gone many a route.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you've just said it's so fast paced now. So would you be all for under 16s? Absolutely no social media or no phones.
Speaker 2:Controversially. Maybe I am much more pragmatic and slow to give a black and white answer.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I think the word ban doesn't make sense when you look at what people mean when they say ban it.
Speaker 2:Actually I think of an old school teacher that would say we all have our in-house restrict, restrictive policies or or classroom norms are ideally co-agreed kind of contracts as to look, you need to learn X, y, z, you want to learn this, I want to teach this.
Speaker 2:So maybe we could agree on for these 45 minutes we'll have this space for this purpose this kind of language of ban all smartphones, ban all social media. The evidence says and this has been trialed in Birmingham recently when you have a different mix of whether it's outright ban the phone isn't even allowed on the premises versus, let's say, a more middle-of-the-road restrictive policy, which a lot of schools have anyway, versus MISC, something else when you test that, the mental health outcomes are the same, the educational outcomes are the same across all these groups and importantly and perhaps surprisingly that was a randomized study in the UK comparable enough with here the average level of social media engagement didn't change. So you think surely, even just with the errors alone that the phone is taken away, you would imagine that it would go down. It seemed that they were perhaps making up for lost time outside of the school parameters.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So the intentions and, for example in Ireland, the smartphone pact as opposed to a ban let's not have smartphones or social media in childhood as a whole Really really interesting and we have to be supportive of creative initiatives like that I guess the researcher in me is always thinking about we have to. The guiding ethical principle of do no harm also means we have to think of the unintended consequences. So the counterbalance to the ban or the pact is all things digital literacy. But importantly, people often forget two things the voice of the child, the rights of the child and as enshrined in the UN Convention, and the digital rights of the child that go along with that, a lot of the work. Like Sonia Livingstone in the UK that kind of advocates for taking the child's voice, taking and putting it at the heart of what we're doing now, talking about how we let tech into the world of the child, there's an inherent conflict Well-intentioned bans and pacts and restrictive policies versus the digital life of the child. It's not an easy balance. So for me it's always about whatever the policy or the agreement is. So long as the voice of the child, the rights of the child and evidence are at the heart of those decisions, I'm always happy with, whatever the outcome is.
Speaker 2:But what I see at the moment is a lot of, again, understandable knee-jerk reaction. We see bad things with tech and social media and there's a lot of them, and we almost react to that. But I often think of the natural experiment that was COVID, like the online world allowed education to function. Imagine COVID without the online world. I know, yeah, you just wouldn't. You wouldn't have had that virtual classroom.
Speaker 2:A lot of the big studies, like the representative study EU-wide again, that's Sonia Livingstone's work For the most part when tech was seen as and social media use was seen positively globally. We often just think in a kind of an Irish centric or your EU centric way. The relationship between social media, internet use and well-being is actually a positive one. So for the most part, things are going reasonably well. Now, obviously, the whole gamut of online harms have their own major major risks and threats and are actively causing online and offline harm too, and they need to be addressed as well. But we always need to remember the binary good and bad. It's always about how we're integrating it into our life. So that's a very long winded gray area answer for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's the truth, really. It's the way it is. I suppose we can't just accept that. There's only one answer. What I'd like to explore with you is this whole idea of toxic masculinity. We've heard it bandied around. Even boys talk about it. They use the term. Now we don't hear toxic femininity, and I think even just the word like boys, seeing toxic beside masculine is that good for them, first of all. Second of all, I would love to talk about those people that are actually reinforcing this toxic masculinity within our boys, within our adolescents, and the effects that it actually is having on them, the real effect that it's having on them, because I think adolescents did portray it very well without showing the group. It was so interesting, I think the whole thing about adolescence and why it resonated so well. It showed and discussed nothing gruesome, it was just the effects on the boy, his friends and his family, yeah, and it was showing that fallout in real time. It was so, so, very interesting.
Speaker 2:And the cluelessness of the parents. Yeah, and also and I'm sure we'll get into it the diversity of boys.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The detective's own son.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:And that scene of Dad. I think you need to look at this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, ironically, bringing them closer together in what was a detached relationship and that that becomes integral to understanding Jamie's behavior and what he was doing online.
Speaker 2:But it wasn't affecting the detective's son and then those other boys in the school who are presented in more of an accomplice kind of way, and then there's others that aren't affected by it.
Speaker 2:So this kind of narrative of toxic masculinity, where to begin with it Generally it comes from thinking about norms of behaviors, but a lot of the research that we would have done on looking at the impact of masculinity influencers and trying to regardless as to what one's take is on them, how the hell do you talk about them in a way that doesn't antagonize you, me or that person, and one of the number one, two kind of key messages from that body of research. With my colleagues in the Anti-Bullying Centre, and particularly Dr Fiona Rourke and Dr Catherine Baker, the key message was, first of all, we do need to talk about it. There was often an understandable question from parents Should we actually mention Tate in a classroom or in a home? Is that going to make it? Is it going to kind of give a both sides-ism in terms of oh so Tate's credible because he's been talked about. Actually, we say you do need to talk.
Speaker 1:She'll ask, like Dan, do I need to talk about sex with my child, or is he going to go and have sex?
Speaker 2:It was such a new phenomenon though, wasn't it? So people are like, ooh, there's an understandable risk aversion there. But then the second point point was whatever you do, don't say toxic masculinity, because it is, has become a way of pathologizing. The mere fact of being a boy or a man, or masculinity itself is wrapped up, it's inherently toxic. That's how the culture wars, and when you say like that, you're like oh, it's awful and I think I shared.
