I think the the way this article is written, is both the symptom, and a factor helping the proliferation, of the issue it discusses. It is more or less a trivi

I think the the way this article is written, is both the symptom, and a factor helping the proliferation, of the issue it discusses. It is more or less a trivia style collection of references and anecdotes, from different sources related to the topic. It feels a bit like a tweeter feed itself, if you search #anxiety - a really wide collection of tangentially related observations (haven't actually tried that, no twitter account, but you get the point). No attempt of synthesis, no deeper analysis of the connections between topics, no statistics. The way I understand it, when there is no core but a shattered collection of associations, that by itself can cause anxiety. Because the reader now has him/herself to build connections, or leave that as uncertainty, and uncertainty will cause anxiety. And to expect the reader will do that is unrealistic - even the skilled reader will need time for that. Also, consider how the article came to existence: The author seems to be a professional writer, 2-3 articles a month, half of them about hand watches. You have just read a socio-cultural analysis by the author of hand watch surveys. On nytimes.com. Granted, life of writers is tough and jumping to conclusions here would be premature. But even if the author is capable of writing a thoughtful piece, writing that kind of article on a serious subject should be a violation of some kind of writer's version of Hippocratic Oath. Couldn't nytimes.com find a reasonable expert to write that? It could, but it wouldn't for some reason. Finally, the first paragraph mentions Sarah Fader, "the Brooklyn social media consultant", "who has generalized anxiety disorder" with her tweet - apparently a gesture by one of the common people. One of the last paragraphs mentions her again, but now "the Brooklyn social media consultant who also runs a mental-health advocacy organization called Stigma Fighters". So perhaps more a calculated step rather than a gesture, but why spoil the hero story right in the first paragraph?