I Am Part of the Anxious Generation

Some days, sitting beside a river helps.

I recently heard someone mention The Anxious Generation for what feels like the hundredth time. Jonathan Haidt’s book focuses largely on childhood, smartphones, social media, and what he argues they are doing to young people’s mental health.

But honestly, I feel part of the anxious generation too.

There is plenty to worry about. Artificial intelligence scares me. So does climate change. This summer brought another round of wildfires and drought, and the news seems to offer an endless supply of things that are burning, collapsing, disappearing, or threatening to get worse.

What feels hard is how little distance there is between us and any of it.

The bad news no longer stays “out there.” It follows us into the kitchen, the car, the bedroom, and whatever quiet space we manage to find. I can be drinking coffee at 7:00 in the morning and, within minutes, know about a war, a wildfire, a political crisis, and a new reason to fear artificial intelligence.

My attempted compromise is to read The New York Times for about 20 minutes each morning, follow it with a short meditation, and then try to stay away from the news for the rest of the day. Breaking-news notifications have an uncanny ability to escape even my best digital-wellness efforts.

And much of what I am worried about is real.

I cannot simply challenge every anxious thought as irrational. Some of the threats are legitimate. Some are uncertain. Some are completely outside my control.

So what is a person supposed to do with that?

For me, this is where time outside helps.

Not because a walk along the river solves climate change or makes artificial intelligence less complicated. It does something smaller.

It changes the scale of my attention.

Right now, a red-tailed feathered friend has captured mine.

For a few moments, I am no longer ten years into an imagined future that looks a lot like the movie The Terminator. I am watching another living creature move through the sky. I can feel the ground under my feet. I can hear water moving nearby.

The problems have not disappeared. My attention has simply returned to where my body actually is.

It changes the scale of my attention.

Sometimes I laugh at the absurdity of it all. We spent years worrying that climate change might get us, and now perhaps AI will beat it to the punch.

There is humor in that thought, but there is fear too.

I find uncertainty hard. I want to know what is going to happen. I want to know that the people I love will be okay. I would very much like some assurance that humanity is not going to destroy the climate, create technology we cannot control, or find some other inventive way to make a mess of things.

I don’t get that assurance.

Sometimes when I walk into the woods, I find myself apologizing.

Here I am again, Mother Nature. I need help with my anxiety and my anger at the world. I am sorry for what my species is doing. I feel helpless.

I’m not sure the forest is actually listening to my confession. But saying it there feels different from thinking it alone in my house.

I do not have to reason my way out of the feelings.

I can be angry.

I can grieve.

I can admit that I am scared.

Sometimes I sit beside the Gunpowder River and imagine letting some of what I am carrying move downstream. I do not think of the river as a disposal site for human pain. It is more that the movement of the water gives my mind somewhere to go. The feelings become less fixed.

I can watch a leaf disappear around a bend and, for a little while, stop gripping quite so tightly.

That matters because I am still responsible for what I do with my big emotions.

Anxiety does not stay neatly inside us. Fear can turn into irritability. Helplessness can become anger. And anger can land on the completely innocent person driving too slowly in front of me on York Road.

I do not want the state of the world to turn me into a jerk in traffic.

That may sound like a small goal given the scale of the problems we face, but perhaps that is partly the point. I cannot control most of what frightens me. I do have some say in whether that fear spills onto the people around me.

The Gunpowder has become one of the places where I practice that.

When I leave, the world is still uncertain. My phone is still carrying headlines. Climate change has not been resolved. Neither has the question of what artificial intelligence will become.

But I am usually a little more able to live inside the uncertainty.

I am part of the anxious generation. I am not particularly interested in pretending otherwise.

What I am interested in is learning how to carry that anxiety without handing it to everyone I meet.

Some days, sitting beside a river helps.

About the author

Place this below the essay, visually separate from its final line. Link the author’s name to her CNIT profile and the invitation to the Nature Informed Therapy overview.

Heidi Schreiber-Pan, PhD, LCPC, is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Nature Informed Therapy. Her work centers on the relationship between mental health and the natural world.

Explore CNIT’s approach to Nature Informed Therapy and everyday nature connection.