You don’t need me to tell you there’s a ludicrous oversupply of anxiety right now.
The stats are there if you care to look them up, but you don’t need to. A casual inspection of the world around you shows this.
Recently, someone asked me why.
There are many factors and I can’t know all of them. From our hormones being disrupted to poor sleep to the mind virus of social media to subpar nutrition, there are plenty of causes.
One not many folks talk about:
We’re no longer swaddled by history.
Humans usually exist as a link in history. We inherit a legacy from our ancestors while building a better world for our descendants. It’s comforting to feel so snug with the past and future. Our very lives are precious gifts from men and women who fought, worked hard, suffered and died to create. Every good decision we make are gifts for the children of our children’s children.
How’s that working out for you?
You have no inheritance. Warmongers stripmine the material resources while delusional academics write papers about how evil your ancestors were.
You have no future. Economic, chemical and cultural factors make it harder to have children. Plenty of folks aren’t building a better future for them even if you do – war, climate change and whatever end-stage capitalism is supposed to mean have convinced them to give up.
There’s no past to be proud of and no future to help create.
And if you don’t think that’s causing a lot of the problems around us, then you don’t know enough psychology to comment.
The advantage here lies – as usual – with the Christians. Christianity is a proud legacy, measured in millennia and by the billions of people it has helped. It also guarantees eternal hope. Jesus has already defeated evil and redeemed the world. All we have to do is smother the last of it and await His return.
And if you’re a secular Western, then it’s not all bad. You’ve inherited reason, human rights, culture and the thinking of the greatest philosophers.
As for the future, all I can say is we’ve gotten through worse. Our challenges may be unique but we’re tough, resourceful and driven. We can handle this too.
What you do with this is up to you.
You can give up like the MGTOWers, nihilists and other losers who take the easy, cowardly way out.
Or you can hope for the best, then get to work in creating it.
That means taking care of yourself and those around you, despising sin, loving sinners, being strong and embracing righteousness.
It also means learning, growing and training for spiritual war: