The most common cause of their anxiety — the future.
Completely reasonable. I’m a Millenial and I also have a lot of anxiety about the future. Previous generations screwed us all really hard.
GenXer here. What drives me nuts is that climate change was taught to me as scientific fact in year 9, back in the early 80s.
The science was clear but collectively every government said “well, I’ll be dead by then so why should we care now”.
Governments got off their collective assess and did something about the ozone layer and acid rain to the point that the problem has largely been corrected. Unfortunately, although climate change and now micro plastics get a lot of media attention, governments have since stopped trying to actually do something about it.
I can tell you (professionally) that the people who saw less anxiety during the pandemic were people with severe anxiety. Statistically.
I can tell you personally it was because we could say, “Something catastrophic finally happened and I’ve been preparing for this my whole life.”
I have serious anxiety about getting up, leaving the house, and other ‘now’ things.
Juuust gonna drop this here again
@ClimateAnxietySupport https://kbin.social/m/ClimateAnxietySupport
The most common cause of their anxiety — the future.
Anxiety about the future is not an anxiety disorder. If almost 2 out of 3 Gen z has anxious intrusive thoughts so bad that they cannot go to school, work, have any kind of healthy interpersonal relationships, etc then the article would have a point, but I don’t think that’s the case. I have more faith in the next generation than that.
I know things are bad and folks are rightly apprehensive about the future, but that is not an anxiety disorder. Anxious thoughts doesn’t mean you have a disorder, it means you are alive and aware of your surroundings.
Some of this next generation will turn their distress about the future into eustress that motivates them to fix it (as long as they don’t give in to defeatest takes like in this article).
Rejoice in the fact that you’re living a higher quality of life than the vast majority of people ever to walk the earth.
