OPINIONS: MODERN LIFE
End the age of anxiety The modern world is driving us to despair and nihilism. We must do something about it Sam Warren-Miell (Year 13)
I t is perhaps uncontroversial to suggest that the dominant mood of our age is one of anxiety. But why is this? First, the omnipresence of surveillance: who could say that they were genuinely surprised by recent revelations about the intrusive snooping of GCHQ? Secondly, job security is far lower now than in the post-war era, with the proliferation of zero-hours contracts meaning that a significant proportion of the workforce operates at the behest of employers, deprived of the rights won by previous generations of organised labour. Thirdly, most teenagers feel the pressure of constant communication. The pervasiveness of social media
presents a psychologically uneasy choice: being constantly available, or being sealed-off from the community. Fourthly, competition rules – whether for status or employment. Call-centre workers feel the anxiety of meeting sales quotas; corporate lawyers work 16-hour days to maintain their place at the top; the intensely exam-based structure of schooling means that, from a young age, children are brought up to regard themselves as in competition with their peers, a competition often extrapolated to the job market. Behind all this, individualism is affirmed as the only mode of being – and attempts to communalise in resistance to this ideology are
obstructed by what Althusser called ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’. (Grime gigs, for example, are often shut down in advance and under specious pretexts by the Metropolitan Police.) The effect of this on mental health is clear: about 10 per cent of UK adults take anti-depressants. But setting even statistics aside, most of us would surely agree that we live in an anxious world. In a perverse response, governments valorise security, national or economic. Such attempts to reframe the causes of anxiety as their solution always fail: tightened national security leads to fear and to the marginalisation of the ‘enemy within’; moves towards ‘economic security’ do nothing, in material terms, but further deprive the
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