By almost any objective measure, we live in a Golden Age.  The poorest ten percent of Westerners today enjoy a standard of living today that our pre-WWII ancestors would have thought miraculous.   In recent decades worldwide rates of extreme poverty have declined more quickly than at any other time in human history (from more than 60% of the world population pre-1970 to less than 10% today).   Life expectancies are at all-time highs and accelerating at unprecedented rates.  Crime, including violent crime, is down about 80% and currently rests at multi-decade lows in much of the developed world.  

And yet subjectively the world is a basket case.  People seem less happy now than at any time I can remember.  Rates of anxiety and depression are at multi-decade highs.  People are so psychologically fragile that simply electing the wrong President causes mass trauma and calls for “safe spaces”.    

Our ancestors worked ten hour days in dark coal mines, lived through the Great Depression, fought and won two World Wars in which million and millions of innocents were slaughtered, witnessed the quick and successive assassinations of both popular and controversial politicians (Martin Luther King, Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, etc.), had little or no air conditioning or refrigeration, died at comparatively young ages, etc.   And yet they were, at least in comparison to the current generation, comparatively happy and stable.

How do we explain this paradox?

I think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs explains things nicely.   Maslow recognized that humans are psychologically preoccupied, often times unconsciously, with need fulfillment.  He also noticed that this need fulfillment follows a progression, or hierarchy, from physical needs (food, shelter and clothing) to safety/security needs (personal security, financial security, etc.) to social needs (friendship, intimacy and family), to esteem needs (recognition, status, respect) and finally to self actualization needs (identifying and fulfilling one’s complete potential).  Until the first and most basic needs have been met (e.g., food and shelter) the subsequent needs go largely unrecognized and therefore unmanaged.

Said another way, our egos don’t really even know that our “higher” needs—like belonging, esteem and self actualization—exist until the more basic needs are first satisfied.  

Is it any wonder then that, with humanity’s most basic needs largely satisfied for the first time in human history, we are now being confronted everywhere with higher needs like belonging, esteem and self-actualization?  And, is it any wonder then that, having essentially zero experience contending with these previously unrecognized needs on a societal wide scale, humanity is struggling to find its place in the “new world”, and that this struggle is foreign and uncomfortable many individuals (resulting in anxiety and depression)?  

In short, I think that our present anxiety and melancholy is entirely to be expected.   It is truly a “first world problem”—a privilege largely denied to our ancestors.   May we learn to sit with it and to develop the mental and physical tools (breathing, meditation, yoga, etc.) to outgrow it.   Hopefully doing so won’t take humanity nearly as long as it took it to get to this privileged point.  

How can we help humanity settle into its new place, to find itself?  First and foremost we can encourage those suffering from anxiety, depression, agitation, etc. to just settle.  To avoid lashing out.  To avoid blaming others (politicians, parents, etc.) for their angst.  And instead to just settle.  To “let it be”.  To deal with their own mortality and fragility.  To admit their needs.   To seek and offer connection.