Oftentimes my friends and family read my desire for isolation and persistent gloom as signs that I want company or to try something new in life. They constantly miss the mark by sending me bumper-sticker quotes, reading Bible passages, or buying me something that I appreciate, but do not need—locker magnets, socks, or ice cream.

They never seem to get to the crux of what ails me, rather only distract from objective reality. They are more comfortable working on the surface level. I believe that I am not the only teenage student to have such an experience.

How to make someone feel better or how to navigate a friendship are not skills taught in a conventional school curriculum. We learn these skills from our parents, friends, and mentors, which gives us all different perspectives and starting points. If our inner circles fail us, we are simply expected to learn these things on our own, and such a proposition is ridiculous, for navigating the human condition—birth, growth, emotion, aspiration, conflict, and mortality—is a formidable task to all.

Despite the difficulty, we also are sophisticated enough to figure out that the friendship skill’s other extreme—spraying impersonal, copy-and-paste brush-offs to our classmates’ problems—is a form of toxic behavior. Parker could be such a more welcoming community if we took the time to train ourselves in the human condition this way, instead of resorting to the behavior that I call “toxic positivity.”

My theory why there is so much toxic positivity instead of real validation and hope comes down to two reasons: (1) students are not experienced with or analytical of the human condition, and (2) we have a habit of “catastrophizing.”

“Catastrophizing” might be a made-up word, but you know what I am trying to get across. We all have that friend who is constantly anxious, constantly looking for something to complain about, constantly blowing things out of proportion. This type of behavior is the cousin of toxic positivity. I observe in the hallway, with considerable frequency: students who overreact to small problems and compete with others to see who is more stressed. When did the hardships of life become a badge of honor?

Take Parker’s sleep culture for example. In the fall, my peer Grace Chang wrote an article about sleep deprivation as a social norm: “I don’t know when not getting sleep became the trend,” she said. “But we need to stop it here. It’s not cool…”

Grace did acknowledge that Parker students aspire to be well rounded, which inevitably means that “you spend a tremendous amount of time perfecting all studies and additional activities, allowing sleep to fall by the wayside.” That is fine and dandy by my standards, but the normalization and encouragement of sleep deprivation concern me. I get the impression from social circles in my grade that sleep deprivation is an indicator of a well-rounded student, rather than someone who manages time poorly or lacks guidance.

It is easy to dismiss sleep deprivation or other hallway complaints as luxurious problems, but past a certain threshold, despair and joy are experiences that belong to every social class, which I covered in my earlier article on Seneca from Issue five. To dismiss someone’s hardship with a platitude like “Just be happy!” is decidedly condescending, dismissive, invalidating, rude, and counterproductive. It is almost never impossible to entirely understand what underlying, more serious issues could be lurking underneath a seemingly benign hallway complaint.

This is not to say that a conventional joke or go-to phrase is the end of the world. There is a balance between catastrophizing and condescendenion in companionship. If Parker’s mission statement promotes “empathy,” why, then, are we not better at suffering alongside others’ suffering? You may not need to speak at all.

In fact, most drawn-out conversations with lots of words have been anything but a conversation from my experience. Rather they are a series of unrelated sentences where the opposite ends of the conversation are oblivious to the concerns of the other.

Next time when you are helping a friend, be intentional with the words you use. Say, “It’s never fun to feel like that. Is there something we can do today that you’d enjoy?” Use common sense. If you were in hardship, you would not want your struggles to be dismissed as something as easy or unoriginal as “being happy.” No, you would prefer to be acknowledged and/or find practical solutions.