Do you often think about your future? What thoughts accompany you? Scientists at a number of US universities are seriously concerned about issues related to people's perceptions of the future. Leading sociologists, psychologists, doctors and even historians took part in these studies, while experts from Europe and Southeast Asia were also involved.
As scientists have found out, at least 54% of the inhabitants of our planet have a permanent fear of the future. Moreover, people are equally afraid of the future both in “prosperous” countries and in the least developed territories.
What do our fears about the future depend on?
“Fear of the future is subjective,” scientists say. It is not connected with the material wealth of the family, with the current difficulties and hardships that a person or his family may experience.
Men are more afraid of the future than women. Scientists explain this by the fact that the man was originally able to be a hunter and be responsible for his family. As a result, he was more dependent on the future - on the weather, on hunting success. It was important to him in time to predict the approaching crisis situations and adequately respond to them. While a woman in many such matters could rely on a man - husband or father.
With age, people become more prone to fears about the future. Moreover, people become more sensitive to such factors with age. For example, if a teenager is told that in his future a sandwich will cost ten times more, he can quite safely accept this as a fact, and this will not even cause him the slightest concern. But if you tell a mature person, say, about 60 years old, that in a year a sandwich will cost 20% more, he can even get worried, even if he was not a big fan of sandwiches before and generally avoided fast food.
Fears of the future of past ages
In different eras, people are afraid of different things. The fears of their distant predecessors will seem ridiculous to today's residents of big cities. So, for example, the inhabitants of London in the mid-19th century were afraid that their children would live in very dirty cities, literally drown in streams of horse manure. After all, that era was marked by rapid urban growth, the population of cities grew exponentially. At the same time, the main transport was horses that produced well-known waste, which for residents of cities of that time delivered much more trouble than today, say, car exhausts deliver to us.
A couple of decades ago, residents of large metropolitan areas were afraid of the gas pollution caused by the development of transport and an increase in the total number of cars on the roads. On the contrary, these days this fear is not even in the top ten, according to a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Not least this is due to the development of alternative energy and the development of vehicles in power plants, alternative to the usual internal combustion engines. Hybrids and even completely electric cars have ceased to be a wonder even for our cities, to say nothing of the civilized world.
What are our contemporaries afraid of in the future?
There are several factors that significantly affect the image of the future and the fears associated with it. Scientists who study futurophobia identify three main factors - information hygiene, nutrition and sleep patterns.
People who sleep little or poorly do not observe the regular wakefulness and sleep patterns, as a rule, and this is a proven scientific fact, more prone to phobias associated with the future.
However, the current emotional state of an individual is most affected by the perception of the future, which is closely related to the information that he regularly consumes. If you want to live a calm life, with a constructive hope for the future, TV is categorically contraindicated to you. After all, it is TV programs that are the main source of fears about the future, which is associated with the very specifics of creating TV shows and promoting them on TV, and obsessive.
Michael Jurasic, head of the Department of Medical Anthropology at Columbia University, conducted a study among his students and found out the basic fears of modern youth. Regardless of the ethnic origin of the students, as well as of the locality from which they came to study, these fears turned out to be quite common for everyone.
In terms of prevalence, from the most typical to the least typical, the fears of modern youth were distributed as follows:
- Life is getting more complicated.
- Constantly master new knowledge.
- Uncertainty in economics and politics.
- Fear of your health.
- Fear about the health of loved ones.
It would seem that the fear of health should have occupied the first lines of the "rating", but although it was in the top five, it was still supplanted from the first positions by other fears. The head of the research team, Michael Jurasik, believes that this is due to the successes of medicine that we have been observing in recent decades.