What causes the Karen syndrome?
What is it?
The “Karen syndrome” is usually a middle-age woman in the Western world who is unrealistically demanding, entitled, and rude. If they don’t get their way at a store or restaurant they want to talk to a manager. They are normally ignorant of basic business rules and things like return policies. They demand to be treated specially and if they don’t they throw a public tantrum.
This is probably a combination of an emotional disorder (anxiety) and personality disorder. Women are more likely to have emotional disorders than men.
Most Karens are white women but they can be any color, and a few are men. Most Karens grew up with plenty of food and a financially solid household. Poor people don’t seem to suffer from this as often. For examples of behavior search any video site like Youtube, for “Karen”, “what is a Karen”, or “Karen syndrome”.
My theory about most Karens is they grew up white and middle-class, with parents who were profoundly ignorant about what constitutes toxic coddling and over protecting their children. The middle-income and middle-education group (college educated) are also the ones who took the most untested COVID vaccines. Do you start to see a pattern here? Not all college degrees require a person to have critical thinking skills, or the ability to discern facts from feelings. In fact, most don’t.
Possible causes, entitlement
We’re seeing more entitled people who cannot function at the adult level. Part of this is influenced by parents coddling their children and manufacturing anxiety disorders in them as well.
How does one manufacture an anxiety disorder? By coddling their children mostly. As an example they will drop their children off at school and pick them up every day. This subconsciously sends the message that the world is a dangerous place. Another way they produce anxiety disorders is they are over protective, again implying the world is a dangerous place. They don’t let their kids go to far and explore. Exploring is important to a kid’s development to help them gain confidence.
Free play time is also important to a child’s creative and problem-solving skills. Many helicopter parents schedule all the time for their child with no time for free play and just “goofing off”.
Narcissism
We are also seeing an epidemic of narcissism and other personality disorders due mainly from coddling, but sometimes from emotional trauma. But the MSM won’t cover this. It’s almost like they want this. Personality disorders are a fundamental change in the way a person thinks and sees the world. A key aspect is the victim mentality and “it’s always someone else’s fault”.
Anxiety and depression can often go with personality disorders. A key symptom of a personality disorder is when someone is highly intolerant of the views of others, and will resort to shaming, name calling, personal attacks, censorship, and violence so they do not have to listen to a different view. And these people are in leadership positions in many companies like social media. Sound familiar?
Personality disorders are incurable and largely untreatable. Some of the symptoms can be treated, like for anxiety, but the illness itself is incurable because it requires the person to change their internal way of thinking and how they see the world and most people cannot do that.
For more on personality disorders see Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic.
Menopause
Some of the worst moody entitled people are middle-aged women going through menopause. Some people who work with customers every day have mentioned this to me. Their hormones are changing making them more moody, they finally realize they married the wrong person and they are angry, or their emotional problems are finally coming to the surface. Women file the majority of divorces and a large chunk of them are filed when the women are in their 50s.
Phthalates
Phthalates are in plastics and there are many types of phthalates. BPA is only one type of phthalate. A bottle that is BPA-free does not mean it’s safe, it simply has another phthalate in it. Phthalates are needed in plastics or the plastic becomes brittle and breaks easily. If you remember cheap plastic toys from the 1970s from Japan you may have noticed many were very brittle.
While phthalates cause problems with the hormones they are present in plastic in small amounts and it just takes longer for their effects to be a problem. This subtle issue is why it’s so dangerous, people don’t know until it’s too late that they are in danger.
Soy
Soy contains phytoestrogens. The body sees these as estrogenic compounds, the body cannot tell the difference. These mess with the endocrine system. And when that happens, things can be bad. It’s not a good idea to mess with your hormones. While we have studies that show soy and estrogen is good for women with certain conditions, the studies are very narrow and do not look at any bad side effects. They only look at positive effects. And soy is probably not good for men, men do not need estrogen.
Enabling
Companies enable this behavior with their “customer is always right” issue and catering to the Karens. But by encouraging Karens they only discourage normal reasonable customers and the customers try to avoid the company.
Anxiety
People can be rude if they have very high anxiety. If they feel they are losing control of a situation they can go full Karen. We are seeing a lot more cases of anxiety over the past 30 years. Part of it could be emotional trauma, part could be lack of magnesium, it’s likely combinations of several factors.
What to do?
Think of them like a person who cannot control themselves, because they can’t. This is part of the mental illness.
If you encounter a Karen, stand up for yourself, just do it politely. Don’t be an enabler, the one who creates the problem. If you don’t want to trade a bus seat then don’t. Especially if they are a Karen.
If you are behind a Karen and watching the drama, do not get involved. Or support the manager they are talking to. Once outnumbered a Karen will usually back down and retreat to its lair, but not without throwing a few more insults around. This is like a cornered animal growling while it retreats.
Don’t create Karens by coddling or being overprotective of children. Understand that children need unstructured, unplanned free play time, do not schedule all or most of their time.
Teach your children safety but then let them roam around and stretch their wings. Yes they will get a cut or a scratch or broken arm, this is a normal part of being a kid. If you cannot handle normal kid behavior then don’t have kids. I got many more sprains than cuts and scratches, I didn’t wear a bike helmet, and I’m a well-adjusted productive member of society who is a functional adult. Who woulda thunk parents were doing things right in the 1970s?
Teach your kids to be a functional independent adult who can take care of themselves. This sometimes means letting them hit bottom and NOT giving them money. This is often a necessary step in their development.
Teach them the world is not as dangerous as they MSM portrays, but also teach them that the job and dating market is competitive. They will not get a job simply because they exist, they must earn the skills for that job, especially for office jobs.
Teach them to be polite. No one deserves their bad day.
Teach them critical thinking skills. Teach them what questions to ask. Then teach them how to find facts from various sources and how to evaluate sources for reliability. Reputation matters a lot here.
.....some Karens I know....