The overwhelmed American

There are plenty of reasons to feel stressed or overwhelmed in America today. We're witnessing the erosion of our democracy and constant drama in the political world. We don't know how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, might reshape our lives. We don't make as much money as we think we should.

In the long term, we know the climate could become significantly worse. All of that sits on top of the daily stressors, such as our relationships, goals, health and more. These aren't just American problems, of course, but that's the country I live in and what I know best, so that's where I'll maintain my focus.

A key feature of this draining environment we find ourselves in is our awareness of so many sweeping problems—and the world's awareness of us. I believe one of the reasons Americans feel overwhelmed and frequently tense is that our digital lives seem to make that tension difficult to escape.

I recently put out a YouTube video where I explained why I thought so many young people feel hopeless, and it delves into these ideas. It's not just that a lot of bad things are happening; it's that we feel like we can never get away from those problems. It's not just that we face difficulties in our own lives; it's that we feel that the world constantly has its eye on us, and we're always comparing our lives to those of others.

I wrote an article about some of these issues for Wired a few years ago. I'm not arguing—as some have—that our phones are the primary reason why so many people have anxiety and depression these days. But I do think that our phones are contributing to our unease and, for some, causing chronic stress.

Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher who focused on media theory in the middle of the 20th century, coined the phrase "the medium is the message." What he meant is that the way we receive information, such as through our phones or computers, dictates how we absorb and understand that information.

Joshua Meyrowitz, another media theorist, published the book "No Sense of Place" in 1985. He argued that technologies like the television and the telephone made it so humans were no longer solely tied to the events around them. They could now feel connected to things that were happening anywhere in the world. Both of these theorists believed that these technologies also contributed to the erosion of our private lives.

I think that what these scholars were worried about decades ago is what we're witnessing in the digital age. It seems to me, as someone who's been writing about psychology and neuroscience for many years, that Americans feel overwhelmed, overexposed and generally stressed out by their digital lives.

There are also, of course, good things about our digital lives. The people we might connect with online can offer comfort at times. However, I think being so aware of the horrors of the world, having the world be so aware of us and constant comparison are not generally a recipe for contentment.

Bad things are happening all the time, and we should not turn away and completely ignore those things. But we should probably consider whether we're all properly managing how much we're exposed to and the extent to which we are feeling exposed. There's a good chance most of us are not.