From: Mr. Big Picture
A thoughtful reader asks Douglas how global conflict, constant news exposure, and climate anxiety are shaping modern psychological stress. Is the world truly more overwhelming today, or are we simply more exposed to information than ever before?
Dear Douglas,
I really don’t have a personal problem, but I am wondering what a psychologist might say about the state of the world and its’ affect on people. Is it true that people are more stressed and anxious than in the past? How do all the wars and unsettled conflicts affect our psychology? Now that we are worried about the ability of the planet to survive climate change and the massive environmental impact of humanity, does it affect our day to day living of life? Certainly mass media and social media change how we come to know about things that are happening all over the world. Is it possible to have too much information?
Mr. Big Picture
Hello Mr. Big Picture,
Thank you for bringing up questions that, I suspect, are relevant to many people. The measuring of the numbers of people who have diagnosable illnesses, like anxiety and depression, is a relatively new phenomenon. Correlating those to events that are happening in the world at large, as far as I know, hasn’t been done. Cause and effect is a difficult thing to establish in the area of mental health.
The fact that we haven’t measured the impact of worldwide cultural change doesn’t mean it has no impact. Let’s consider change itself. Up until, only, 200 years ago an average human lived and died within the context of a stable and, relatively, unchanged reality. They had the same tools, exposure to the same things, and the same set of possibilities. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution, and then the technological revolution that the progress of humanity was experienced and recognized within a single generation of people. That rate of change has happened exponentially, doubling in half the time it took before. During the life of a ninety year old person today, the number of new inventions and discoveries is astounding…think about it, the world they die in is quite different than the one they were born into.
It is also a common assertion in areas of psychology that the development of an individuated sense of self, someone who is self directed and empowered to make decisions which determine the course of their own life, is a relatively late phenomena in the history of human psychological development. It represents a shift in our “group-ness”, the degree to which we function with an external locus of control, conforming to group norms or authority. Personal growth is largely seen as an individual quest, a set of internal discoveries, the conquering of one’s unique neurosis. (Not that I am saying it doesn’t lead to the questions of where and how we belong to the human family).
All of this is to say that there is no way to compare ourselves to another time in history. We are, both internally and externally changing. The context of our experience of life is on a fast track of change, the systems…political and economic are rickety structures, traditions of religion and culture are being submerged in the tide of the new wave, boundaries and identities are being unformed and reformed by the accessibility of the internet. One could argue that the disruption of our security (that which is stable and known) has catapulted us in to an age where we will need to rewrite our priorities.
Douglas
