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Posted on 08/30/2026 7:11:34 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I have been traveling a lot lately, and I keep noticing something that would have seemed genuinely strange not very long ago: Grown adults are walking through airports carrying stuffed animals.
Not parents carrying the stuffed animal their toddler dropped. Adult men and women carrying plush animals through the airport as companions and comfort objects. Apparently, this is normal now.
I realize I am in dangerous territory here because I am about to sound like an old person complaining about the younger generation. But I don’t actually want to make fun of people with teddy bears. I want to understand what changed. I also have very little moral high ground when it comes to childhood comfort objects. I sucked my thumb into college.
Throughout my childhood, adults kept predicting the milestone that would finally make me stop. Kindergarten. Elementary school. High school. Surely, when she gets a boyfriend. Nope. Eventually, acrylic fingernails accomplished what adolescence and boyfriends couldn’t. I started wearing them regularly, as was fashionable at the time, and thumb sucking became impractical.
My mother still occasionally sucks her thumb. She is also one of the strongest and most capable women I know. She built a large fashion company, raised children, worked incredibly hard, and eventually retired to Hawaii. Every once in a while, though, falling asleep or driving when she thinks nobody is paying attention, there goes the thumb.
So my argument cannot possibly be that needing comfort makes you weak. But I do think we are becoming weaker, and I wonder whether the stuffed animals are one tiny, furry symptom of something much larger.
One of the most popular columns I have written for The Epoch Times was about another phenomenon I couldn’t stop noticing: people wearing pajamas in public.
Recently, Tuskegee University, a historically Black university, made news for reinforcing standards restricting pajamas, bedroom slippers, bonnets, and durags in certain campus settings. Critics have characterized such rules as “respectability politics.” I find the phrase itself interesting. When did presenting yourself respectably become politics?
There is nothing wrong with pajamas, a bonnet, or a teddy bear. The question is whether every setting needs to accommodate whatever makes us most comfortable. School is partly preparation for entering the world. Sometimes, that means learning that what is appropriate in your bedroom isn’t necessarily appropriate in a classroom or job interview.
We have seen a similar conversation around emotional support animals. For a period, they became so common on airplanes that airlines were dealing not only with dogs and cats but with increasingly unusual animals being presented as necessary for emotional comfort. People with disabilities who rely on trained service animals are in an entirely different category.
But culturally, something interesting had happened: “This makes me feel safer and more comfortable” had become an argument we increasingly expected the world around us to accommodate.
Perhaps what has changed isn’t our need for comfort. My mother and I are proof that previous generations had plenty of comfort habits. Perhaps what has changed is our expectation that adulthood should require us to leave any of them behind.
There is psychological research supporting the idea that manageable discomfort serves a purpose. Researchers sometimes describe “stress inoculation.” Overwhelming or chronic stress can obviously be damaging, but manageable stress, successfully navigated, can help us develop the ability to deal with future stress.
If, every time a child encounters something difficult, we remove the difficulty, how will the child discover, “I can handle difficult things”?
I wonder if my generation inadvertently participated in an enormous parenting experiment. Many of us looked at our childhoods and said: “My parents messed me up. I’m going to be gentler with my children.”
Some correction was undoubtedly needed. Cruelty doesn’t create healthy children. There is enormous value in affection, empathy, and listening. But somewhere along the way, did being gentle begin to mean preventing discomfort?
This extends far beyond parenting because we have constructed a civilization extraordinarily good at removing discomfort. We rarely have to be hungry. We control the temperature. Food appears at our door. Entertainment is available every waking second. We don’t have to navigate without GPS or even stand in line for three minutes with nothing to do.
We reach for our phones, and I certainly do. I am addicted to mine. I sometimes turn my head away from a human being who is speaking to me because something appears on my screen. I know that while I’m doing it, it isn’t appropriate, and sometimes I do it anyway. Maybe the smartphone is just the socially acceptable stuffed animal almost all of us carry.
On a recent flight to North Dakota, something unusual happened. I sat next to a man who worked both as a cattle farmer and in the oil fields. We started talking and kept talking for essentially the entire flight.
