There are charts, and then there are charts. Statistics, and then statistics. The kind that take your breath away. Want to see one of those? Just take a hard look above. Those numbers are the surreal combination that typifies this age — not surprising, yet still shocking.
Just how stressed out are we? How much distress are our societies really in? More than a quarter of people say they can’t function anymore. More than a quarter. 1 in 4 people. That is a breathtaking, ruinous figure, and we’re going to discuss just why.
After a caveat or two.
First, the point. Our societies are in dire states of distress that are rising off the charts.
Now. There’s going to be the guy — and it’s always a guy — who says: so what! That’s fine! Suck it up, chumps! What are you, women? Life is hard, get over it. Don’t be that guy. Nobody should be that guy. Why not?
What’s an acceptable figure for “the number of people who can’t function anymore because they’re so stressed out”? A third of a society? Half a society? At that point, surely, we’d be nations of quite literal zombies, stumbling through the daily motions. Perhaps you see my point. While there’s always going to be some number of people in a society who find it hard, who struggle, who can’t cope — more than a quarter of people in such shape is totally unacceptable. It points to severe levels of institutional failure, from economic to political, as we’re about to discuss.
Those numbers are even worse when you break them down by age. Almost half of people aged 18–35 say they can’t function anymore. Almost half. More than half of young people say they are “completely overwhelmed” by stress. Almost half of people in the next generation, from 35–44, say they can’t function, either. Those are vast, vast numbers of people — and such a fact should make us all pause.
Let’s pause for a moment to establish another that that guy will object to, because he’s uncomfortable with the subject of feelings. This is a fact. It’s an empirical reality, based on data. When I say our societies are in dire straits, distressed off the charts, I’m not kidding. So let’s not minimize, but explore it.
What does it say when more than half of young people say they are overwhelmed by stress, and almost as much can’t function anymore? That’s what you’re probably asking, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and explore for a moment just why people are this stressed out.
The reasons are pretty obvious, aren’t they? The research above asked people just what was stressing them out, and the answers were in order, something like this. Inflation, the economy, the cost of living, the future, the political climate, climate change. The usual smorgasbord of catastrophes confronting us at this juncture of human history. And it’s plain to see, too, that their burdens fall disproportionately on the young.
What does all this mean? A lot of things, but let’s begin with this one. If you’re stressed out to the point you can’t function — and we’re going to discuss exactly what that means — you’re far from alone. We have this strange norm of not really discussing our feelings in our Calvinist societies — and it turned into the even stranger norm of joking about our real feelings with despair in the eyes. It's not a joke to feel this way.
This research wasn’t general. It was done by the APA, and the APA asked specific questions about what “not being able to function anymore” meant in daily practice. Getting out of bed, going to class, going to work, having relationships — all the things that daily “functioning” more or less means. You can read it for yourself if you like, and you should — but the point is that it wasn’t a general, vague question. When people said they couldn’t function, they really meant it, in specific and pinpoint ways. And that is a very, very big problem.
We can hardly be societies where large numbers of people can’t function — because they’re overwhelmed to the point of basically catatonia. Where stress and depression are destroying their abilities to learn, work, relate, socialize, create, build, evolve, grow. Societies like that will obviously fail in several ways. Economically, they’ll lose productivity, politically, socially, they’ll stop cohering, and politically, democracy will stop working. Everything we think of as modernity stops when people stop functioning, because modernity is about freedom. But what does freedom even mean when you’re hunkered down unable to get out of bed because life has become too stressful?
This problem is real, in other words — it’s material. It’s not just about “feelings” — the way that we play into our broken systems by minimizing our emotions. Emotions are real, and they matter intensely, perhaps most. What this research suggests is that we are becoming societies of people who are in so much pain that they are going numb.
Why do people feel like this? Why is it so common to be overwhelmed by bad feelings, negative emotions, these days, to be unable to get out of bed, or stopped in your tracks? Well, it’s because we live in an age of mega-failure. I read a thread about the research above, and wouldn’t you know it, it was full of people saying, smugly, that, hey, things have been worse. At least this isn’t Auschwitz!! LOL. That’s not exactly a great argument, and it’s not thinking either. People really feel this bad. Minimizing it isn’t going to make the problem go away — it’s just a form of denial, which by now, we should all understand is a profound form of ignorance.