Speaker 1:I shared this with you earlier and I may have shared it before on a podcast. Like one of my lads turned around to me a few years ago and says mum are all boys, he used the word scumbags like he used the word are all boys. He meant he'd obviously heard it somewhere, but he meant he'd been watching stuff or seen stuff or heard stuff. He meant her all boys bad and I just my heart flipped, and it's.
Speaker 2:There are so many things wrapped up in this. We were chatting earlier about your really interesting conversation with Sarah Benson from Women's Aid and the research that they had commissioned in relation to young men's attitudes and actually this weird shift that we haven't necessarily seen in a while, which is that the 18 to 30 year old men are presenting with these more what I would call regressive ideas of masculinity, what the report calls traditional Cliched stuff of like a man showing vulnerability or saying no to sex or any of these things are seen as weaknesses and that's making a bit of a comeback. It's kind of overcorrection that we're seeing, with younger men becoming more traditionalist or regressive, let's say.
Speaker 1:Actually, yeah, there was a report saying that the younger men are becoming more traditionalist. Their fathers aren't. Their fathers are more pro women's rights, etc. But their sons aren't, so the son plan happens right.
Speaker 2:And also in that report, was where they're consuming their media. Okay, so there is this valid observation that a lot of things are short form, fast paced consumption of your TikToks, your the opposite of this podcast.
Speaker 1:Basically, yeah.
Speaker 2:Except, well, except when people snip a podcast. But there's equally the hunger and the appetite for the long form, these kind of algorithmically pushed narratives of whether it's traditional ideas of manhood and boyhood and masculinity. It's being consumed by that 18 to 30 cohort. Now there is the open question there as to how much of that is trickling down for your preteen, how much of that is creating various subcultures online and in the manosphere.
Speaker 2:The manosphere the manosphere, which again people think of it as one thing, but there's several kind of cultures. Like someone, like a hyper-obsessed Andrew Tate fan is completely different to someone in an incel Reddit forum.
Speaker 1:Could you explain the word incel to people that may not know what it is?
Speaker 2:Involuntary celibate, so kind of a subculture of men who feel that they'll never have any chances with women. So there's very much, and also subcultures, within that as well, but they would self-identify that way.
Speaker 1:That they will never have a chance to have sex. They're involuntary celibate. Women shun them. They're not attractive to women, they'll never, and as a result then hatred for women is stirred and okay.
Speaker 2:Also presented in adolescence with the reference to 80-20. 80% of women will only be attracted to 20% of men.
Speaker 1:Which? Can we just refute that outright? It's absolute bullshit, isn't it? Yeah, and who came up with that stat?
Speaker 2:This is a classic misuse and abuse of evolutionary psychology type studies.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh Jesus, I could discuss this all day.
Speaker 2:In the forums across the manosphere as a a whole, this kind of motivation to find some evolutionary answer to the how men and women should interact, the science of attraction, all of these things are are oversimplified, repackaged conspiratorially to have a view of the world, the view of women, in a very um, in the case of incels, in a very damaging way to their own lives, their own mental health, the outside world view of them, coupled with what's happened over the past few years with COVID, with lowering mental health, socioeconomic challenges across the globe and continuing political division as well post-Brexit and within Trumpian politics, all of this is just creating more fractures and, as we know, in this sort of post-truth world, it doesn't really matter to some people what the truth is, rather which ones you want to cherry pick pretty much.
Speaker 1:But the 80-20, that came from nowhere, did it? Or is there an 80% of something that they took and repackaged?
Speaker 2:It was like a cluster of evolutionary psychology studies that found patterns across different societies. Or let's say, some of the dating app patterns that women select up. Let's say, all the while forgetting some of the most obvious from my world of research. Things like you're only evaluating these things on the basis of could be surveys of whatever happens in the first three seconds as to how we interact. And then someone asks you to rate attractiveness or race. It says nothing about the whole world of the many counterfactuals that could refute even if 80-20 was true. So there's a real self-fulfilling prophecy and kind of confirmation bias and focusing on the negative with some of those particular incel scripts. But then all the hyper-masculinity stuff that you're Andrew Tate's of this world's view completely different, all the kind of religious, pseudo-intellectual stuff from Jordan Peterson oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:Jordan Peterson has just changed. I used to listen to him and think he's very interesting. I like his take on the way he's talking to young men about because he used to say get a job and make your bed and no one's going to put up with you?
Speaker 2:no one's going to put up with you.
Speaker 1:No one's going to put up with you if you don't look after yourself and turn up clean shaven. And what are you? And I was like this guy makes sense and he's gone completely whack job now.
Speaker 1:I was listening to some of the shite he was spewing and it's downright dangerous and he's in the same field of science as you, so he so he's, and because he's so intelligent and so very articulate, and some of the stuff that he is talking about is true. So when he's talking the truth and a bit of bullshit, it's like hard to tell which is the bullshit 100%, 100% and it's been an embarrassment to some people.
Speaker 2:In psychology, that type of some of the nonsense that comes out, the kind of beating around the bush when he doesn't even answer a question about random things, he turns something into a kind of a pseudo-scientific piece of things about dragons and imagery and all these wacky or hyper-conservative, really religious it's preaching and then we'll sprinkle in some things that are true Big five personality traits not disputed in psychology. Really Learning about them can help our lives. They're not the be all and end all, but big five is largely accepted.
Speaker 1:What are the big five personality traits?
