Finn McRedmond: No end in sight to the new age of anxiety

Since WH Auden popularised the phrase The Age of Anxiety in his eponymous 1947 poem, it has become a catch-all term. Post-war Europe, the cold war, the financial crisis of 2008 have all been dubbed as epochal moments of fear and uncertainty.

Amid a pandemic, housing crises, increasing climate fatalism and even Brexit-induced political anathema, are we living in the most anxious of times? The atmosphere certainly feels jittery, and the pulse of society beating more rapidly than ever before.

Access to constant rolling news does little to assuage these feelings. Not long ago, information on current events was confined to whatever could fit in the column inches of a newspaper.

Now news outlets update their websites across the clock. And Twitter and Facebook allow us to scroll endlessly through images and opinions to accompany the latest doomsday headlines.

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Cop26 was kicked off with UN secretary general António Guterres telling us 'we are digging our own grave'. Maybe such alarming language is necessary to provoke action

The bid to stay informed comes at no unlikely cost to our collective mental wellbeing. At almost any point during the pandemic we could read the latest death, hospitalisation and infection figures.

Hannah Ritchie, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford, pointed out in Wired Magazine that the Guardian publishes a new article about the climate every three hours.

In such circumstances it is no wonder that climate-anxiety, to take just one example, is running rampant in teenagers and young adults.

A recent global survey asked 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 how they felt about the environmental crisis. It should concern – but not shock – us to learn that over half believed “humanity was doomed”; while nearly 40 per cent were reluctant to have children thanks to climate change.

Total destruction

Why isn’t this surprising? A cursory look at one of the most prominent movements in the field – Extinction Rebellion – might make it clear.

Among its co-founders is Roger Hallam, who recently addressed young people with advice to deal with “their approaching annihilation”. Even the organisation’s name is derived from the very premise that we are headed for total destruction.

It ought to be enough to send anyone spiralling. But this kind of rhetoric is not limited to the extreme fringes. Cop26 was kicked off with UN secretary general António Guterres telling us “we are digging our own grave”. Maybe such alarming language is necessary to provoke action, but it cannot be good for our brains.

The rising blood pressure of our common conscience is not just thanks to climate anxiety. The pandemic has left the world feeling nervy and skittish. At first it was the arrival of a new disease on our shores, then there were lockdowns, and wondering how long they might go on.

Predicting what shape the world might take over the next decade an almost impossible task

People washed their shopping and some were fearful to leave home even when restrictions eased. All of this happened while we learned how to adapt to working from home.

And even with the vaccine and its successful rollout programme, we are seeing cases rising. We are reminded that the flu season will be particularly bad this winter.

And it is all furnished with constant querying in the news about whether we will see more lockdowns and more restrictions. Maybe the realisation that the vaccine was not necessarily the silver bullet it was once touted as had led to new paroxysms of stress and worry.

We can blame the angsty atmosphere on the information age simply making us more self-aware, not necessarily more worried. But it seems the convergence of these factors has heralded a moment uniquely capable of generating unease. The question, then, is what lasting impacts it might have.

Quitting jobs

Major crises have a tendency of generating non-trivial social change. As economist and Irish Times columnist David McWilliams wrote, "one of the biggest changes ushered in by the pandemic is the increase in the numbers of people choosing to quit their jobs and reassessing work".

The Great Resignation has caused severe ructions in the labour market and the effects it will have on the economy in the middle and even distant future are unknown.

Meanwhile, analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to investors recently that “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline”. The link between climate anxiety and the potential for declining birth rates long into the future might be blurry at the moment, but it does not seem to be something we ought to treat as frivolous.

And putting the question of birth rates aside, the huge commitments made already at Cop26 will rewrite the courses of several of the world’s leading global economies. The Global Methane Pledge, for example, is a US-EU led initiative aimed to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30 per cent by 2030.

And, the number of countries pledging to reach carbon neutrality over the coming decades continues to grow. Perhaps we can and ought to demand more radical action, but we should not underestimate the seismic reverberations such promises (if met) will have.

Navigating periods of such extreme social volatility creates huge challenges for policymakers. And predicting what shape the world might take over the next decade an almost impossible task. But in an age of such anxiety perhaps the first thing we should do is reach for greater social and political empathy, and take a collective deep breath.