I’m of the view that there are actually no “highly sensitive people”, only those who imagine that they are. What is true, on the other hand is that “sensitivity” has taken on a huge load of moral meaning in the contemporary West — both extremely negative and extremely positive.

Where shall we start?

Let’s being with the positive connotations of this rhetorical term, which are more interesting, as they indicate the values that are promoted as ideal in our contemporary culture.

Ideally, then, one must have “sensitivity” toward the feelings of others. One must not be brutish or crude, rude of simple-minded, but take into account that others have their own emotional needs and situations.

More than that, there has been a successful coup, by those who embrace identity politics on the contemporary left, to make it seem that if you do not feel a bit guilty and ashamed of your identity, you don’t care about the feelings of others. This applies in particular to the way that Western leftists have labeled both whiteness and masculinity as “fragile” , which implies, in turn, that any confidence one may have in one’s identity (if one is white or masculine) is just a false confidence based actually on over-sensitivity and thus fragility.

Consequently, if you want to remove the stigma of alleged over-sensitivity, what is required is to move along the axis of measurement, to become, actually, more sensitive toward the needs and demands of others. In other words, thou shalt change thy status of “over-sensitivity” to the allegedly better status of “sensitivity” in order to remove the original stigma.

In this case, we see how varying degrees of “sensitivity” are implied and used for emotional blackmail for political purposes.

But this brings us to the opposite but related issue concerning the negative framing of the term, “sensitivity”, which, in this case has the implied meaning of “not being able to conform to society’s demands. This idea has also been smuggled into the mainstream of Western culture, to become a fairly normative “common sense”. If we notice somebody who is not conforming to the norms and conventions of Western culture, we look around for how that person might be “overly sensitive”.

It would also seem that we also base this presumption about any nonconformists on our own way of feeling, that no matter how you are, anybody would want to conform to the conventions of Western culture and become one with them. In fact I wonder if we can even entertain the slimmest notion that there might be people who do not want to do so. We just assume that everybody wants to be like us, and if they are not sufficiently the same, they must be getting in their own way — it’s the concept of the self-defeating narcissist that we invoke. (And thus, we show how narcissistic we really are!)

So, in equal portions, I think, “sensitivity” is a much admired and derided trait in our contemporary West. And above, all those who take up the label should be closely examined for a political agenda, because the rhetorical power of the term far outweighs anything that has been clarified or resolved philosophically about its meaning.

To get back to my original point, it seems that “sensitivity” has a political and rhetorical meaning in Western culture, but virtually no real substance.

Because current Western society suffers from a Just-World Hypothesis (more than a hypothesis — a belief), and lacks any objective moral compass whatsoever. (That is a strong statement, coming from someone who has instilled qualities of academic discipline, but I make it all the same). People embrace ideas of social progress that are instilled in them in school, for instance, but are unable to think through a situation with a higher degree of complexity to it than what they have already internalized through earlier education.

In the decades since the seventies, a lot of social progress has been made, but at the same time, Western society has somehow embraced a notion that simplicity denotes authenticity and truth. Consequently, if you are trying to explain something complex to simple-minded people, it is best to give up whilst you are even fractionally ahead. :)

From a philosophical point of view, the term, “sensitive” is one of the most abused in current popular culture and contemporary psychology. This is because it does the work of connoting many different possibilities in terms of human reaction and propensities — so much so that it has become a catch-all term that, precisely because it means anything, turns out to mean nothing.

If one wants to address a question like the one above, one must begin by defining one’s terms. And terms are always defined in accordance with some kind of political ideology. Even neutral-sounding psychological terms have an underlying set of presuppositions to them, most often linked to some implicit and subconsciously held ideology.

Consider, for instance, the use of the term “sensitive” as it is commonly used, which is as a pejorative term used euphemistically to imply “not so resilient”, In this case, some people who may miss the pejorative inflection of the term may rush to pronounce themselves “highly sensitive people” as an indication to others that they at least have something to make them stand out from the crowd.

Do such people become more sensitive, or less sensitive as they age? It may depend on a multitude of factors, and the answer is still most difficult to grasp because we haven’t really defined the core components of the term, “sensitive”. Instead, we have been reliant on looking for signs of conformity, and then judging any lack of conformity with an expected norm as “an inability to conform” — thus connoting to us that a person is “sensitive”.

The prevailing use of the term is, as I have suggested, mystical mumbo-jumbo, with a political agenda.

But what if we could use the term in a way that gives it genuine content, rather than as a measurement of compliance to social and political conventions? I think in that case we would need to look at “sensitivity” as something that has the function of attunement. A good example would be the conductor of an orchestra who has a requisite “sensitivity” to any part of the orchestral system being out of tune with the rest. And having said that, there could be all sorts of other types of “sensitivity’ possible — for instance the sensitivity of an accountant to something not being quite right with the figures, the sensitivity of an artist to the exact structure of the rabbit’s jawbone she is drawing, and so on.

And maybe in this sense we do become more “attuned” to certain arts and disciplines to which we have dedicated our lives, over time.

As for the other loaded question, whether we become more resilient over time, or whether resilience really is linked to conformity to convention (as it is assumed, thus begging the question) — all of this mostly has a lot more to do with individualistic psychology we would normally give credit for. That is why answering the question as though any answer would apply to one and all would be an error and misleading.

I second Ellen Deardon’s answer to this question. Americans do not understand relativity and context even slightly or fractionally, in my experience. I think this is a syndrome of the modern industrial process, however, and that Americans just take this logic further than most. It’s like everyone is a product from a factory production conveyor belt, and each has a different brand, different possible production flaws, and therefore must be categorized accordingly. This way of handling reality is very mechanical and systematic it seems. But only if humans really are the outcome of certain predictable and mechanical processes. (Arguably not all of us are like this— that is to say, we are not all mechanically produced by deliberate and orchestrated systems in society.)

In particular this syndrome may also be because Americans in particular are of the “new world” which is not, alas, steeped in tradition and history. If narcissist are those who take themselves too seriously, at the expense of others, it is also worthwhile noting that much of the time, Americans cannot contemplate things with a sense of irony, complexity or a grasp of their general context.

In addition, America is still very much ingrained with Protestant Christian ideology, and even though it has moved to use scientific language, more often than not the scientific-sounding or secular language is a mask for theological ideas. So it is that “narcissist” really means somebody who obeys the devil and does things to others that are morally corrupting. And since everybody is morally imperfect……..