“For the others, like me, there is only the flash of negative knowledge.. our passions pray but to primitive totems as absurd as they are savage…”
-WH Auden.
When W. H. Auden began work on his famous poem “Age of Anxiety” in 1944, Europeans had been living with conflict and uncertainty for thirty years. Two global wars had profoundly shaken their worldviews. People wondered if things would ever get better and questioned whether their leaders and governments had their best interests at heart. Sound familiar?
Even though we haven’t had a world war (yet), unless you’ve been living under a rock, you hear a lot about the rise of anxiety in the 21st Century. Our lizard brains have been weaponized against us and turned into the engines of a certain kind of economy, where bad news drives revenue by amplifying engagement. It’s made even worse by the use of broad, vague predictions that can never be disproved, creating a perpetual anxiety cycle.
Once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it: some internet pundit comes out with a shocking, scary prediction, and followers rush to either support or disprove it. The influencer gains additional reach but now they’re beholden to an audience that craves more and more engaging—and often disturbing—content. It’s a feedback loop that leads to increasing anxiety when our lizard brains make it hard to look away from bad news. After all, if our ancestors missed the beautiful sunsets, that’s a bummer, but if they missed the poisonous snakes in the grass, they probably didn’t live long enough to be our ancestors.
The subscription economy has made this cycle even more pronounced. Free content draws you in and makes you hope for exclusive insight to navigate the predicted crises. These crises can never dissipate or be solved if the monetization model is going to continue, so some creators seek to maximize the reader’s anxiety. They’re also competing with each other, which gives even more incentives to focus on frightening and enraging stories.
Some of the concerns out there are real, of course, and we don’t want to stick our heads in the sand entirely. (Okay, maybe we want to, but we know we shouldn’t.) We need to learn to recognize when we’re caught up in dopamine-driven engagement loops and question how or why the algorithms feed us certain things.
The bottom line: who benefits from your feelings of fear, anger, and/or sadness? Chances are somebody does, and it’s not usually you.