When that news story broke, my LINE groups exploded.

A young person had done something irreversible over a romantic dispute. The comment sections were filled with identical responses: “How could they be so impulsive?” “Such poor EQ!” “Their psychological resilience is too fragile.”

Looking at these comments, I felt a deep discomfort. Not about the incident itself—that was heartbreaking, of course. But about how we were discussing it. We always focus on “the individual”: they were too impulsive, their EQ was too poor, they were psychologically unhealthy.

But if similar incidents occur regularly, is the problem still with “individuals”?

We’ve Misunderstood EQ

The term EQ has been overused to the point of meaninglessness in Taiwan. When kids fight with classmates at school, parents say “we need to cultivate EQ.” When employees lose their temper in meetings, managers say “insufficient EQ.” When friends fall apart after breakups, bystanders say “EQ needs improvement.”

But our understanding of EQ almost always points to the same thing: manage your own emotions.

Stay calm. Take deep breaths. Don’t be impulsive. Learn self-regulation.

This understanding has a fundamental problem: it treats emotions as purely personal matters. As if EQ is a skill you can develop on your own, like building abs—with enough self-discipline and effort, you can achieve it.

But the human emotional system doesn’t work that way.

From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are social tools. Fear alerts your companions to danger. Anger signals to the group when your interests are violated. Shame tells you when you’ve broken social norms. Empathy lets you sense others’ states and respond appropriately.

Every emotion presupposes an “other”—another person, or a group. Remove the group, and emotions lose their evolutionary function. EQ is fundamentally not a solitary affair.

The Disappearance of Group Education

Taiwan’s education system once had a concept called “group education” (群育). Alongside moral, intellectual, physical, and aesthetic education, it was one of the five pillars of education.

But think back to your own school experience. What percentage was devoted to intellectual education? What percentage to group education?

I remember as a child, there were choirs, club activities, inter-class competitions—these were all venues for group education. In choir, you learned to listen to others’ voices, match others’ rhythms, sometimes suppress yourself for the sake of overall harmony. In inter-class competitions, you learned to cooperate with people of different personalities, handle disagreements, compromise for common goals.

These experiences seemed unrelated to “academic performance.” But they were the soil where EQ grows.

Now? If participating in choir interferes with cram school, parents will unhesitatingly choose to quit choir. Club activities have been compressed to formalities. Inter-class competitions become “distractions from study time.”

We’ve systematically eliminated group education, then wonder in confusion: “Why do kids today have such poor EQ?”

It’s like pulling fish out of water, then asking why they can’t swim.

The Narcissistic Generation’s Parenting Logic

Why has group education been eliminated? Because the generation controlling parenting discourse has a deep-rooted belief: my child is most important.

This isn’t meant as criticism. It’s a structural observation.

Psychologist Jean Twenge’s research shows that starting in the 1970s, Western society (and East Asian societies influenced by it) entered what’s called the “Me Generation.” This generation grew up in an environment of rising individualism, believing personal feelings are paramount and self-actualization is life’s highest value.

When this generation becomes parents, their parenting logic naturally becomes: the child’s individual development above all else. Grades matter more than socializing. Personal competitiveness matters more than teamwork. “Being yourself” matters more than “accommodating others.”

So they don’t see teaching children to accommodate others as learning. They see it as wasted time—even unfair to the child.

“Why should my child have to accommodate others?”

The subtext is: others don’t matter. Your feelings are paramount.

A child raised under this logic lives in a world with only “me.” They’re not used to having others in their lives. They don’t know how to handle conflicts between “what I want” and “what others want.” Because they’ve never been required to handle such conflicts.

Then one day, they encounter a situation that can’t be solved with “my feelings are paramount”—like setbacks in a relationship—and they explode.

Feelings Are Relationships

Leading teams, I’ve observed something: those with genuinely high EQ almost all share one trait—they’ve had deep group experiences.

Maybe varsity sports, maybe church fellowship, maybe student leadership, maybe long-term collaborative projects. The type of group doesn’t matter; what matters is they’ve experienced friction, compromise, conflict, and reconciliation within a group.

In “Elite Arrogance, Youth’s Way Out” I discussed Sandel’s view: meritocracy makes winners think everything depends on themselves. The EQ problem is similar—we think EQ is personal cultivation, but it’s actually a product of group experience.

If you absolutize personal feelings—my emotions, my needs, my perspective are always most important—there are only two extreme outcomes. Either you’re strong enough to steamroll everyone with your approach, becoming a loner in some domain. Or you retreat in the face of interpersonal friction, because you never learned how to operate in a world “with others.”

And the latter is most people’s situation.

Feelings aren’t produced in a vacuum. Every feeling you have relates to your relationship with the world. Your anger relates to how you’re treated. Your anxiety relates to your position in groups. Your loneliness relates to whether you’ve experienced acceptance.

Discussing “feelings” while removing “relationships” is as absurd as discussing fish while removing water.

Education’s Responsibility

I’m not an education scholar, just someone who’s raised children and led teams. But precisely because of this, I have visceral feelings about this issue.

My own child follows a non-traditional homeschooling path. One reason we chose homeschooling was discovering that group education in institutional education has become a hollow shell. I share more in “The Truth About Homeschooling.” But even within homeschooling, I’m very deliberate about ensuring my child has sufficient group interaction—not superficial “playing with classmates,” but deep interaction requiring cooperation, compromise, and facing conflict.

Because I know that if he only lives in his own world, his EQ will never develop.

Every time we see emotional tragedies on campus, society’s response is almost always legal: should we regulate dangerous items? Should we strengthen campus security? Should we add more counselors?

These all make sense. But they’re treating symptoms, not causes.

The cause is: our education spends twelve or even sixteen years teaching children how to test, how to compete, how to run faster in individual races. But it spends almost no time teaching them: how to live well in a world with others.

A World with Others

I can’t solve this problem. One article can’t solve it either.

But I want to leave a thought: next time we say “that person has poor EQ,” maybe we can ask one more question—did they have opportunities to be shaped within a group during their development?

If not, that’s not their fault. It’s our collective failure.

We built an education system with only “me” left, then expected people emerging from it to understand caring about “us.” This expectation is inherently absurd.

EQ isn’t innate, nor can it be developed through reading or meditation alone. It requires conflict, requires compromise, requires learning not to flip tables when others annoy you, requires learning not to collapse when your needs are rejected.

All of these require “others” to occur.