Age of Worry

grown up too fast

I remember Gary Coleman’s character, Arnold, in Different Strokes once said “I don’t want to grow up...”.  A line that has stuck with me over decades, albeit for no particular reason.  Recently I have been affectionately nicknamed Peter Pan and it has got me thinking... “Is my generation in the Age of Worry John Mayer beautifully sung about?”

Am I, like Peter Pan, refusing to grow up, metaphorically, of course?  I mean, I am constantly trying to figure out the world as it changes every day; lovers turn to bitter enemies, friends to foes, partners face-off in ugly lawsuits.  It is indeed a dangerous and scary world out there.  I remember once overhearing a train conversation when a young man said “I don’t want to get married cuz I don’t want to get divorced...” and that was shocking.  He was worrying about an ending before even starting the journey.  I recently read an article about some traits of unhappy people and the common thread with most of the traits was the burden of worrying.  Unhappy people worry a lot and in most cases unnecessarily.

This generation, in my opinion, is constantly paranoid.  The degrees of paranoia vary but we are worried about everything.  Our worries send us to bed and ironically our worries wake us up and chase us out of our houses.  Our worries make us apply for loans we can ill afford to repay, mortgages we avoid to look at and so on.  Our worries send children to school for and ‘education’ we fear may corrupt their views on the world but do so nonetheless for fear of them being left behind in this factory conveyor belt called life.  Our worries keep us in relationships long after their expiry dates afraid of being ‘alone’ and being happy with just that.  Worrying we will be broke and downtrodden, we apply for jobs we wished never existed  but we turn up anyway worried to be reprimanded and sacked.

On a wider community level we worry about the ozone layer, climate change, wars, diseases, hunger, poverty, slavery, sexism, racism, child trafficking, deforestation, animal rights, human and now I’m literally afraid if I continue listing I would have added a new worry on your ‘list of worries’ so I’ll stop with the listing; but you can imagine that our waking moments must be spent in mental rooms choking on the fumes of worry and paranoia.

In all fairness to this generation we have inherited some of the worries from our parents.  They worried about what kind of members of society they’d be raising and channeled us towards paths they deemed fit and development and we in turn will certainly pick the baton and continue the vicious cycle of worry.  We will worry for our own offspring; we would worry about cloud storage accounts being hacked, about religious extremists, revenge porn, the effects of social media on physical human interaction and our children’s safeties online, the incurable diseases of HIV/AIDS, cancer and Ebola.

In spite of this scary storm of despair, let’s look less at the things we can’t help and focus on the things we can help in the here and now; the sun, the birds and trees; the faces and smiles of children and our loved ones.  We can chose to spend more time in the present.

Worry less...

Adieu!