Speaker 2:Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. I remember that because it's ocean. You put me on the spot there, but they're useful to know. Someone who's very high in neuroticism, a psychologist, will plan interventions with that sort of knowledge in mind, so he'll sprinkle stuff like that in CBT, making your bed, and have a plan and work backwards with baby steps. All of those things seem to have resonance with particularly men, for whatever reason. That kind of 2017, 2018 timeframe. We chatted earlier. But what was it about the peterson effect? With men, with dads, with uncles that were all of a sudden reading peterson religiousy stuff, with some cbt in there as well, with some psychobabble in there as well the 12 rules for life. When you read it, there's nothing new in it arguably.
Speaker 2:And the Peterson brand came at a time of culture, wars, noise, becoming monetized in that kind of ooh, that online world of it. Doesn't matter what you're saying, so long as you're getting engagement. That was really kind of taken off.
Speaker 1:So well, it's clear that he's subscribed to that now, because it does seem to be. He's just trying to get the algorithm to just keep feeding people the bullshit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's always like this hook and he's saying something random and you know god and and there's a lesson in there If you think of the division in the world pro or anti-Brexit, pro or anti-Trump, pro or anti-McGregor the last thing we want to do is create further division. It's very difficult to sit with views that you actively detest or that you know are harmful or are implicated in, let's say, the risks of perpetrating sexual violence or whatever it may be. But there's a lesson that we can learn, and I don't know what it is, but how and why. Particularly men and boys were in our engagement long-form podcasts about masculinity, but it's a very particular type of conversation and I think adolescence, going back to that point, captured that in such a simple way the cluelessness of parents, the boys, boys that are using emojis, particular types of emojis, this codified language, all with reference to whether it's incel culture or whether it's Tate that that's happening. The other interesting thing about that show was what it didn't say.
Speaker 1:I'm always more interested in what something or someone doesn't say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a high profile murder. There's a brief reference to Jamie, that main character being a victim of bullying himself from the murder victim. That's only briefly touched upon. There's this open question on. Some of the critics of Adolescent said. It's completely non-representative of the many, many boys that are engaging in all this problematic online content. Whether it's Manosphere, whether it's Tate, whether it's incel stuff. There's a lot of boys that are engaging with it and don't end up committing murder. That much we know is true. So then you're left with this question. It's probably part of the value of the show, isn't it? What was it about Jamie? Or what was it about that family or that ecosystem that he's in at that school that led to that awful crime, and what can we then take from that? That was one of the things that you're like. You're just left hanging with it.
Speaker 1:So what can we do for our boys and our girls by default? I suppose, Do you have any answers?
Speaker 2:Nope, not one Time to go home. I think that first point about actually talking about it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So I know it's a cheesily obvious answer, but it's the thing we don't do. What I think is a very valid working hypothesis there's a vacuum surrounding some people call it men's mental health, some people say masculinity, some people say gender politics, some people say whatever. There's a bit of a vacuum there that the likes of Tate Peterson, other Manosphere and other subcultures we don't know about are filling. There is the kind of politics of algorithms and how social media operates that amplifies these things, but it means that we don't actually have that conversation about okay, what is masculinity? What must, what should masculinity be? What should, what do we mean by a good role model? It'll be blame for this terrible thing. How do we stop this constant comparison of this gender, that gender? How do we have a meaningful conversation about differences and the overlap between sex and gender and how society shapes our identity and how our individual characteristics also impact that? All very easy things to say from academic, but the specifics of that conversation would be the first step.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that we said in a resource that we launched to try and address the impact of masculinity influencers was broach the question. I always use the example have you ever caught up with an old friend. You're dying to tell them something, they're probably dying to tell you something and by the end of it you're going God, they didn't listen to a word I said, or vice versa. You know, listening is bloody hard work, let alone non-judgmentally listening. So if you have a boy, that is and we talked earlier about maybe different types of boys and how they might consume whatever the content is, but let's say he's consuming really misogynistic stuff and he knows not what he says. Type manner is just parroting noise from some online influencer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you were saying there's four types. There's the boy that will consume it and ignore it or think nothing of it. There's a boy that will consume it and parrot it. Yeah so he'll just like say, repeat the stuff to other people, probably not really understanding what he's saying. There's a boy who will consume it and actually he will be the one that will go off and actually believe it and live it.
Speaker 2:And then what's the fourth? The fourth would be, let's say, the person that is parroting that. That slowly turns into one of the other typologists, and some of that's derived from kind of polling data in the UK that looked at how men and younger boys are actually using, in that case, tate. So there's this kind of blanket assumption, this binary of engaging with Tate and everything he says good, bad, much more nuanced. So some boys are only looking at that Instagram muscles, cigars, cars, bikini-clad women, that imagery piece and getting stimulated by that, but rejecting anything to do with the role of women, so pushing back against the misogynistic piece. Others are just interested in the wealth business noise that he spews as well, which, again, it's quite simply a pyramid scheme Plain and simple.
Speaker 1:Has he got a university? What is it?
Speaker 2:Hustler University. Yeah, it is literally laughable.
Speaker 1:One of my parents was talking about that and he was laughing at it.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And he's taking the piss, but he's like yeah.
Speaker 2:And again, we saw that in adolescence, didn't we? We saw Jamie captivated by in that case, incel subculture. We saw the detective's son calling it out, and we saw different types of consumption. More recently, there's kind of US data I think it was the Monitoring the Future survey and this kind of inverse relationship the less teenagers were consuming all these online videos, the more they didn't endorse gender equality.
Speaker 1:And why do you think that is? Because that's almost like the inverse of what you think.