We talked regenerative agriculture, watering-trough hacks, repurposing security cameras to watch cattle, stocking density, GPS collars, and everything else two people interested in agriculture could cram into a flight. When I got off the airplane, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had talked to a stranger beside me for an entire flight.
Airplanes have changed. We sit down, insert earbuds, open the laptop or phone, and disappear into entertainment individually designed for us. Everyone becomes the center of his own little universe. Of course, each of us is the center of our own universe. We are the narrators of the movie happening inside our own heads. Maturity, I think, is realizing that everyone else is, too.
After employing hundreds of people over decades, I have felt a change in this orientation. I increasingly encounter an expectation that the environment should organize itself around the individual’s experience rather than the individual asking how he or she should show up for everyone else.
People ask me almost every day some version of the same question: “How do you do all of this?” “Do you sleep?” I have four young children. We have a ranch and restaurant. I write and travel for speaking engagements.
I make apothecary products for our farm store and homemade ice cream every week. Written down, it does sound like a lot. And yet I somehow still find a remarkable amount of time to scroll through my phone.
So I wonder what people are really asking. Are they asking, “How could anyone possibly accomplish all of that?” Or is the question underneath sometimes, “Why would you be willing to?”
Why choose a life requiring that much work? Why do something difficult and inconvenient for relatively little money or recognition? Why willingly be uncomfortable?
Maybe I am projecting, but I wonder whether effort itself has begun to look abnormal.
For most of human existence, nobody needed to seek out discomfort. Life delivered plenty of it. I certainly don’t want to return to a world where people routinely went hungry or ordinary infections killed children. Eliminating suffering is a tremendous human achievement. But somewhere along the way, I wonder if we confused suffering with discomfort.
They aren’t the same thing. Being bored isn’t suffering. Waiting isn’t suffering. Having someone disagree with you isn’t suffering. Dressing appropriately when you’d rather wear pajamas isn’t suffering. Putting your phone away while another person speaks isn’t suffering. Allowing your child to struggle with something he can ultimately overcome isn’t cruelty.
These are tiny repetitions of something human beings desperately need to know: I can be uncomfortable and still be OK.
Maybe the person carrying the teddy bear through the airport is every bit as capable as I am. My own family history makes it impossible for me to conclude otherwise. But I still have the judgment: You’re a grown adult. Why are you carrying a stuffed animal through the airport?
Maybe we’ve simply become less judgmental about harmless comforts. There are certainly worse things a person can do than hug a stuffed bear. But maybe embarrassment once performed a small cultural function, too. Maybe occasionally being told, “You’re getting too old for that,” was one of countless little pressures pushing us toward adulthood.
Not everything our parents did to us needs to be repeated. But not everything they asked us to overcome was trauma either. Maybe resilience isn’t something we simply possess. Maybe it is something we practice.
The teddy bear probably isn’t the problem. I just wonder whether it is trying to tell us something.
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We are too isolated, so any sense of companionship will substitute.
Peter Pan Never Never Land
Wait till you find out that the biggest car show culture are the furries.
Yes, furries. They love car shows and organize a lot of them. Outside of the furry thing they seem to truly be the future of car restorations.
I mean I guess it makes sense because even 35 years ago when u was a teenager the furries frequently had orgies in parking garages. They couldn’t get enough of it.
In the span of 10 minutes in an airport you lose count of the number of times you say, WTF.
Yep.
Yup.
Because they can’t afford a service animal? LOL
The trauma is real... The reality is not.
Because they can’t afford a service animal? LOL
The trauma is real... The reality is not.
They must use them to bogart seats on buses, trains, and theaters
It’s worse than that. Grown adult men carrying around stupid dolls. It’s just creepy.
Who's laughing now?
Furries remind me of the time that I showed up at a big Halloween party without a costume, I drink left handed, so I unzipped my pants, stuck my right thumb in my blue jean pocket, and went in as a one eared elephant.
Here’s comedian Kathleen Madigan talking about the first time she saw a furry. If you’ve got a minute to spare, check it out. It’s pretty funny.
https://youtube.com/shorts/01kbfehA4oA?is=3tDP8buVXtSFEVXF
Reagan.
I blame Reagan.
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