Is the Apocalypse making you too anxious to work?: Howard Chua-Eoan
A recent survey reveals that 46% of Gen Z and 38% of Millennials are often too distraught by the news to function at work. This anxiety, heightened by global crises, affects all generations. From nuclear threats to environmental disasters, the fear of an impending apocalypse looms large. While humour and history provide some comfort, today's world is a constant reminder that uncertainty and catastrophe are never far from our minds.
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By Howard Chua-Eoan
Is the end of the world getting in the way of your job? A poll of the labor force in seven countries late last year had a remarkable result: 46% of Gen Z and 38% of Millennials agreed with the statement "I am regularly so distraught over what is happening in the news that I am unable to function at work." Those anxiety levels must be higher now. Edelman, the communications consultancy, conducted the survey in September 2023, well into the war in Ukraine but just before the Middle East erupted in massacre, bombings, death and destruction, raising fears of military escalation, including, as in Europe, the specter of nuclear war.
The percentage of distraught older workers was lower but, as a late boomer, I can attest we aren't immune. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I immediately ordered potassium iodide pills, even though at my age, the tablets — which can shield the thyroid gland from radioactive fallout — are probably less protective for a sexagenarian than they are for the young. I usually keep the bottle close to me, in a drawer in the office or in my valise. Happy to share.
We have lots of coping mechanisms, including macabre humor. Between the catastrophic hurricanes Helene and Milton in the southern US, my friend Rene Alegria posted a note saying he'd started binge-watching "apocalypse porn" — specifically the multi-episode How the World Ends series that's been streaming since 2017. He'd just been through Helene, which swept through Georgia where he lives, to wreck a big chunk of neighboring North Carolina. "It definitely tipped my imagination over the edge," he told me. Watching the series was "like fast-forwarding one's life to the end, just to save time and the prolonged misery." Then he added "LOL."
Anxiety is not to be laughed at, of course. Things do go wrong — and just the prospects can be palpably terrifying. We are wired to worry. Millennials are practically named for historical end-is-nighers, the Millennarians. And they have the Y2K panic of 1999 — when the zeros of the coming year 2000 would throw the world's computers back to 1900 and create cybernetic chaos — as an emblem of their cohort's coming of age.
We want to be able to see apocalypse coming — if only for the survival tips. Movies and books, magazines and television have done just that. In fact, there have been writers and theologians who've been calculating when the world will end (and the best way to get through it) since the Book of Revelation (aka The Apocalypse of St. John) became part of canonical Christian scripture.
I won't touch on The Omen and 666 (or the astrological prophecies of Nostradamus and zombie apocalypses for that matter). There are enough terrifying examples of the banal human sort without calling in divine or devilish interventions. In the early years of the Cold War, we had On the Beach, starring Hollywood legends Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire. It depicted a post-nuclear war world where all human life appears to have been annihilated, except momentarily in Australia. In 1964, director Stanley Kubrick gave us Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It remains a paramount expression of nuclear end-of-days paranoia as a high-ranking military officer sets off a fail-safe proof Armageddon, with a triply-lunatic performance by the late, great Peter Sellers. A stage adaptation, starring the British actor Steve Coogan, debuted in London's West End this week.
In 1983 — at the height of Ronald Reagan's confrontation with what he called the "evil empire" — the US television network ABC aired The Day After, which follows characters who live near Midwest missile silos after the US and the USSR engage in the unthinkable. More than 100 million people tuned in. The next year, the UK came up with its equivalent: Threads, which is set near a devastated NATO base in Sheffield, England; it was broadcast for only the fourth time on British television last week.
Movies can be uncanny. During the Covid pandemic, viewers rediscovered a chronicle of the plague foretold in the 2011 movie Contagion. Even more prescient was The China Syndrome, which depicts a meltdown in a nuclear power plant. Twelve days after the film's release in March 1979, the real-life near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island power facility took place near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Seven years later, the world got a full-on catastrophe with Chernobyl. A five-part HBO dramatization of that crisis gripped a new generation of viewers in 2019, providing context for the battle over nuclear plants in Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion, including the entombed remains of the still glowing toxic facility in abandoned Chernobyl.
Fast-forwarding via Hollywood offers psychological benefits, as my friend in Georgia notes. But we can also derive comfort from history, by looking backwards at what we've survived. The activism of ACT UP helped contain and almost completely defeat an apocalypse for the gay community — and indeed all humankind — when the Reagan administration tried to laugh off the AIDS pandemic.
As the news director of Time magazine for a 13-year period that included 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and Japan, I've had to worry about a lot of world-shaking events as well as the reporters I sent out to cover them. So many, I've lost track. Last weekend, Facebook "Memories" reminded me of a note I put up on Oct. 6, 2008: "Just when I was getting my life together, the world ends." I forgot why I wrote that and Googled the date. It was the Monday that the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 30% as global finance went into meltdown.
That was a bad time — touch-and-go for the style of living we'd become accustomed to. But we're still here, perhaps even feeling a bit more confident. Just as we can rebuild better after earthquakes and other disasters, we've learned to count on central banks — particularly the US Federal Reserve — to becalm all serious financial outbreaks of volatility. Indeed, the Covid pandemic reinforced the role of central banks in financing government largess to prime national economies, spending our way out of disaster. It's contributed to a prevailing technocratic verve across many sectors: "We have the data so we can prepare for any contingency."
Is that true? We may have defined apocalypse downward so it no longer means mass extinction. But we still expect disasters to be sudden and massively destructive, metaphorically if not literally tsunamis and earthquakes; what if instead they were subversive, slow and treacherous? Sometimes trying to outmaneuver prophecies of doom can lead to more tragedy. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, nightmares over Malthusian predictions of massive overpopulation and a collapse of resources may have propelled colonization as well as the kind of industrial development that's brought us to the edge of climate cataclysm.
The best laid schemes of mice and men can go ugly. The Fed's bond-buying programs, for example, likely contributed to the dramatic spike in inflation that only now seems to be under control. It's made central bankers cautious, questioning how effective their best weapons are. "They can't just cut rates because stocks go down. They can't just cut rates because a bank is wobbling," Jared Gross of JP Morgan Asset Management told Bloomberg's What Goes Up podcast last year.
I know this isn't going to calm those too distraught by news to focus on work. Office jobs are far from paradise, but being at work affords you a community to talk out your anxiety with people who may be just as anxious. A friend told me one of his young employees chose not to join colleagues at the pub after work, saying "I'm not into that work-hard-play-hard trauma bonding." News flash: We're trauma bonding together, like it or not. As one of my favorite old t-shirts proclaimed: "Jesus is coming. Look busy."
Oh, by the way, I just checked my potassium iodide. It expires this month. I'm going to reorder while there's still time.
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