Eco-anxiety is overwhelming kids
It’s not just adults who are suffering. In our noble zeal to emphasize the urgency and enormity of environmental issues, we appear to be inadvertently raising a generation that feels hopeless about the future of the planet. A 2018 international review of recent research on the psychological impacts of climate change on children published in Current Psychiatry Reports reveals that many kids honestly believe the world may end during their lifetime as a result of climate change or other global threats. In-depth interviews with ten-to-twelve-year-olds in the US found that 82 percent of children expressed strong feelings of fear, sadness, and anger when discussing environmental problems.13
I want to underscore that these are kids who have not directly experienced catastrophic floods, droughts, sea level rise, or bushfires. These findings are from researchers who specifically study the psychological impact of indirect or gradual climate change effects.
The reason I think that is such a sad and important point is that children are suffering emotional and psychological anguish not from their lived experience, but as a result of their anticipation of a dystopian future they believe is inevitable. They see planetary destruction as a foregone conclusion. They are so deeply embroiled in the narrative of doom and gloom that they have no idea other futures are possible.
It’s not surprising they feel this way. They are growing up in a media storm of end-of-the-world threats and getting graded on homework assignments that hammer home the magnitude of environmental problems. This pervasive and skewed orientation toward analyzing what’s broken follows them throughout their school careers.
Though it’s natural and responsible to try to protect the people we love by focusing on the dangers they may face, lots of studies now show what parents and teachers already know. The best way to equip kids to handle challenges in their lives is to help them learn how to develop and maintain strong social networks within supportive communities. They also need to learn how to develop effective, creative problem-solving abilities to overcome adversity. These same strategies are true for the challenges they may face from climate change. The Australian Psychological Society provides more details on how to do this in a helpful online guide called “Raising Children to Thrive in a Climate Changed World.” In it, they remind parents: to talk about but not catastrophize the problem of climate change; to validate and help children learn to recognize their feelings; to offer emotional support; to take positive environmental action together; and to nurture kids’ capacities for resilience, flexibility, and adaptability.
The more we worry, the more we . . . shop?
A fatalistic focus on climate doom triggers a host of what psychologists describe as conscious and unconscious concerns about our own deaths. The result is an emotional state of “existential anxiety.”
Psychologists use the term terror management theory to describe the constant tension each of us experiences in our day-to-day lives between our desire to live and the fact that we know that one day we will die. Without realizing it, we develop defense mechanisms to manage this psychological tension.
Fears about the death of the planet are even more visceral because we know how completely dependent our own lives are on the health of living ecosystems. Climate change is a primary driver of biodiversity loss, just as the loss of biodiversity contributes to climate change. Both of those fates—and our own—are inextricably linked.
The trouble is, depictions of climate change as an inevitable, sweaty death sentence trigger these defense mechanisms. We protect our sense of security by subconsciously denying the problem or minimizing the credibility of the threats.
So even though you might assume that people who fear death by climate change would be motivated to change their behavior, it doesn’t work that way. When we already know there is a massive problem, and people just keep telling us how bad it is, we suffer real fears about our survival. In fact, fearmongering amplifies our existential anxiety, which sets off a chain of protective reactions that can cause us to downplay the issue and reduce our likelihood to take action.
Surprisingly, these fears can actually lead us to shop more. Researchers have found links between existential anxiety and hyperconsumerism. Shopping (for people who derive personal validation or identity from their stuff) decreases our sense of vulnerability.14 In our materialistic, consumerist culture, a common response to soothe our unconscious fears of death is to hop online for some comfort shopping.
This could help to explain why Black Friday 2019 hit a record $7.4 billion in US online sales at the same time concern about climate change was at a record high. Mass consumerism is bad for the environment in a myriad of ways. Millions of shoppers buying and then discarding smartphones and TVs, for instance, contribute to the fifty million tons of e-waste the world generates each year. If you were to add up all the stuff people around the world consume, everything from food to birthday presents to toilet-bowl cleaner, it would total a whopping 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and between 50 and 80 percent of total water, land, and material use, according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.15 It’s shocking to realize that by slamming people with messages of climate doom, no matter how well intentioned, we may inadvertently escalate the environmentally destructive shopping we so badly need to stop.
The finite pool of worry triggers emotional numbness
Other researchers explain our failure to act, despite high levels of concern about environmental crises, through a phenomenon known as the finite pool of worry. According to researchers at Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, there are limits to the number of concerns a person can deal with at one time. Overburdening people’s capacity for worry with too much doom and gloom leads to emotional numbing. We tune out or feel immobilized. “When we’re scared, we can freeze,” says Susan M. Koger, a psychology professor at Willamette University in Oregon, who teaches and writes about psychology for sustainability.16
The trouble is, emotionally numb can look a lot like not caring. My friend Carrie teaches high school. She recently told me that she’s been showing her classes increasingly graphic images of climate change devastation to try to shock them into caring. “They are so apathetic,” she says.
Apathy can easily be mistaken for a lack of compassion, but many psychologists interpret it as quite the opposite. Apparent indifference or dissociation often serves to mask a person’s feelings of helplessness.
Apathy is produced as a response to feeling powerless in the face of political realities we cannot control.17 To avoid feeling helpless, guilty, and afraid, we create a veneer of not caring in order to maintain an image of ourselves as smart, tough, and in control. Apathy stems from fear and a lack of capacity to tackle what seems like an insurmountable task. When we believe nothing will change for the better, then any positive action can feel useless or pointless.
So if the students in Carrie’s class already know about climate change (which, according to research, it’s pretty well guaranteed they do), and if they keep being slammed with examples of how unjust it is or how little society is doing to correct it, her lessons may unintentionally create the apathy she is trying to cure.
There is a worrisome connection between apathy and cynicism. People who fall prey to apathy then may end up transforming their original political frustrations into longer-lasting expressions of skepticism, cynicism, and mistrust. Indeed, you don’t have to look far to see this happening writ large.
A rise in cynicism and drop in trust
Pessimism and cynicism are on the rise in many countries, according to Our World in Data, a research project based at the University of Oxford that analyzes big data trends. Meanwhile, feelings of trust are plummeting. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures levels