Speaker 2:It is, and it's because it's not a dose dependent response.
Speaker 1:That's the thing that makes me oh, I love when you start talking dose. I'm a pharmacist. It gets me all excited, Darren.
Speaker 2:That's the exact opposite. I'm a pharmacist, so guess me all excited.
Speaker 1:Darren, that's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2:If only it was as simple as those responses, and unfortunately that is a narrative that a lot of parents are hearing. Social media consumption high. Mental health equally high. It's far more complex. Young people have incredible and this is where the road of critical digital literacy programs are coming in. We can't design out tech and social media in the world. We might be able to do it earlier on in childhood and that could be important. But for the most part, and even as adults, we need to figure out how to become better critical thinkers. Adults, we need to figure out how to become better critical thinkers. But what would happen? I think some of that data that found those patterns. It's speaking to a couple of things to do with baseline risk factors isolation, mental health issues, the society they're living in and what's being mirrored from where they're at. That's going to influence how they react to that content. That could be throwing a load of pyramid scheme type stuff, conspiracy theories, how they arrive at that online, because they're going to see it at some point. It's far more nuanced and complex.
Speaker 1:But just like we would consume something like you and.
Speaker 1:I, two different people, doesn't matter that you're a man and I'm a woman. We'd look at something and we'd react to it completely differently. Children are the same, but I've even spoken to young people and they've said I deleted TikTok because it was too addictive, I was on it too much. We do have to give them the benefits of the doubt as well. In a lot of ways, they're intelligent people that can make decisions at a certain age. I really do believe that we can steer them and guide them. I suppose just no parent wants to end up in a situation like Jamie and in adolescence, and I suppose that's the real underlying thing here, so I'm just wondering.
Speaker 1:you did say about five questions that we need to ask what is masculinity? Do you know the answer to that? Do you know?
Speaker 2:the answer to that. I'm more a believer of thinking of tangible examples and talking points that can make that question land and make people actually engage with it. One example that came up recently when we were discussing some of this research in the context of teachers and training and how they might think about broaching these topics as they might want to invoke in lesson plans or as it might arise naturally in the class.
Speaker 2:Strength, that's one of the first. Strength and courage, and whether you have imagery of bodybuilders when I say that or whether you have a different conceptual framework for it, that's fine, but it tends to be one of those variables that comes up when you talk about men and masculinity strengths.
Speaker 2:A really interesting point about strength is because it's a huge component of why a lot of boys are interested in particular types of masculinity. Influencers, gm content and a lot of the kind of problematic ideas are just old school, almost laughably old school ideas of traditional masculinity come in tandem with gym content. But you take the most boring public health perspective of strength. You can go to the HSE guidelines now and it will say that particularly for those 30 and over, you need to be doing resistance training. What is it? Two to three times a week, because what we know of how muscles atrophy across the life course, risk for osteoporosis. Yeah, it just so happens that, for whatever reason, the internet and certain influencers that are interested in promoting a particular idea of masculinity talk about strength in a very particular way. But if we were to take a completely different public health angle or psychological angle, or take a body image perspective, a critical body image perspective, we'd all probably have things that are very much in common and you want to showcase that to young people to say, can you see how that pyramid scheme for that GM program from that cluster of influencers is trying to take your body image interest or issue with strength, weight and is packaging this in such a way. Are you able to see that? Watch out for this thing in the next YouTube ad? Stuff like that and you almost gamify it. And there's an emerging psychological literature called pre-bunking.
Speaker 2:I'm going to show you a myth that's going to come up in the next podcast. See if you can listen out for it and then you see it in the next one. Oh, that's what they're doing. That's what they're doing. Stuff like that can literally build critical thinking faculties for young people to call out bullshit when they see it, and I think stuff like that that's proactive is far better than that more kind of finger wagging workshop giving thing of boys. You need to think this way Because there's a perception of that as well. Isn't there this kind of reactive response from parents and teachers and policy stakeholders that we need to do something about the boys problem?
Speaker 1:that's yeah and that's it, but it does almost depict boys as the problem and the perpetrator, and women and girls as the victims, always. So then, when boys are being fed this persistent negative mantra about themselves, do they begin to believe it and they fall into it? So there's so much to this which is very worrying, isn't it?
Speaker 2:And that's where you need to know what's the objective of the conversation, because a lot of those things happen. So how often are boys in, let's say, in an educational context, simply just asked to chat about what it means to be a boy and masculinity and all of those things again, regardless of what anyone's take is. You want to be hyper conservative, you want to be hyper liberal, don't care. Just the conversation. How often has that been meaningfully included in curricula? It hasn't, and when it has? Not all the time.
Speaker 2:But it comes couched in sexual violence prevention work. So that 10-year-old boy the only time he's really been asked to think about norms of masculinity is in the context of sexual violence. For very good reason. We are very clear on the rates of sexual violence perpetration, the risk factors, the relationship between certain attitudes and risks of perpetration. That's clear to see. But we also need to be very clear on the need for a separate discussion about boyhood masculinity, growing up, living with each other. We don't even need to say boys and girls, we just say living with each other relationships and, you know, I think there's a realization that we want to talk about prevention.
Speaker 2:Actually, to be emotionally, to be ready to talk about prevention, we have to be really creative in thinking about when these conversations start, have to be really creative in thinking about when these conversations start. So, going back to that earlier question, why is that influencer of appeal in this classroom? Or what does masculinity mean in this classroom? The objective of that question might simply to be to get the conversation going. It's not to provide psychoeducational information on risks of sexual victimization or perpetration. That's a separate kind of worms. So we need to be always very clear and I think a lot of society at the moment might be still in the reactive space, understandably. So, yeah, that's another thing that we kind of unpack in our resources. What are some of the turns of phrase, the language, the ways we might say okay, what are some of the terms of phrase, the language, the ways we might say okay, what are we trying to do here and how would we facilitate it? Easier said than done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and do you have a website that people can go to to try and find out this information?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we deliberately made it open access for those who want it, rather than kind of this misperception that it's a certain type of person like me or like my colleagues rolling out an intervention in schools. No, no. If you're interested in how you might want to use some of the research evidence to broach this topic as a teacher or a parent, you can log on to the Anti-Bullying Centre website and pop in Masculinity Influencers and you'll see a free PDF there.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And it kind of goes through some of those top tips.
Speaker 1:Okay. Can I ask you if you think it's a good thing that there's girls' schools and boys' schools in Ireland, versus the rest of the world which seems to mix them even over? In England and America they're all in school together, co-ed. Do you think that has an effect on the way boys and girls interact with each other, and then men and women when they get older? Because I also read an article in the newspaper recently, some woman who'd come from a European country and she found it strange the way men and women don't necessarily have male and female friends. Yeah, men tend to hang out with men, but they don't have female friends unless they've had them as girlfriends before. Do you think that it's a good thing or a bad thing, or are you going to be like oh, it's a very grey area? Now, laura, I can't give you an answer.
Speaker 2:You should know by now you won't be getting a good or bad from me in response. Do you know it's a question I haven't really thought about that much.
Speaker 1:It just literally popped into my head. It is one of those things.
Speaker 2:Going back to when we talked about the term toxic masculinity and I initially said it's often in reference to norms, with groups of men or often that imagery of the rowdy bunch of men that would never do certain behaviors unless they're drunk, with that bunch of lads doing those things. There's a normed behavior there, influenced by a load of things the norms. That happens in a boys-only school in a certain part of Dublin or a certain part of Ireland versus a particular religious school with just this gender. Of course you're going to get normed behaviours. That's going to impact how they interact with groups that they haven't grown up with. It's a classic yeah, Any developmental psychologist would say that's going to have an effect.
Speaker 1:But are we not supposed to interact with the world together and get along together as men and women in society? So would it. And I know from being in a mixed primary school and then an all girls secondary. I think that even though the girls really hung around with the girls in the primary, you were still interacting with boys all the time, whereas you only interacted with boys when you were at the weekend.
Speaker 1:When you're going out kissing these boys, you know, even though you were hanging around groups, certainly, but and then I've read research to say that girls perform better in all girls' schools, but boys perform worse in all boys' schools. It's better for them to be mixing with girls. So is there much to that, or is that just not your area?
Speaker 2:It wouldn't be my area. But the educational outcomes piece is a tricky one, because when the question is raised, yeah, what is the optimal? And then even the ethics of saying, right, well, ok, we might value the fact that we need to all be interacting with each other in a diverse way, with diverse students, where some schools will, or that kind of Elisa's position of saying, well, if there are students with lower educational performance rates mixing with students that are high achievers, what would the impact of that be? So, depending on the motivation for mixing or not mixing, we have to kind of appraise it that way. My kind of gut response personally would be mixing is better, yeah, yeah, that would be my kind of gutraise it that way, my kind of gut response personally would be.
Speaker 1:mixing is better yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would be my kind of gut response.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, no, it is. I do believe that too. In terms of the anti-bullying, I'd like to discuss a little bit about that and the impact of cyber bullying anti-bullying because we all have seen it happen with our children. I'm sure no one comes away. I'd be very I'd be interested to know does anyone come away from school feeling that they weren't in some way picked on in a way? But now you see, I know, when we were in school, you fought with your friends and you went home and that was the end of it. You could forget about it until the next day and then you probably made up, Whereas now that bullying can happen when you get home, you can be excluded from WhatsApp groups or Snapchat groups or whatever it might be. So what is the impact of your work, or what are you trying to do with the work that you're doing about bullying and the impact that has on our children?
Speaker 2:Looking at the exact role of the smartphone in that mix. The gaming environment, the live streaming world, the weird and wonderful and scary evolution of Gen AI Nudification apps have you heard of them?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, where they can take a picture and make the person nude.
Speaker 2:Even the socio-legal effects of that. Okay, it's generated from that other person's data, but the actual output is technically the IP of the Gen AI. So who's culpable? This is just one of many new online harms, but the same kind of psychological dilemmas baked into it. Generally speaking, a lot of our work would have looked at right how much of this is happening.
Speaker 2:So we did a random let's say so an adult survey, in the first instance in Ireland, near representative of 45 or nearly 45% of people had experienced some form of online hate, which is a broad kind of term to refer to any type of online hate across different kind of subgroups. So that's how common it is. Then you work backwards and you think OK, what's happening in schools? What happens, even developmentally, with bullying? The playground dynamics that you refer to, like pre-internet times, how do they specifically play out? What we're seeing in terms of what works is also messy because, on the one hand, anti-bullying interventions they will work for a sub-cohort, but there'll be one type of child that will actually get worse. So some of the interventions.
Speaker 1:As in get worse because they're the bullier or the bully.
Speaker 2:Victimization, but also the dual status. That's the other interesting thing. Yeah, that thing of the victim becoming the perpetrator.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or that dual status dual status. Going back to that point about digital literacy and thinking about self-efficacy as well. Those are some of the core components of anti-bullying programs where we're trying to tell the stories to the harm, that that action of saying that thing about that person online or that Snapchat that actually might live on if someone screenshots it. Communicating that, workshopping that digital literacy understanding on digital citizenship as well.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? Digital citizenship?
