The Ukraine crisis has consumed us in a sudden and
overwhelming information overload. After weeks of warnings about a potential
war in Ukraine preceded by years of increasing antagonism, the Russian military
marched into the country and swiftly altered geopolitics for decades to come.
Within minutes of the invasion, the global news cycle kicked into high-octane
war coverage and it has not stopped since.
اضافة اعلان
While it is vital that the war and suffering of the
Ukrainian people be reported as transparently as possible, the flood of
information through our phone screens carries its own kind of harm. The Ukraine
crisis is adding another layer to our crisis of information overload, and it is
damaging collective mental health in myriad ways.
Let us start with the immediate factors concerning the
Ukraine war. Given the nature of social media platforms like Twitter and
Facebook, the conflict has taken on a personal dimension for many around the
world. Even if you have no connection to Ukraine or Russia, the war has felt
intimate and overwhelming. Is the next world war on the horizon? Is the global
economy about to enter a prolonged recession?
Someone could be sitting at home in Jakarta or Buenos Aries,
doom-scrolling through Twitter and feel as though the events in Ukraine are
taking place outside their door. This situation is compounded by the fact that
social media companies have a vested interest in keeping users engaged on their
platforms. That is how they generate revenue, after all.
Writer James Greig astutely notes that it is reasonable “to
be anxious about what might happen next, but we should bear in mind that, as of
now, this is first and foremost something which is happening to people in
Ukraine. We are not being bombed or driven out of our homes”.
Greig goes on to bemoan the glib reaction to the conflict by
many on social media. Many have made the war about themselves because of the
tendency to place oneself at the center of this historic episode.
To understand how we arrived at this moment, we need to
consider how the internet is changing our relationship to information. The
incredible amount of time we spend glued to our smartphones is changing how we
experience and integrate information. We read differently than we did just
decades ago. Our attention spans have shortened. Our sleep has become worse
thanks to the constant blue light of our screens. The Ukraine war is the latest
and most extreme example of the shift in how we deal with information. Perhaps
surprisingly, this change is deeply affecting our mental health and can be
clearly seen in how the midlife crisis is changing.
The difficult process of individuation is rendered nearly impossible if one is constantly checking a smartphone.
While it might seem like a jump on the surface, the midlife
crisis in the internet age is a key dynamic in mental health trends. Made
popular by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, the midlife crisis is a period of
great transformation that we all experience around the midpoint in our lives
regardless of wealth, social situation, and upbringing. In popular culture, a
midlife crisis is articulated with people chasing fancy sports cars to reclaim
some form of lost youth and vitality. However, the transformative period is
more about one’s relationship with the self than material goods.
For Jung, a person is called upon in the middle part of
their life “to achieve an authentic and balanced self that acknowledges every
aspect of his or her character”. When Jung was working in the early 20th
century, this crisis generally came about between the ages of 40 to 50. At that
stage, many have established a career and started a family. Suppressed
emotional trauma comes to the surface at this stage as we begin to grapple with
the proximity of death. The challenge, for Jung, is to psychologically
harmonize with all aspects of the self, a process he called individuation. Jung
famously said that “midlife is the time to let go of an over dominant ego and
to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence”.
How can we contemplate the deeper significance of human
existence if we are glued to our Instagram and Twitter feeds engaged in endless
commentary about far-off conflicts that do not bear directly on our lived
experience?
The Ukraine crisis is not the reason for our mental crisis,
but an example of how we are losing ourselves in the constant stream of
information we encounter on a daily basis.
It is fine to be concerned about the fate of Ukraine and how
geopolitics will change, but when we are consumed by it all day, we lose sight
of the deeper significance of human existence. The difficult process of
individuation is rendered nearly impossible if one is constantly checking a
smartphone.
Popular culture has made the midlife crisis into a bit of a
joke, but the process is an important and potentially positive one. If we take
the opportunity seriously, it is a rare chance to become our true selves.
Given the financial interests of powerful technology
companies to keep us online, we are facing unprecedented challenges in
navigating our midlife crises. It is time to rebrand the midlife crisis and see
it as a vital portal to better mental health.
The writer is the senior editor of Exponential View, a
weekly newsletter about technology and its impact on society. He was formerly
the editor-in-chief of emerge85, a lab exploring change in emerging markets and
its global impact.
Syndication Bureau. www.syndicationbureau.com
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