Our institutions are failing us, like never before. Yes, there have been World Wars and all sorts of disasters and catastrophes. But behind all that was the backdrop of progress, made of quantum leaps in everything from productivity to life expectancy to happiness to trust to democracy. And now all those things are coming undone, falling, going backwards. It’s not some kind of random wishy-washy feeling people have for no reason. They’re not being weak or emotional or any of the rest of it. We really do live in an age — and these are all empirical facts, too — where democracy’s eroding, where even nations like Italy and Sweden are going fascist, where life expectancy is falling, where fanaticism is resurging, where incomes have been stagnant for decades, half a century in America’s case, where downward mobility is so much the norm that now five generations are experiencing it.
All of those facts, too, are real. The grand narrative that was prevalent yesterday — humanity’s story is made of progress, and once upon a time, there was a Big Bang of it, called the Industrial Revolution, which led to prosperity, and everywhere such prosperity spreads, it brings with it democracy and freedom, and so all we have to do is follow the rules, obey the scripts written for us about how to live our lives, like get educated and work hard, and everything will just get better and better by the year — that grand narrative is now at an end.
The Age of Progress has stalled, and gone into reverse, becoming an Age of Regress. Hence, so much backward motion at once that it’s dragging us all into oblivion with it, it feels like — from falling life expectancy to democratic erosion to rising fanaticism to economic stagnation to comic-book culture, which doesn’t help anyone make sense of any of it, to the disinhibited bullying and mob behavior of lunatics of all kinds and trolls farms on social media, which has replaced genuine relationships for many. All of that backward motion is, again, real.
This really is an Age of Regress now, and it’s leaving us all anti-future-shocked. Do you know the term “future shock”? The futurist Alvin Toffler popularized it, but it was a derivative of an idea dating back to Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology — who said that such rapid technological and social change made people feel uncomfortable. Toffler’s definition was thin and weedy, whereas Durkheim’s was rich and nuanced — Durkheim spoke of relationships breaking and old ways dying. But what is happening now is very different. We aren’t shocked by how fast the future is happening — hey, man, look, I can cook food in thirty seconds in this microwave! — we’re in shock that there isn’t one anymore.
You see, the Age of Regress is a Big Deal because with it comes a thing, a conclusion, that is genuinely terrifying and shocking: the Death of the Future. If there’s just going to be regress now…at least for the next several generations…then the future…is a thing that doesn’t exist anymore. The future is a new idea. Before, there was just…time…and for ancients, it often went in a circle, precisely because, well, nothing much ever changed. Maybe empires rose and fell — but the question was who was going to be king, and who slave. The future didn’t exist yet.
With the birth of modernity came this strange idea of “the future.” What was going to happen next? We became excited spectators in this cinema of the human journey, and whole careers were made on this notion of predicting it, forecasting it, understanding it. This kind of technology would lead to that kind of growth, which would come from this region or state or country, and these people would grow richer. That kind of innovation would make our lives easier and more convenient in this way, freeing up time and energy for us to work on this problem, which was even more important.
We grew obsessed with the future, so much so, that most of us never understood life apart from it, that human beings, for most of their 300,000 years on this planet, had never had a thing called “the future.” Previous civilizations were intensely historically backwards-looking — that doesn’t mean they were backwards, it means that they looked back, and grounded themselves that way. They thought the past was the most important thing, because there was no idea of “the future” — think of the way the Greeks invented complex and nuanced stories about their Gods and where they came from and lived and so forth. All previous civilizations were far, far more interested in history and time and beforeness — and then we came along, invented this thing called “the future,” and grew obsessed with it, basing our entire societies around it. If you doubt me, consider the fact that our economies are about a thing called growth — tomorrow.
