The generation that wants a safe environment
It is all about anxiety, messianic visions and dystopian futures. People in their 20s and 30s embrace ‘ecosophy’, a belief that makes them militant and ready to change the present
According to a recent Deloitte Global GenZ and Millennial Survey 2024 report, in Italy, compared to the global average, 68% of Generation Z (62% global average) and 64% of Millennials (59% global average) speak in terms of broad sensitivity to climate change. More generally, the overall data tends to reinforce the notion of ‘concern’, if not quite ‘fear’. Not just words, not even slogans, but concrete and actual practices: 37% of Gen Zers and 42% of Millennials are concerned about reducing their environmental impact, for example by avoiding fast fashion, limiting air travel, going vegetarian or vegan. Around the age of 30. Well informed. Socially, culturally, nutritionally ‘eco-friendly’. Strongly convinced, from the point of view of the most critical people, that they have to deal with environmental issues, ecological transition, climate change and other issues that are fueling the debate in the international political arena.
In an increasingly overheated land, media, governance, companies represent a semantic ‘blockade’ against the intensifying instances and waves of environmental activism, although in different gradations. Ideas are on fire, as are the many fires that have been raging for some summers now, even if the 30-year-olds are almost alone in raising the great ‘environmental question’ of the coming decades. Thinking about significant issues, we see the presence of a generation (a term that is never entirely cogent) that experiences, day after day, a double level of anxiety: technological and environmental. This is a sociologically ambiguous theme, in relation to the fears, conflicts and commitment, if not quite to the post-modern obsession that characterizes those who, in their thirties, are concerned with the fate of our planet. In the midst of the contradictions of woke capitalism, resilient and sustainable sociality, a new generation is emerging, as it were, with no way out.
Far be it from me to throw it into the ‘meta-physics of youthful custom’, but the defense of the environment has once again become something archetypal, affirming the synchronicity of social practices with the rhythms of nature. This is what the sociologist Michel Maffesoli has called “Ecosophy” (2018), as an awareness of the nature of things, i.e. the primordial harmony between Mother Earth, communities and individuals, and at the same time the care, the protection of the cracks and wounds of that “industrial and post-industrial Prometheanism” and mono-paradigmatic technology. A theme that has its premises in the reflection on culture and civilisation so evident in the critical thought of the Frankfurt School in the 20th century, in the sense of crystallizing the existence of what Adorno defined in the subtitle of Minima Moralia as ‘damaged lives’.
Quite apart from the huge amount of headlines and televised denunciations of the defacing of monuments and motorway blockades carried out by an elite of white, rich people with rich parents, few of us have the problem of doing the shopping and “if my washing machine breaks down in my house I am happy to fix it”. But “we also fight for those who cannot fight”, as Marina Hagen, the Austrian leader of Ultima Generazione, recently told Il Corriere della Sera on Friday 9 August 2024. According to a less lazy reading, there would be an opportunity to come to terms with the vision of who is not interested in what he can no longer see. More a warning from visionaries or returning anchorites of contemporaneity combined with the ancient projection of every social and cultural movement to make their dreams or hallucinations real. Even the most tragic, twisted and desperate ones, which are the widespread outlet of the totalitarian beast. Being/feeling perpetually anxious allows one to produce ideas, never shrouding oneself in ideologies. Believing that we are faced with a series of catastrophic errors, in the name of an active paradigm that forces us to get out of the ‘downward game’ between categories and segments of society that cancel each other out in the rumpus of an exhausted list of effects.
It is better to discuss causes in order to retrace the path of a common goal, without necessarily being pandering, sympathetic and self-referential. Out of embarrassment, fable of fables or parable of the end of everything, almost science fiction, of the consumer society in all parts of the planet, from São Paulo to Detroit, from Calcutta to Kuala Lumpur. Theoretical passages that unite Slavoi Zizek’s and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s readings of the imaginary, more Lenin’s cook than artist, we are dealing with a generation that wants to modulate and destructurise the imaginary, almost as if it were a Dürer table.
“Everything is anxiety”: a kind of pervasive social atmosphere, the result of a precise culture that produces anxiety, as Vincenzo Costa, Professor of Phenomenology at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, explores in depth in his recent essay: ‘The Anxiety Society’ (2024). It is now known that the ‘post-pandemic’ has disproportionately extended the perimeter of anxiety. During the day we deal with anxiety, at night we deal with anxiety. Moreover, each phase of the day produces and aligns different anxieties. A multiple state, a common condition, an eternal bite in the stomach that attacks us deeply. A true imaginary has been built around anxiety, to the extent that simply saying or declaring that you are anxious is enough to engage in a flowing conversation on social media. Between immediate solidarity and acid stigma. Creating a common feeling and, at the same time, perceiving a common destiny, a multiple consonance.
This is how the world and things are in the “age of anxiety”: a mature phase of globalization or a new time of impossibility?
More than answers, riddles. Complicated legacies of a widespread, compact, almost over-whelming discomfort. Whether it is Amazon’s delivery or the end of the year play. Without rest. Whether ‘incel’, ‘eco-anxious’, ‘neo’ or ‘post-fragile’, ‘eternally precarious’, the anxious state is the drôle de guerre of the present. Impossibility as destiny takes the form of a permanent and total anxiety. A reality beyond the imagination and a direct consequence of chronophagia, as a consciousness of being devoured by obligations, more or less real, necessary.
