One of our predictions for 2018 is that we’re now living in an Age of Anxiety, driven in part by our screen addiction.
What we’re seeing is confirmation of our prediction. In this blog post, we’ll cite validation from the New York Times and Bloomberg.
Among the points we made about the Age of Anxiety was “We anticipate more coverage on stress, anxiety, mental health and ways to de-stress, which includes taking a break from your device – aka a technology cleanse or digital detox – which is healthy and a good idea but may seem impossible to do.”
And that’s just what we’ve been seeing. We’ll tackle in a future blog post what it means for marketers to try to communicate with key audiences in such a way so as to minimize their stress levels. This is a real challenge because there’s so much anger and resentment, sincerely felt by conservatives and liberals, that the personal — like which team you root for and which coffee maker you use or what programs a brand advertises on — has become politicized to an unprecedented degree,
But first, some advice on how to de-stress from the New York Times:
How to Manage Stress Like an Olympic Biathlete
The Promise of Self-Compassion for Stressed-Out Teens
How to Break Up With Your Phone
Meanwhile, here’s a Bloomberg article about screen addition:
Tech Diets Catch on With Apple Executives, Facebook Billionaires and Google:rSilicon Valley insiders, concerned about the attention-sapping effects of modern technology, experiment with ways to log off.
We’ll continue to explore the Age of Anxiety because, I’m afraid, it’s going to be a main theme for a while.