Nothing you didn’t already know:
Seventy years ago, there was “the greatest generation.” Later, Generation X became known as the slacker generation. Today, millennials are turning out to be the anxious generation.
Numerous recent studies have shown that millennials suffer from anxiety at a much higher rate than generations that preceded them. What’s wrong with kids these days?
A lot, actually. They’re the first generation raised with Internet. The first generation to experience “helicopter” parenting. They’re at once constantly exposed on social media but also permanently sheltered by overbearing parents. They’re not the first generation to experience a rough economy, but they certainly act as if they were.
Much has been written about how millennials are tender and delicate. They’re sometimes absurd, like when they don’t eat cereal because there is, apparently, too much clean-up involved — what with the bowl and the spoon. They draw headlines like “Do Millennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?”
But the spike in anxiety is a real issue
There are probably two things at play. One is the absence of harshness producing amygdala atrophy. Anxiety generally isn’t measured as you are fighting off the barbarian hordes. It is measured in between Horde assaults, as you lounge by the side of the fire. If there are no Horde assaults, you spend that time worrying about what the neighbor thinks of you, or if that girl at the office is still angry you addressed her by her first name, instead of Xie. It is counter intuitive, but the best way to find relaxation is to experience a big stress, solve the underlying cause, and then enjoy the stress-free moments which follow.
The other cause is epigenetic. Over the past few decades of reduced threat and resource availability, the genetic blueprints of our people have been massaged by the environment. The DNA structures for genes of various neurotransmitter receptors, enzymes, and other gene products have been tweaked to either produce more or less of them, based on what the environment has demanded of the genome over the last few decades. I suspect these changes have been most exacerbated along certain familial lines, with some families of the rabbits in our societies adapting to produce a model of human designed to neurotically exploit gluts. Other familial lines from the military/law enforcement/fire-rescue/warrior/rural populations were both exposed to shortage, self-sufficiency, harshness, and danger, and adapted to seek it out due to their being more designed for it. Today, from a behavioral and psychological standpoint, we could almost be two different species, linked only by morphology and delusions of similarity.
Although this article describes a trend, it is probably worth noting that they are likely testing university students and city-dwellers. I suspect if they went to Paris Island or a rural country area in Texas, and ran the same tests, they would find little to no change. This is more a measure of our increasingly split nation, with mindlessly neurotic rabbits on one side, and the same wolves who have always made America great exactly as they always have been.
There is one concern. Where a wolf can confront the harshness even mindedly, and adapt to it rationally, I suspect it likely this overall trend toward anxiety may signal an underlying emotional instability that could overshoot the K-selected mark when real stress finally arrives. That is, when an intolerable harshness hits, you may see these neurotics seek out ever more extreme solutions to try and quiet the agony in their brains.
Right now, we on the right want to blunt the influence of the GOPe, and reduce its ability to raid the treasury and redistribute the national wealth to their cronies as they destroy the sovereignty of the US. If Apocalypse drives all of these neurotics into a fervor, and they turn on the fat cats who destroyed their utopia, I could easily see mobs seeking out what they saw as the perpetrators of our nation’s destruction to make examples of them. I do not see any of us stepping up to save them.
Trump is not apocalypse – not even close. The anger he is tapping into, mixed with the agony of an economic collapse, with a little of this neurotic anxiety stirred in, is the stuff of history. If I were a GOPe, I would already know what country I’m flying to, and where I’ll be hiding out, just in case.
With uncontrolled neurotics so prevalent, Apocalypse will not be pretty – more so for some than others.