Anxieties in a world that's going backwards
Memes and parodies about the way young people react to everyday problems are commonplace. Particularly witty is the Valencian influencer Ignacio Gil Conesa, better known online as Nachter. This man, with over ten million followers on TikTok, has left his previous job and now dedicates himself to "content creation," which is the new term for generating videos and other audiovisual materials with the aim of entertaining and, above all, making likes and followers.
Youthful anxiety. When Nachter explains what today's youth is like, he often ends with one word: 'anxiety'. Millennials, and especially young people of Generation Z, struggle with frustration, they say, and that's why they have a lot to deal with in the dreaded anxiety, which, for good reason, is elevated for some to the category of a psychiatric condition.
Environmental anxiety. The precocious Nordic activist Greta Thunberg began alerting us to the dangers of climate change when she was still a child. Now that she is a woman, we have more recently seen her siding with the Palestinian people in the conflict that plagues the Middle East. Thunberg is the leader of a generation that suffers greatly from what has been called 'environmental anxiety,' defined by artificial intelligence as a "chronic emotional response of fear, sadness, or helplessness in the face of the threat of climate change and environmental degradation." However, anxiety should not be exclusive to young people.Muzungu problems"('White people's problems')," a Maasai friend of ours used to tell us. A predominantly wealthy, idle, and capricious society needs headaches to keep it entertained. Those who have real headaches laugh at our worries.
War Anxiety 6 War Anxiety. Bombing of an Iranian doll school that had the misfortune of being located next to a military installation. It's serious, what has happened in Iran. of the Revolutionary Guard and a handful of members of his family. Bombs and missiles are commonplace in more than half a dozen countries of that world. He says "no to war," and Mr. Pablo can act as he does because of the fear he inspires in us and, above all, because of the influence he has among a good part of the world we know. Today, defending life and peace is not in vogue. likes Be aggressive, intolerant, and angry. "Do-gooder" attitudes don't sell. Racism and xenophobia are rampant and even dare to take hold among those who claim to want to defend our Catalan identity. First, we encountered racist slurs in cafes; today, we find them amplified everywhere. feeds and social media walls. On the other side, the left-right axis is winning by a landslide in Catalonia-Spain, and Rufián, who is the most important scourge of the Spanish right, turns out to be one of us and prefers to forge alliances in the central plateau rather than in Catalonia, with the excuse that the fight against fascism is more urgent than continuing to be who we are. Thinking about your own language makes you old-fashioned. Using it and not betraying it makes you intolerant. Discussing the predatory tourism model makes you naive. Discussing vacation rentals makes you gullible and undemocratic. Selling your godfather's estate to a German for a million euros makes you lucky. Charging a Moroccan 500 euros in rent makes you stupid. And wanting to insure your mother's Colombian caregiver or register her at your address makes you just as stupid.
The magnificent Maria Jaume sings it in her newest San Domingo ForeverAn album brimming with nostalgia, heritage and aspirations, joys and anxieties. Full of refuges, identities, and universalities. An LP (is that acronym still used?) that is both electronic and natural. The tearful diva says that "now that the world is going backward, I feel some sadness looking ahead." And it is because of this sadness we feel that there are too many anxieties that both understand and overwhelm us, because we know that thinking about a more just and compassionate world without ceasing to believe in ourselves is more difficult today than yesterday. But it is not impossible.
