COMMENTARY: Life and Love in an Age of Heightened Anxiety

One big reason why we are feeling so rattled is because we are living in a time when the tectonic plates are shifting underneath American society.

Economic anxiety is aggravated by years of lagging wages, increasing wealth disparity, a bipolar stock market, an economy that appears to sprint from disastrous bubble to bubble.

Key demographic shifts are profoundly reshaping America. An aging white population sees a growing, diverse, multicultural younger generation. Rural America is shrinking. If a small town is growing, it’s likely due to immigrants. The country will be majority minority in about 25 years.

At the same time, we’re experiencing an increased lack of cultural cohesion driven by the disruptive digital revolution, a weakened and weakening mainstream media, and growing secularism.

What’s more, fear is stoked for crass political gain and corporate profit. The threat of terrorism is hyped. Gun violence is tolerated. Racism is dismissed or mocked. Immigrants and transgender people are made to feel like “others,” criminal outsiders.

All of this is happening in a society that has long-experienced the see-saw tension that comes from trying to balance the individual and the community — the iconic figures of the cowboy and the idyllic hometown have long competed for America’s central defining myth.

Underneath all of this is a widely held cynicism — the conviction that all politicians are corrupt, the media can’t be trusted, Big Money controls everything, nothing really changes, marginal progress always gets rolled back. Where does this lead but to greater feelings of isolation?

What makes this all the more complex is that the drivers of cynicism are not without their truth — and several of the drivers of other changes (demographic shifts, digital revolution, growing secularism) offer multiple important benefits as well as challenges. In other words, the bad news has some “good” in it and the good news has some “bad” in it — and that adds to the depressing confusion of our times.

So, how should an individual respond to all of this? You tell me. Personally, I’m doubling down on hope. Joy. Gratitude. Purpose. Meaning. Love.

I don’t get it right all of the time — anger overwhelms me too often. But I believe we are all in this together. We are buoyed by common cause.