When that news story broke, my LINE groups blew up.
A young person, over a romantic dispute, did something irreversible. The comment sections were unanimous: “How could he be so impulsive,” “His EQ was just too low,” “His mental resilience was too fragile.”
Reading those comments, I felt a deep discomfort. Not about the incident itself—that was, of course, heartbreaking. But about the way we discussed it. We always put the focus on “this person”: he was too impulsive, his EQ was too low, he was mentally unhealthy.
But if similar incidents keep recurring at intervals, is the problem really with “the individual”?
We’ve Misunderstood EQ
The term EQ has been used to the point of overflow in Taiwan. A child argues with a classmate at school, and the parents say “we need to cultivate their EQ.” An employee loses their temper in a meeting, and the manager says “their EQ isn’t enough.” A friend falls apart after a breakup, and bystanders say “their EQ needs improvement.”
But the EQ we talk about almost always points to the same thing: managing your own emotions.
Calm down. Take a deep breath. Don’t be impulsive. Learn self-regulation.
This understanding has a fundamental problem: it treats emotion as a purely personal matter. As if EQ were an ability you could train on your own, like working out your abs—as long as you’re disciplined and diligent enough, you can have it.
But the human emotional system doesn’t work that way.
From an evolutionary standpoint, emotion is a social tool. Fear lets you sound the alarm to your companions in danger. Anger lets you signal to the group when your interests have been violated. Shame lets you know you’ve broken the community’s norms. Empathy lets you sense another’s state and respond appropriately.
Every emotion presupposes an “object”—another person, or a group. Remove the group, and emotion loses its evolutionary function. EQ, at its root, is not a one-person affair.
The Disappearance of Social Education
Taiwan’s education system once had a term called “social education” (群育). Standing alongside moral, intellectual, physical, and aesthetic education, it was one of the five major dimensions of education.
But think back on your own school experience. How much of it was intellectual education? How much was social education?
I remember as a child—choir, club activities, inter-class competitions—these were all arenas of social education. In the choir you learned to listen to others’ voices, to coordinate with others’ rhythm, sometimes lowering your own so the whole sounded better. In inter-class competitions you learned to cooperate with people of different temperaments, to handle disagreements, to compromise for a shared goal.
These experiences seem unrelated to “academic grades.” But they are the soil in which EQ grows.
And now? If joining the choir would interfere with cram school, parents will unhesitatingly choose to drop the choir. Club activities are compressed into mere formality. Inter-class competitions become a nuisance that “cuts into study time.”
We have systematically eliminated social education, and then ask, bewildered: “Why are today’s children so low in EQ?”
It’s like scooping a fish out of the water and then asking why it can’t swim.
The Parenting Logic of the Narcissistic Generation
Why did social education get eliminated? Because the generation that holds the discourse power over parenting has a deeply ingrained belief: my child matters most.
This isn’t an accusation—it’s a structural observation.
Research by psychologist Jean Twenge points out that beginning in the 1970s, Western society (and the East Asian societies influenced by it) entered what’s called the “Me Generation.” This generation grew up in an environment where individualism was on the rise, believing that personal feelings reign supreme and that self-actualization is life’s highest value.
When this generation became parents, their parenting logic naturally became: the child’s individual development is above all else. Grades matter more than socializing, individual competitiveness more than team collaboration. “Being yourself” matters more than “accommodating others”—this became the self-evident highest principle.
So they don’t see teaching a child to accommodate others as a form of learning. They see it as a waste of time—even as wronging the child.
“Why should my child have to defer to others?”
The subtext of this sentence is: others don’t matter. Your feelings are paramount.
A child raised under this logic has only “me” in their world. They’re not accustomed to other people being part of life. They don’t know how to handle the conflict between “what I want” and “what others want.” Because they’ve never been asked to handle it.
Then one day, they encounter a situation that can’t be resolved by “my feelings are paramount”—say, a setback in a relationship—and they explode.
Feelings Are Relationships
While leading teams, I observed something: those who are genuinely high in EQ almost all share one trait—they’ve had deep group experiences.
Maybe a varsity sports team, maybe a church fellowship, maybe a leadership role in a club, maybe some project team requiring long-term collaboration. The point isn’t what type of group, but that they once experienced friction, compromise, conflict, and reconciliation within a group.
In The Arrogance of the Elite, the Way Out for Youth, I discussed Sandel’s view: meritocracy makes winners believe everything is owed to themselves. The problem with EQ is the same—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 views are always most important—the outcome lands at one of two extremes. Either you’re strong enough, strong enough to crush everyone with your own way, becoming a lone wolf in some domain. Or you suffer defeat after defeat in the friction of real human relationships, because you never learned how to operate in a world where “other people” exist.
And the latter is the situation of most people.
Feelings are not produced in a vacuum. Every feeling you have is tied to your relationship with the world. Your anger is tied to how you’ve been treated. Your anxiety is tied to your position within the group. Your loneliness is tied to whether you’ve had the experience of being accepted.
To talk about “feelings” with “relationships” removed is as absurd as talking about a fish with the water removed.
The Responsibility Education Must Bear
I’m not an education scholar; I’m just someone who has raised children and led teams. But precisely because of that, I have some very personal feelings about this issue.
My own children follow a non-institutional, self-directed learning path. One of the reasons I chose homeschooling was my discovery that the social education within institutional schooling already exists in name only. I share more in The Truth About Homeschooling. But even within the homeschooling framework, I very deliberately ensure my children have sufficient group interaction—not the superficial kind of “playing with classmates,” but deep interaction that requires cooperation, requires compromise, requires facing conflict.
Because I know that if he only lives in his own world, his EQ will never grow.
Every time I see an emotional tragedy on campus, society’s response is almost always at the legal level: should we regulate dangerous items? Should we strengthen campus security? Should we add more counselors?
These all make sense. But they all treat symptoms, not the root cause.
The root cause is: our education spends twelve or even sixteen years teaching children how to take exams, how to compete, how to run faster on the individual track. But it spends almost no time teaching them: how to live well in a world where other people exist.
A World Where Other People Exist
I can’t solve this problem. A single article can’t solve it either.
But I want to leave behind one thought: the next time we say “that person’s EQ is too low,” perhaps we can ask one more question—did they, in the course of growing up, have the chance to be worn down within a group?
If not, that’s not their fault. It’s our collective failure.
We’ve built an education system that leaves only “me,” and then expect those who emerge from it to know how to care about “us.” That expectation is itself absurd.
EQ is neither innate nor something you can train through reading or meditation. It requires conflict, requires compromise, requires learning not to flip the table when someone provokes you, requires learning not to fall apart when your needs are refused.
All of these can only happen where “other people” exist.
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