Anxiety.
A transversal, omnipresent word. If you do not feel anxiety, you are nobody. I am deliberately exaggerating. Given the subject: I stress the concept. But it remains undeniable that the state of mind that characterizes contemporary life is anxiety. Roadworks and speed limits, work, study, environment, school, affections, promises, premises, each, in its own way, create anxiety. Whether small or large, living in an anxious society seems to be an inescapable destiny.
The turn of events unfolds in a precise state of mind. Just to wait for a courier we mobilize a building, the local shop, if it is still open, a nearby bar. This is not minimal apologetics, but the observation of a permanent state and movement. Without prior agreement or even sufficient truth. Expectations are projected without knowing how to keep them, because there are too many, more and more. Not to mention the fact that, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, we are living through a phase of full maturation, as one of his recent essays calls it, of a veritable “The Anxious Generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness”. According to Haidt, sooner rather than later, anxiety will be waiting for us with open arms. More precisely, within reach of a smartphone. It is not as if time is organized enough to spare us a little anxiety, to the point that we feel unprepared for the slightest change in schedule, for the more than natural change in things. We are not ready. We feel unprepared in a time of deep loneliness, no matter how much we flaunt our brilliance and prominence on social media. A kind of uninterrupted spleen in the information and communication overload, the blue ticks, the buzzers, the proclaimed voice notes, the recommended notices, the dizzying chrono-compression.
The digital society requires an immersive state og consciousness, where there is no time for detachment or contemplation, but only a frenzy that translates into a perpetual social preformance, drive by technological times.
Anxiety caused by the round-the-clock flow of information. The digital society demands an immersive state of consciousness, where detachment and contemplation no longer exist. Frenzy, that is the absence of stasis, which translates into a continuous social performance dictated by machinic, technological times. The finite and the indefinite are welded together in the new “anxiogenic ecosystem”, expanding the sensory perception of a widespread sense of fatigue combined with a resurgent disease of life. Every sphere or situation generates anxiety, beyond the positive aspects represented by the anxiety to grow, to improve, to experiment in new fields. To be honest, the other declination of anxiety turns out to be neglected, removed. It prevails, in various ways, a mood in which, perhaps for the first time, we are ready to openly (and I don’t know how consciously) declare that; unlike voting behaviour, sexual preferences and values, we do not see any obstacle to declaring, or more simply admitting, that we feel anxiety. Don’t worry: I won’t give in to the temptation to discuss the structural causes of the phenomenon.
It seems to me that anxiety arises primarily from the awareness of the inevitability of certain processes. It is a form of perpetual disorientation with no future solution in sight. A constant restarting in the face of too much novelty, in the absence of the unprecedented. A fifth state, psychic and social at the same time, is advanced: ‘the eternally anxious’.
Whether the fears and doubts are more or less well-founded is unknown. Anxiety is one of the great contemporary adhesives. An issue. A dilemma. It takes on a metaphorical imprint that, the more it diminishes in relational terms, the more it increases the surplus of distraction and diversion, which resembles giddiness. Once the existential and anthropological surprise that every social act should guarantee has been abandoned, an upside-down perception advances that sometimes distorts, sometimes confuses. Anxiety coincides with everyday life. Everywhere: a countdown to which the print media, social media, television, learned intellectual discourses, talk show recitations, tele-vision series, films and fashionable reportages are feverishly working. For the first time, the social imagination has nothing to do with the future, nor does it present itself as a memento mori, to prevent social disfigurement. Being anxious is no longer the prerogative of managing life, but a drastic transformation of family, professional and gender culture. A certain idea of the environment, and not in a political sense, is offered by those who demonstrate a reasonable knowledge of the environment. A metaphorical attitude that seeks to move away from the spirit of competition, challenge and the race for energy supremacy, towards the nihilistic prophecies and pessimisms of civil and practical reason, of the “professionalism of the coming apocalypse”. It is a matter of working sensitively on values, with good grace on the fundamentalism of principles and virtues, starting with the “things of creation”, focusing attention and listening, as compatible with a social climate, trusting that the environment will become a flywheel of the knowledge economy.
The 20th century has already seen Arcadian and Romantic impulses, as well as drastic technological metamorphoses. Social time, suspended between nature and culture, is joined by the material substance of the things and objects we use. Very often we are in danger of not noticing the change in mental structures and the immediate consequences for our behaviour, attitudes and cultural life itself. Probably what politics demands, or rather should demand, is not to limit the complex nature of the debate to an exhaustive listing of effects or, certainly not, to a discussion of causes. Effective politics knows that we will always need energy to act, to create and to know, not so much to know reality as to make it more plastic, thus avoiding an attitude that radicalizes issues and then trivializes them. In life, human responsibility towards the global environment must combine imaginative and cultural patterns with those of vigilance and protection, symbolizing the restoration of the ecosystem. A chiaroscuro generation that aims very high, that is, at the universe. And which, whether it succeeds or not, will be an essential crossroads of tomorrow.
Ivo Stefano Germano
Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the University of Molise, he teaches Theory and Techniques of New Media and Public and Social Communication. He is the author of essays on Italian pop culture.