Speaker 2:So thinking about and I've been guilty of this before differentiating the online world from our offline lives. Whereas digital citizenship is trying to say we should behave online the way that we behave offline, we should think about what does it mean to be a good digital citizen online? How do we work? I was thinking recently about some employer survey that found that so-called Gen Z have two thirds of them have a preference to work remotely or at home, by themselves, behind the laptop, with no interaction. Yeah, not in the workplace. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I have a couple of amazing young Gen Z's that work for me.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And they had to get used to me phoning them several times a day. They said at the start they'd panic, they wouldn't know what to do because even amongst themselves they don't phone each other. So everything's on Snapchat or everything's in a WhatsApp and you'd almost phone and then you get a text back Is everything OK. And I heard someone on Pat Kenny then saying a Gen Zer saying and I heard someone on.
Speaker 1:Pat Kenny then saying a Gen Zer, saying that they would like to know what the question is, so they're prepared for it, so they don't have to answer on the hop. Yeah, so actually phoning someone out of the blue as a Gen Zer is rude. So I'm like listen in the interview.
Speaker 2:I'm like, yeah, you got to get used to Laura phoning you 10 times a day, okay, and you know, when mobile phones first started becoming commonplace in Ireland, it wasn't as common to have the doorbell ring anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So if a friend was just to randomly knock on your door? Pre-mobile phone explosion you'd be like oh, how's it?
Speaker 1:going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whereas now you're like what the hell? Why didn't you text?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I know it is. It's actually crazy how society changes like that, isn't it?
Speaker 2:So like the equivalence of that as you try and teach a young person about okay, that's why saying that, even just saying that the first, that's why that is problematic here, but then adding to that the consequences of doing that online. We've seen that with image-based sexual abuse. We've seen that with I used the example recently of by image-based sexual abuse do you mean sharing someone's image?
Speaker 1:who sent you something?
Speaker 2:And that would be one of many. I used an example recently a clinical psychologist trying to discuss the impact of using Snapchat for nude images. The age of that person meant that it was illegal and in the therapeutic scenario, you're trying to communicate that to the child in a way that doesn't disempower them, doesn't shame them, but also says what you're doing is really harmful and really risky, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Why do you not want to disempower the child for sharing nude pictures? Is it not right to tell them that's the wrong thing to do?
Speaker 2:No, but in a therapeutic scenario.
Speaker 1:OK.
Speaker 2:Where you're trying to. When I say disempower, you're not trying to disengage, perhaps, in that therapeutic process.
Speaker 2:And the clinical anecdote was one where the psychologist asked the child to show them the function of Snapchat. How does Snapchat work, empowering the child to understand that they're in control of the app and their decision-making as well, and then give the question, or then give the important point back, that well, of course you know Snapchat the data never really deletes. That's on a server somewhere, which it is technically, and then you see that land with the child and that's the impact of your behavior. They might only be taking certain risks if they know that that image is just going to vanish away. So when you pose it and you reframe it in a way that says, actually there are consequences to what you're doing, and even if there weren't, why would you be taking this risk in the first instance? Can you see the harm that you would be causing to what is a victim? Can you see the legal consequences, the emotional and so on and so forth?
Speaker 2:That's another area that's changed massively in Ireland, particularly with God. I was thinking recently of the journey of Coco's Law, the two Johnnies catfishing story and how that took hold in Ireland. The two Johnnies catfishing story and how that took hold in Ireland and what that means for how people use the online world to victimise other people and thinking they'll get away with it and sometimes, because of legislative gaps, actually getting away with it. But it is changing. I think regulators, governments, parents they're waking up to the fact that the wild west of the online world has been getting away with quite a lot.
Speaker 2:And we're slowly but surely kind of seeing the parameters of these things.
Speaker 1:But it is a fact, isn't it, that sexual violence perpetrated by young people is on the increase In Ireland anyway.
Speaker 2:That is the case.
Speaker 1:And that that we think or do we know for definite is directly related to porn use and consumption.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the association with porn is always there. Such is the prevalence of porn use, particularly among young people, and violent porn and violence.
Speaker 1:And that's what it and it's the portrayal of the act is not in any way, shape or form, a loving portrayal, exactly.
Speaker 2:And this whole concept of sexual scripts. So boys, young people, girls, other genders, having a certain idea as to what sex and sexuality is or should be is heavily informed by what they're seeing, not just in those traditional porn major websites but also the kind of indirect routes into different sources of porn, which actually often come from social media as well, are certain kind of nods to to porn or soft soft porn that then leads into harder porn and that whole area is absolutely implicated in the perpetration. But the problem is knowing that, going back to dose dependent, because it is so prevalent, and again thinking about adults' populations as well. It is so global. How do we know the precise role, how much of porn consumption is directly impacting that young person's risk for perpetrating crimes? But we do know that the role of there was interesting studies about how porn is specifically responsible potentially for choking and this kind of how for a certain age group all of a sudden choking as a phenomenon has rapidly increased.
Speaker 1:It's a pseudo-eroticism or something, isn't it?
Speaker 2:That's directly linked to porn. You think of risk factors for sexual violence, let's say, before the era of porn. A lot of it would be kind of attitudinal problems, a particular kind of view of women in the world. It's quite a complex mix. And then any of what the criminologists and psychologists would call your criminogenic risk factors, these things that the perfect storm type of life, whether that's trauma, substance abuse, witnessing sexual violence, certain sort of personality disorder type factors, any of that kind of perfect storm is also implicated. So, as ever, it's always about to what extent is one versus the other impacting us.
