One Vote for This Age of Anxiety by Margaret Mead

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our parents or their parents did.

Anxiety and uncertainty are also considered to be by-products of a changing mentality that accompanied the transition from pre-modern to modern society. Modern society emerged when the solidarity characteristic of clans and families are being taken for granted.

People began to distance themselves from the traditions. In postmodern society the starting point is the person himself.

Postmodern identity is particularly flexible and is no longer oriented towards the past or future, as can be seen in the motto of disaffected youth, “live fast, die young”.

A man of this modern society is much less focused on what a person is or what a person does and more focused on how a person appears. What is important is the image others have of me and how I can guide that image in the direction I want.

Such people consider them as something that needs to be marketed. They are constantly checking whether the aspects of their self-presentation conform with the image that they want others to have of them.

Compared with conventionally determined norms, here every particular agreement is precarious and incalculable. What holds today may be different tomorrow. For these reasons, postmodern socialization goes together with greater uncertainty and anxiety. The individual can no longer rely on a fixed structure or on axiomatic prescripts and is therefore no longer certain how he ought to behave.

Our very anxiety is born of our knowledge of what is now possible for each and for all.

People who are anxious enough keel their car insurance up, have the brakes checked, ‘I don’t take a second drink’, when they have to drive, are careful where they go and with whom they drive on holidays. People who are too anxious either refuse to go into cars at all -- and so complicate the ordinary course of life -- or drive so tensely and overcautiously that they help cause accidents.

People feel ashamed about their personal attributes even they have no control over things such as height, facial features, race, gender, sexuality. People get upset because the person they are very nice to doesn’t enjoy their company. People feel angry because a religious/political/cultural group they find repulsive shows up in their news feed, upsetting them with their mere existence.

Now, if the thing you are having anxiety about is something you can affect with action but is someone else’s agenda, it’s also spam. Here someone is trying to shame you over your job/partner/body, even though you yourself are happy with them. Someone is trying to shame you for the harmless hobbies you enjoy. Someone is trying to shame you because your life doesn’t look exactly like theirs.

There is a chorus of voices to tell you that you should be devoting more time and energy to your career by shaming you for being poor, but also that you should devote more time and energy to socializing by shaming you for being a friendless virgin. They shame you for your weight, but then make it clear that all of the really cool people eat and drink with abandon. They mock your nerdy clothes and then scold you for being too obsessed with physical appearances.

They don’t want you to panic, oh no-- panic would mean burning cars in the streets. They just want you to always be living with that low-level hum of anxiety at the edge of your senses, like a wasp buzzing around your ceiling 24 hours a day. Enemies who have been honing their techniques for a very long time with vigilance and repetition.

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