There was an odd, very brief window in human history where you could be reasonably sure, on the daily, that your loved ones were safe, but you had no means to rapidly communicate with them/keep tabs on them/etc.

I don’t have another hand-wringing think piece on how anxious we are in our current, very coddled and safe age, or perception of acceptable risk or or or. But I *am* an anxious person, so I have spent a great deal of time wrestling with the specter of anxiety, how to handle it, how to defang it. I never became less anxious in the sense that I felt safer–I had to make peace with the idea that every day could be your last, or the last for your loved ones, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I had to cultivate a laid-back, it-is-what-it-is, we’re-all-dying attitude to function. It don’t matter. None ‘a this matters. I’m better at it some days than others.

I was a kid during the time period above indicated, where life was relatively safe but you didn’t have means to keep immediate tabs on everybody. I did a lot of scrambling up and down canyon walls without a cell phone or a tracking advice–that halcyon age people my age and older reminisce about when kids had a radical amount of freedom and it was socially acceptable to let your kids run feral most of the time. It kicked ass. Parents felt safe enough to let you run around without having an immediate means to track you, and this was legally and socially acceptable. Thinkpieces do accurately assume that freedom I was given helped me grow a spine and self-confidence that is lacking in the iPad generation. And God knows I needed some help doing that.

Few currently alive born into the “first world” middle class or wealthier remember the age before antibiotics, vaccines, abundant food, basic sanitation infrastructure. And I maintain this loss of the “fear of God” (the sense that life can be suddenly, irrevocably upended by a force beyond your comprehension or control) is leading to the weird panicky distaste for vaccines and the lack of urgency regarding funding the discovery of new antimicrobials, but that’s a bit neither here-or-there. I wonder what impact that unique, brief set of coinciding circumstances (safety and the autonomy of not being tracked) had on the zeitgeist. Bad things happened as they do and will but the amount of mental space taken up worrying must have been a lot lower.

There was more facilitating that general sense of invincibility and well-being than autonomy. The American postwar period was an optimistic time, because for many Americans, it was materially good. The nineties took that to new heights with the “end of history” nonsense, the belief that we had reached the apotheosis of society here in the US and it was just cruising from here while the rest of the world took time to catch up. And while I was not exactly reading Fukuyama as a kid I absorbed that well-being from the adults in my life.

There’s that saying that to worry is to suffer twice; this is what I am talking about–was our overall aggregate level of needless worry and suffering lower? There is the theory that humans established a ‘baseline’ level of wariness during our days of peril on the Savannah and while it well-served us during that evolutionary period, it has not reset in what is, really, a split second of intense relative safety at the end of an epoch of human existence. But I wonder–it seems a lot of people walk without that burden, kids especially.

Do they really not carry it? Or are they just all good at hiding it?

Why I can’t tell you much about that halcyon age (even though I was there).

It was good for me. I do know that.

Me-born-thirty-years-later would have had my anxieties and paranoia indulged by society instead of dismissed, and I benefited greatly from the “just get out there and deal with it” attitude.

I did just say that I grew up during that time period, but I could not tell you what it “was like” because I was a weird fucking kid burdened by too much technical knowledge and zero life perspective. I was terrified all the time. I saw something on the news that featured a drive-by shooting; I was convinced every car that passed me was going to shoot me. (Yes, in podunk nowhere.) I heard that rumor about the HIV-tainted needles left in movie seats; I was afraid to go to the movies. (I did go, but I was scared until I was safely settled in the seat, after gingerly inspecting it by ambient movie-light.) Same rumor with the needles being put into the egress hatch in coin-operated dispensers; I always held my hand well away from the hatch to catch the gumball or whatever it was and lifted the hatch cover very, very delicately with the tippy-tip of my forefinger only on the rim of the hatch I could easily see. I heard the story about gangsters hiding under cars to slash your Achilles tendon to rob you and I never approached a car under which I could not clearly see. (Or, in a more cowardly way, somebody else approaching first and not getting tendon-slashed was a good indicator to me it was safe.) I assumed every day my parents were going to die in a car wreck on the way home, or on the way to work, and I was just waiting to hear about it. (Some really bad days when I just shut down when they were running late without warning, but I hid that shutdown because it wasn’t stoic or indicative of much grit, and I wanted to be a stoic, gritty person.) My point being: I can’t tell you what that time of well-feeling felt like for most people, because I was pathological. But I can tell you what it felt like to be not-normal in that time period, and the zeitgeist ultimately did rub off on me in ways of which I was not aware then or now. I know this.

I find most horror movies kind of boring, but one conceit that did effect me deeply, that was ‘sticky’ to my thinking, was that of help being turned away by the bad guy aping you or some authority when your loved ones check in on you, speaking for you while you cannot speak, and your loved ones hung up the phone content you were safe while you were being serial-killed. It was an incapacitating idea as a kid and as an adult it still sticks in that poisonous anxious fearful Stygian sludge oozing around the brainpan, somewhere with my reptile brain. The sludge never drained with age or wisdom; I just learned to coexist with it, to nudge it aside, most of the time. And I’ve been doing well enough.

The existence of rapid communication compels its use.

Normal becomes expected. When somebody texts you daily and they miss a day, you begin to worry. In the age before texting, the issue never even came up. The existence of the technology to ‘check up’ on people constantly means we must use it. To do otherwise would be choosing ignorance. If we can, why wouldn’t we? The very existence of the technology is the death knell for a more autonomous age; it becomes a choice that is not a choice, and choices are weighted with risk assessment and other mental baggage. This quandary was not present during that high-safety/low-trackability age. It takes psychic energy to refuse to use something that is readily available. If it isn’t available, well, there is no conflict there.

I sometimes wonder how much mental space we’d clear if we had no choice but to let each other run through the day autonomously.

As for experiencing the reverse — high-speed communication in a high-danger environment, ask anybody with a loved one in Gaza.