Speaker 2:I think we're getting better at asking questions and realizing okay, so we have porn, we have this culture in Ireland, we have had this role of the church, we have had this culture of silence. We have had all of these things make for a better response to it and where we've seen victims struggle to even understand what a help-seeking journey might look for them, we're seeing that slowly change. I think a lot more work to do. But also perpetration A really interesting area as well is thinking about primary prevention. How do you stop someone who is at risk of committing a sexual offence, or if that person themselves know that they're at risk of committing an offence. What should we do?
Speaker 1:As parents and teachers, then, apart from talking about it with our children, is there anything else that we can do? Do we limit the amount of time they have on? Is there anything else that we can do? Do we limit the amount of time they have on socials? Do we just tip in with them every day? What is the best thing to do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess collaborative is always the word that springs to mind, insofar as it's possible. The debate really moved away from screen time a few years ago because researchers realized it's actually meaningless.
Speaker 1:What the amount of screen time children have is meaningless to the okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like the same kind of moral panic was said about books.
Speaker 1:What, like they're reading too much. No, there was a headline, I think it was 1930s.
Speaker 2:Was it UK, you could have swapped it around for screen time. Really, books are going to burn the brains of our kids Because their minds are going to be shaped by things we can't control. They're going to get ideas for this Comical now, wow. What's far more interesting, of course, is right. What platforms are they on and why? What's bringing them there? Are they speaking with strangers? Are social networks? I often think of the opposite. Forget about the online world. Do they still have play, physical contact with friends, able to get exercise or sport? Actually eating with people sleeping? So, rather than get those ones right and the online stuff will probably fit in and around that, it's a different way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2:It's like it's not so much what you're engaging with online. It's what that's supplanting. So if I'm stuck scrolling whatever and that's taking away my sleep, it's the removal of sleep rather than some dose dependent response with the app.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:That, for me, is one kind of distinguishing feature was some people. Their starting point is the addiction model of I need to get my hit of, and this thing of dopamine hit is just a complete reductionist, simplistic thing. It's not as simple as that. The brain is much more complex and a lot of young people will say this as well when I'm going on putting those headphones on to go gaming. That's my community of pals. We do that mission and that game or and we've seen really cool things with like students working on on minecraft and these real strategy games and that's their. It's a really important piece of identity for them, so we have, and they're collaborating with peers too 100%.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we should be careful. But the collaboration piece might come in where, if there's a good kind of relationship with the child, that you could say did you see any of your friends this week outside the house? And if the question is no, or did you feel really, really irritable every morning this week? And that collaboratively might both spot the fact that it's because it was six, seven hours on that console, okay, would you be interested in not feeling really, really tired and jaded every morning? Would you be interested in seeing the group of pals a little bit more, trying to see how you could support them in kind of curating their own use of social media or games and in terms of the prevention of online harms, or trying to have that conversation about if they come across something that bothers them. Do they know where they could go or how would you know that they have encountered something, or is there anything that you shouldn't do? Or just having a space or time for whether it's a check in or whether it's, um, some sort of collaborative agreement as to these are the things that we both want from our online lives and these are the things that we need to make sure we stay safe from Stuff like that, you know, and it'll be different for different parents, for different children, and it'll also be changing as well as the platforms evolve.
Speaker 2:But one thing, even just from a parental perspective, we did see this with adolescents. You know the detective couldn't get over this online world and all the emojis that meant particular things. And I know parents will always be told to kind of OK, we need to learn more about this and that there is kind of some educational stuff there, and I know CyberSafe kids in Ireland and web wise are doing great stuff for saying here's a guide for parents to know that. Ok, if you see that emoji, you might need to know at least what that means. So stuff like that can be empowering for parents.
Speaker 1:These references that you've spoken about, I'll get them off you and we'll put them into the show notes as well. Children are they actually interacting physically in person with each other a lot less now I have read that apparently even young people young adults, are having a lot less sex now than say that their parents did at that age. Is that a trend?
Speaker 2:It is a trend. Yeah, I think I'm more privy to the young adult data on that. So, yeah, whether it's sex, alcohol, those risk-taking behaviors, I guess the tricky thing with that one is the impact of austerity and COVID as a double whammy in a certain time period.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There's that We've seen the explosion of kind of wellness culture. I was talking to someone recently. There's more saunas opening than there is pubs.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and the alcohol industry are very worried about their bottom lines because the kids are not like it's great. I think that what they're not drinking an alcohol, they could be snorting up their nose as well. So there's that. But in terms of just interacting with their peers and if they have a girlfriend or a boyfriend and actually meeting them in person and they're not doing as much as that, like, what effect is that having on their brain and that having on their social skills If they're only, if they only a bit like my Gen Z people, if they only really know how to convert with each other or converse with each other in text form or in video call? Do we know? Do we have any data there?
Speaker 2:we know. The core fact is that humans are social animals and so the anything that will block our ability to be social in a interpersonal, same space offline way will have a detrimental impact. So the million-dollar question is is there the extent to which that's going to adversely impact? We can correlate it a bit with loneliness levels.
