Shitloads of adults were on anti-anxiety meds (and anti-depressants, for that matter) 20 years ago. Plenty more self-medicated for those symptoms with alcohol o

Shitloads of adults were on anti-anxiety meds (and anti-depressants, for that matter) 20 years ago. Plenty more self-medicated for those symptoms with alcohol or illegal drugs. One of the big shocks of my growing up was learning that, more or less, "everyone and their brother" in fact relied on mood- & perception-altering drugs, legal or otherwise, to get through the day. And they all still do (except that the weed and some of the psychedelics may be legal now). It may just be zeitgeisty, now. Then again, I'm not sure coverage of it is even greater now than it was in past decades. Future Shock was published in, what, the 70s? Or Affluenza? Bowling Alone's not new, though that treats of more than just anxiety. Direct associations between first The City and anxiety were so common they got really tropey in the first part of the 20th century, and later (starting in the 1940s and '50s) the suburban middle class and their (alienating, unfulfilling, and sometimes nearly or entirely useless, as in Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, the core observations of which were made by others all the way back at the start of the modern postwar economy) office jobs got similar treatment, which has continued ever since. If there's a difference, I expect it's because people are using anxiety to cover more states of mind than it used to. It does seem to have become a blanket term for "mentally ill-at-ease, but maybe not full-on mentally ill" in some usage. Or maybe it's just that Future Shock was right, in which case we'd expect that kind of thing to get worse over time, until something about the pace of change itself changes.