What Should We Be Worried About?

THE NEW AGE OF ANXIETY

GARY KLEIN

Senior scientist, MacroCognition LLC; author, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

The Edge Question this year asks us to identify new worries, but I was not aware that we were running short of things to worry about. Just the reverse—we already have too many threats to keep us up at night. And that’s what worries me. It seems we have entered a new Age of Anxiety. If the problem were internal, it could be treated with anti-anxiety drugs. Unfortunately, the problem is external, in the form of the ever expanding list of fears that science generates and the media are happy to amplify. Bad news sells. We listen more carefully to news reports about a possible blizzard than to a forecast of mild and sunny weather. And so the science/media complex is happy to feed our fears with all kinds of new threats.

I worry that the number of things we need to worry about keeps growing. The science/media complex is inventive at discovering all kinds of threats to our food and our water supplies—delighted to warn about the deterioration of the environment, declining fertility rates, new carcinogens, physical and mental health issues, and so on. The more novel the threat the better, because new dangers avoid our tendency to habituate to scare stories after they’ve been broadcast for a while. Very few old worries get retired. A few diseases, such as smallpox, may be conquered. But even there the science/media complex keeps us worried that terrorists might get hold of smallpox samples or re-create the disease in a lab and wreak havoc on a world that no longer gets smallpox immunization so our vulnerability to smallpox may be increasing, not shrinking.

I worry that the shrillness of worries keeps escalating. In a sea of worries, a new one stands out only if its consequences are apocalyptic. If it doesn’t threaten our civilization, it won’t get much airtime. The pressure is on scientists and media specialists to show that the new issue is not just dangerous but highly dangerous. It cannot merely be contagious; there has to be a means for it to mutate, or perhaps attach itself to a common vector, posing the threat of a deadly new plague. And shrillness isn’t only about the consequences, it’s also about the need to act immediately. To command our attention, the science/media complex has to show that this new problem should jump to the top of our priority list of worries. The threat has to be close to a tipping point beyond which it will become uncontrollable.

And I worry about the proposed remedies for each new danger. To be worth its salt, a new threat has to command rapid and extreme reactions. These reactions have to start immediately, eliminating our chance to evaluate them for unintended consequences. The more over-the-top our fears, the more disproportionate the reactions and the greater the chances of making things worse, not better.

I hesitate to raise the issue, because I’m just adding to the problem, but I do think it’s something worth worrying about, and I don’t see any easy way to counter this new Age of Anxiety. The science/media complex keeps ramping up, continually finding novel dangers, more threats to keep us up at night—and then we have to worry about the consequences of sleep deprivation. It never stops.