Speaker 2:So, we're seeing that loneliness, the so-called epidemic with younger age groups as well. Is that linked to the fact that the culture of living online and not offline? As far as I'm concerned, there is a relationship there. You know me, I won't say cause and effect. I absolutely think that we probably won't know the medium term consequences until well sorry, we are seeing them now, aren't we Even in that example of the world of work, that the conversation in person or the etiquette in person for a younger age group is more challenging for them, and it begs the question so what is the world that we want to live in? So that's interesting as well, because humans also adapt. The brain highly. Plastic will also adapt. So I don't know a gamer or a coder who's behind a laptop all day will say why should I be in person?
Speaker 2:all the time, I'm thriving here in my apartment in Portugal, coding for some big tech company and earning lots of money, and I interact and flourish in my gaming world. Why should I? There are some questions there as well about how we interact, and certainly people that have been forced to go back to the office will say actually, I kind of preferred my Sitting in my pajamas with my tie and shirt on for the Zoom call.
Speaker 2:Well, that, in between, the in between of whether it's 3-2 or 2-3 in terms of in and out of the office. A lot of people find that kind of balance to be the best of both worlds, maybe.
Speaker 1:Do you know what I actually do believe? So I worked before I left the pharmacy. I worked in a pharmacy, you know, 96 or 97, monday to Friday, or you know I would have done a Sunday as well, or something like that and you're out of the house all day long, whereas if you're able to do remote working, you can be there for your children. If you're a parent and that even they're just coming in the door and they see it, you're probably working at the table but they get to see you. There's those don't they call them touch points in the day Very important for families, and a lot of families. A lot of people would say. I know there's some people that are like, no, I love the office, it gives me structure and I'm actually away from the house. But a lot of parents particularly would say that actually they do find it fabulous from a familial perspective. And then I'm sure people that don't have children just love the fact that they don't have to commute for two hours every day.
Speaker 2:But then even think of going back to young people and think about preventing cyber bullying or thinking about digital citizenship. You don't know what you don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The world of work allows us to see how life changes pre and post COVID. Or working from home versus not, the boundaries that we can institute are not or the blurring of them or the touch points that actually really work for that new parent. But if a young person doesn't know what it means to go for a lunchtime outing with the work crew, or the Thursday night pints or the tag ropey or whatever it would be, or even just normal office etiquette yeah.
Speaker 2:But even that might change. Yeah, so that's the thing that's really interesting. People are still observing that, aren't they?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's only when someone points that out can people say actually, I hadn't thought about my online life as taking away from these things that you've pointed out to me. I'm a big believer in, you know, showcasing this to young people. Give them our perspective, value their. I'm a big believer in showcasing this to young people. Give them our perspective, value their perspective, because it's very easy to point these things out. But there'll be a 23, 24-year-old graduate that's struggling to make ends meet in some graduate job and they're saying why would I commute two hours to go to an office with people that have their secure contracts and talk about this and this and the importance of interaction and creativity, when I can barely get the food on the table, you know. So that's going back to that tricky relationship with where society's at and austerity. But I think that the mix of the online world is it does give us more autonomy and options, doesn't it? But usual caveats, with some of those risks and known unknowns.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I actually think that collaborative I will probably end on this piece the collaborative aspect of parenting a child with the online world Because I would have been guilty before of just going give me that phone. You're banned, you're off that or you're not allowed it for a certain amount of time. But then I took the approach there. Once let's discuss about how many hours you think would be suitable for you to be on social media or be on your phone, and when they feel they have an input, they actually come to the table and they actually love the fact that you've respected their opinion. I actually think that it worked out much better for my family. Instead of just going right, you're only allowed an hour a day, you say to them how many hours do you think that it would be suitable? And they don't necessarily overdo it and say I want six, because if they feel that they have a buy-in or an opt-in, it's linked to tangible things that will happen.
Speaker 2:It's a bit like I don't know, you know an employer survey and you go one of these things, but if that employer survey actually dictates what will happen to the policy next year, you're damn well going to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you are actually asking the question and open to the response now, of course, the child might go well, I think I know.
Speaker 1:Well, you have to allow for that, but I think just sometimes, when they feel heard and seen, it's the most important. Yeah, so, dara, what?
Speaker 2:advice would you give young people today, and it doesn't even have to be to do with anything that we've spoken about. I think, whenever there's anything bad or challenging, that knowing that it will pass, more than likely will pass and things will be okay, that would be one thing I'd say, particularly given the mental health crisis that we know is out there. And I suppose, knowing that it's okay to not have a clue about any of this stuff or not knowing what you want to do, that we need to normalize that as well, because Ireland has become very much a you know we need to normalize that as well, because Ireland has become very much a you know we need to achieve this and that kind of leave insert culture of the points race and the commercialization of everything. It's also okay to not have a clue about anything, and that is that should be celebrated as well yeah so those would be the the two things I would say.
Speaker 2:If I had a third, it would probably be something along the lines of you know that cheesy thing about you know finding your passion. That can sometimes often become a pressure as well.
Speaker 1:I would be more like fuck that, it's like what if I haven't got one, something you hate?
Speaker 2:I'm passionate about hating things, yeah, yeah, but finding something where you can be you and really kind of think about that. It's so easy to be. You know, you can be avoidant with something, you could be angry or hating something and hanging around with a bunch of people or playing a certain sport or doing a certain thing, but what is it that allows you to be you in terms of self-expression or something that is meaningful or allows you to have a sense of your own development? That would be one final thing to critically think about.
Speaker 1:And what's the meaning of life?
Speaker 2:That there is none. I don't know. If I knew that one, I would have my own podcast. Well, I certainly don't know what the meaning of life is. But if I find out, you can let me know I will.
Speaker 1:Dara, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining me, my pleasure.
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