The Easily-Offended Generation: Why is Everyone So Sensitive These Days?

An “unpopular” view on the triggers of offense

Edneil Jocusol
11 min readMar 3, 2024

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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

It was the night of the burial of my mother’s best friend. One of the relatives of that bereaved family had a casual conversation with my mom. I sat beside them on the bench, conservatively sipping my coffee, to offer my sympathies and perhaps gather wisdom from their life stories.

I was starting to love the flow of their heart-to-heart dialogue until that lady, a stranger to me, abruptly put me in the spotlight and unapologetically advised my mom:

“You know Nelia, your son should have a deep desire to get married someday because it’s sad to grow old alone,” she delivered confidently with a poker face and continued, “... he also needs to save money for himself and put a limit on giving it away.”

She then looked at me with a confused expression, “I heard you will go back to Saudi Arabia to work, ‘kuya’ [endearment in Tagalog]. Why Saudi of all the countries? Are there any good jobs there?”.

Fun Fact: We don’t know each other.

The silence in my body can no longer contain the deafening lines of unspoken counter-arguments rallying inside my brain. I kept on telling myself over and over again, “Not the right place, Edneil

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Edneil Jocusol
Edneil Jocusol

Written by Edneil Jocusol

I write my observations on society, business/entrepreneurship, and technology/engineering.