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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

What's going on with "anxiety" lately? This went from something you heard about here and there 20-30 years ago, to something that everyone and their brother is feeling all the time.

What changed?

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Shitloads of adults were on anti-anxiety meds (and anti-depressants, for that matter) 20 years ago. Plenty more self-medicated for those symptoms with alcohol or illegal drugs. One of the big shocks of my growing up was learning that, more or less, "everyone and their brother" in fact relied on mood- & perception-altering drugs, legal or otherwise, to get through the day.

And they all still do (except that the weed and some of the psychedelics may be legal now). It may just be zeitgeisty, now.

Then again, I'm not sure coverage of it is even greater now than it was in past decades. Future Shock was published in, what, the 70s? Or Affluenza? Bowling Alone's not new, though that treats of more than just anxiety. Direct associations between first The City and anxiety were so common they got really tropey in the first part of the 20th century, and later (starting in the 1940s and '50s) the suburban middle class and their (alienating, unfulfilling, and sometimes nearly or entirely useless, as in Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, the core observations of which were made by others all the way back at the start of the modern postwar economy) office jobs got similar treatment, which has continued ever since.

If there's a difference, I expect it's because people are using anxiety to cover more states of mind than it used to. It does seem to have become a blanket term for "mentally ill-at-ease, but maybe not full-on mentally ill" in some usage.

Or maybe it's just that Future Shock was right, in which case we'd expect that kind of thing to get worse over time, until something about the pace of change itself changes.

Postwar America was huge into self-medication. You watch a film like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and characters are casually popping pills and swigging scotch every other scene. Before that, you had patent medicine shows and snake oil remedies and puritanical types inventing Graham crackers and corn flakes to promote temperance. The U.S. has always had a self-medicating, consumerist approach to health, for whatever reason.

What's changed is basically an entire pan of medicine, the one dedicated to sleep emerged. Also, we now have a much deeper understanding of stress, or anxiety, its effect on sleep, on hormones, on the reproductive system, on rational decision making. We also have a better understanding of cortisol, the role it plays in increasing inflammation and all the problems associated with it. We also better understand how low level and punctual source of stress can also be beneficial for performances and focus, and how it is dose and duration dependant. Basically, we don't simply discard emotions as unrelated to the body anymore. We have a better and more integrated view of body and the mind and all that entails.

The fact that you didn't hear about it much 20-30 years ago doesn't mean it wasn't just as common. Admitting to mental health problems is much more socially acceptable today than it was 30 years ago.

Economic uncertainty in a fundamentally unfair economic system on a planet that is literally degrading in front of our eyes, if I was to hazard a guess

The pandemic has made most people a bit more aware, at least. The distractions people enjoyed were suddenly taken away, for at least over a year. That has heightened awareness, along with the need for self care.

Even the idea of anxiety was extremely stigmatized, especially in the workplace, and still is but is now less so. What you're seeing is a growth of people talking about it as the stigma lessens.

Honestly I think we just started paying more attention to the subject. Anxiety is a completely natural survival mechanism: “was that a tiger in those bushes!?”. It keeps us alive.

5,000 years ago it kept us alive.

Now it just adds unnecessary stress and impedes our functioning 99.8% of the time. We no longer live in a situation where a tiger lurking in the bushes is likely, but our brains haven't evolved to compensate for that.

I can't remember where I heard this but it makes sense -- People who don't have enough anxiety are at the morgue.

It's the internet.

The Internet is amazing!*

*As long as there is a ban on discussing people , once you start discussing (and most importantly) advertising people on the internet , it's over.

Endless comparison ensues and anxiety skyrockets for everybody.

Humans were never made to be aware of being 1 unit in an 8B sample. The person sitting for an interview has high anxiety because they know they can be replaced easily

Things could be better (less concern about items lower on Maslow's hierarchy allows one to worry about self-actualization and other items at the top), and it could also be worse (concern about the basic lower needs leads to anxiety). For engineers who are missing out on the boom times caused by the bubble, it might be a mix of both.

You're comparing, what, the booming 90s to now?

That said, I don't think anyone ever thought interviews were anxiety free.

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