RESTLESS GENERATION 02: Anxiety and the Search for Purpose

The Restless Generation is having to acknowledge some big questions around the nature of our purpose on this planet and around what meaning we have as individuals. These are not at all new or original questions – we have been struggling with them ever since homo sapiens banded together and started creating a language of abstracts that could ask questions about more than the immediate, concrete problems of survival. The difference between early Man and our current reality, however, may be to do with how technology is speeding up the process of our ability to solve problems, create new problems and solve them. Where previously humans have evolved over a relatively large number of generations and have assimilated new ideas and technologies slowly and steadily, the scientific and technological revolution of the last 200 or so years have sped up the process exponentially, and we are now constantly playing catch up in understanding how we need to adapt and evolve to our rapidly changing social environment. For many it leaves a deep-seated, residual and often unconscious sense of falling behind the curve, feeling out of synch with what’s going on around you, being out of the loop, being redundant. Not a comfortable basis for existence.

So back to our two questions. Firstly, what is our purpose? Until recently our most fundamental purpose as living organisms was to procreate and continue our species.  We have done a great job of evolving and adapting to our changing natural environments over the last 200,000 or so years and propelling ourselves to the top of the food chain by destroying all other large organisms that also rely on the natural resources we use to survive. But, as is now abundantly clear, we have been massively over-successful in this department. Medical innovations, increased longevity and a better and better understanding of the environment in which we live have led to global over-population which has, in the last few generations, become a matter of increasing concern. We are the victims of our own success and there is now a general acceptance among pretty much all societies with a reasonably ecumenical viewpoint that over-population is already and will continue to be one of the major challenges that our species is facing in our near future.*

In effect, what this means is that we have in a very short period of time become too successful at carrying out our purpose as a species. And that leads us to an extremely unsettling reality; in order to continue to survive as a species, either we have to find a way to expand our living space beyond the closed system of our planet or we have to reprogramme the biological imperative to procreate that has driven us for hundreds of thousands of years.

With those uncomfortable decisions in mind let’s move on to the second question; what meaning do we have as individuals? Or, in other words, why am I here? This fundamental question has been keeping philosophers, psychologists and other big thinkers engaged for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and no one answer exists for all of us. Quite the contrary; it’s a question that we all have to deal with on an individual level, and each of us approaches it in a completely individual manner. However, given that we are living in the Restless Generation, where we as individuals arguably have more time and freedom to spend on the question than ever before, how are we choosing to use this to address this question?

The answer, sadly, is that often we are not. Instead we often choose to use our energies in the pursuit of distraction - and we have developed methods that are increasingly sophisticated and increasingly numerous. Our ability to travel easily gives us the opportunity to sample different cultures as dilettantes, dipping in and out as our fancy takes us. Our consumerist culture and our access to the internet allows us access to an ever-expanding variety of physical ‘stuff’ as well as to myriad events, experiences and information.  We are pushing ourselves to greater and greater excesses; exercise; food; sexual exploration; recreational drugs, all which release different feel-good chemicals into our bodies that make us feel good – and distract us. But once the high (natural or otherwise) has dissipated, that fundamental question of our individual purpose keeps on popping up again.

So here we are, not only faced with the perennial question of what meaning we have as individuals, but also recognising that we no longer have the larger purpose of species survival through procreation. We have been wrestling with the former for several millennia, but the latter is a recent occurrence, and one which inevitably (as with all fundamental change) cause a deep-seated level of anxiety as we collectively search for a new purpose.

*A Note on Population Control

If you’re interested, the first international conference about population was in Switzerland in 1927, with follow-up conferences hosted by the UN in 1954 and 1974. Despite the recognition that population growth is becoming an increasing concern for our entire species however, there have been few active attempts to alter the upward trend (probably the greatest direct attempt at population control was in China following the Cultural Revolution – with interesting and sometimes unexpected social and cultural results). Recent UN studies suggest that although the last 200 years saw the greatest acceleration in population growth, since the early 1960s the rate has been slowing and for the first time we have seen negative population growth across a wide swathe of mostly first-world countries. This is good news. The bad news is that this doesn’t mean the world’s population is falling – indeed by 2088 it is estimated that the number of humans on this planet will reach 11 billion.