So what do you do when the future suddenly dies? You go into shock. Anti-future-shock, to be precise. You’re not anxious and uncomfortable that maybe you don’t know how to use that newfangled microwave, that you don’t have one, so you’re not keeping up with the Joneses, that you’re not wearing the latest fashions or conversant in the latest trends and technologies. You’re overwhelmed by the sudden loss of the meaning of the whole thing. The telos of the journey, the climax of the story, the theme, the point of it all.
If there’s no…future…what the hell is the point of me? How am I going to survive in a world without a future? What even happens in one? Do we all just slowly…accept declining into oblivion? Sinking into nowhere? Hurtling backwards through time, all its follies and mistakes, from fascism to ignorance to war to poverty to hate…is that all that’s left now?
Maybe you can see why people are so stressed out now. It’s a Big Deal. It’s about the Age of Progress ending, and becoming the Age of Regress. Taking this idea of “the future” with it, and in place of “the future” now is just a…black hole. Or maybe a white void. We don’t know what’s going to happen…we just know it’s not good.
And that feeling is the feeling of now, isn’t it? The generalized, free floating dread? Isn’t that what most of us wake up to? We open our eyes, and maybe luxuriate in the comfort a nice, long sleep — and then, suddenly, wham, out of nowhere, panic sets in. What’s going to go wrong today?
We don’t know what’s going to happen anymore — we just know that it’s not going to be good. And we relive this dystopian meta-foreknowledge every single day. Every single day, we wake up, and we don’t know what’s going to happen — and that’d be OK if the scales were equally weighted, but by now, we know they’re not, and so the main question of the day becomes: what kind of hell is going to break loose today? For me. For my country. For the world. A new wave of the pandemic? A fascist coup attempt? A new Big Lie? Or maybe just a bill I can’t pay, a friend turning into a far right lunatic, and so forth.
This is what it feels like at the End of the Future, which is where we are now. We don’t know what’s going to happen, we just know it’s not going to be good. That’s the polar opposite of the way things used to be, and the way we were told they were not just going to be, but should be: we didn’t know what was going to happen, but we knew it was going to be good. New technologies, innovations, gadgets, inventions — that old narrative of the Industrial Revolution — would raise our living standards and make everyone happier and freer and thereby buttress democracy in the process, too. But now? It’s not like that at all anymore. Now the main question is: Jesus, what the hell is going to go wrong today? Can I just have one day — one — without some kind of surreal new level of dystopia being reached?
All of the above says we’re at a Turning Point. One age is becoming another. Is the Age of Progress really over? Does it have to become the Age of Regress? And who wouldn’t go catatonic, watching everything from democracy to the planet to the economy simultaneously die? This feeling, this free floating dread, is the feeling of being at a Turning Point — but not having fully recognized it yet.
That’s because too many of us have adopted the posture of cynicism — even if we don’t know it. Cynicism isn’t always a sneer and a curdled grimace. These days? It’s you and I making ourselves the butt of the joke, the kind of dead-eyed irony that says, “hey, I’m powerless, and I accept it, isn’t it funny, ha-ha.” No, it’s not funny. Not really. This posture is what our failed institutions want. For us to go numb and accept their failures, and transform them into our catatonia? Why, that’s just fine with them — because it means nothing has to change. We reinforce the systems that fail us when we adopt the pose of sulking children, batting eyelashes at each other, which is largely where we are today.
It’s time to grow up. Let me capitalize it, so you know I mean it. Grow Up. As a species, as nations, as people, as beings. Yes, the future as we once thought of it — consume, feel superior to the next guy, until he can consume more than you, feel bad, see a therapist, work harder, consume more back, and never mind anything else — that idea really is over. It is finished, done, at its limit.
And until we move beyond it — instead of living in its shadow, resenting the loss of that future, telling childish jokes about it, which barely mask how much we long for it, instead of, with all our might, freeing ourselves to be genuinely upset about the way our institutions have failed us, recognize how much we’re all hurting together, challenging the broken systems which have let us down, and that way, reinventing an age worth living in — this is all we’re going to have. Failure. Trauma. The End.
Tough words, I know. Tough love, maybe.
