At 84, I am an analog guy in a digital world. Sure, I do Zoom meetings and check my smartphone too often. Yet my mental health suffers, I swear, from the almost vertical rate of societal change; political mayhem; transition from a human to digital-dominated world, and the sense that Big Brother’s cameras know my every move.

Stop the world, I want to step off.

I wondered if this is a general perspective. So, I asked 25 of my friends on email how they feel about the world around them, on a 1-5 scale, from: (1) quite comfortable; (2) OK; (3) a bit unsettled; (4) really unsettled, to (5) it’s affecting mental health. All are smart, and many are accomplished or becoming accomplished. A few are young; most not. A couple are Trump fans, most not.

The range of responses was from 2-5, with the average just under 4, really unsettled. The Trump fans were more comfortable, while my liberal friends were at 5.

Nothing earth-shaking here. Yet, I contrast this anxiety with my post-WWII childhood. The mood in smalltown Illinois, where I grew up, seemed generally positive, with expectations high for a better world, as the Beach Boys harmonized sunny tunes in the background.

Respondents to my informal survey mentioned, as unsettling factors: Trump, AI, difficulty in sorting through media propaganda, mental overload, decline in traditional values, and concern for the world our grandchildren will inherit.

After our human history in which basically nothing changed from generation to generation, the rate of change on a vertical axis is now basically straight up, as displayed in a recent Economist article (headlined "Did killers make the modern world?").

As a college student years ago, I frequently devoted from 7 until closing at 10 in the library researching a term paper. If I found three pertinent articles that evening from the hefty volumes of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, I considered myself successful. I still needed many more hours to cogitate and agonize over writing the paper. Today, type a few words into Chat GPT and presto, the program writes the paper!

The race to artificial general intelligence will continue at a frantic pace. And it won’t be throttled, because the goal, like the mountain, is there for the ambitious to conquer, with great rewards for being first.

It’s as if we are literally in the process of outsmarting ourselves.

All the while, the world around us invades our once-private selves via shadowy surveillance that maps our every move. My car manufacturer knows where my vehicle—and I—are every second of the day.

Woe is me. What to do? I offer a pot pourri of efforts I am making to preserve my sanity, and maybe boost my efficacy:

— Increase my daily step count from 10k to 12k or so. Brisk walking lifts my spirits.

— Meditation. I am new to this, and try to do it while on my walks. I fix my gaze at a point in the distance, purging the cacophony from the world around me.

— “Wednesday Without” my smartphone. I am trying to wean myself away from devices, which inflame and depersonalize in their quest for eyeballs.

— Increase my involvement in good works and important public issues. For example, I am adding national gerrymandering reform to my present work in Illinois to create fair legislative maps. Using computer software to draw exotically partisan (gerrymandered) maps almost guarantees the outcome of an election before the election is held, and increases polarization. Fair maps increase general election competition; this tends, through the need to appeal to a broad electorate, to draw us together, rather than pull us apart.

Whatever you do, please don’t step away from our political society. I worry this would just add to the cynicism, anxiety and anger I heard from my survey respondents. I recall the quotation of Raymond Moley, who created the FDR “brain trust,” and later became a conservative newspaper columnist:

“Politics is not something to avoid, abolish or destroy. It is a condition of life, like the air we breathe. It is ours to live with, as we must; to influence if we desire; to control if we can. Either we must master its ways, or most surely we will be mastered by those who do.”

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Jim Nowlan has been a Republican precinct committeeman, state legislator, statewide candidate, campaign manager for U.S. Senate and presidential candidates, chair of the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission (yes, Myrtle, we have one), senior aide to three unindicted Illinois governors, professor and gadfly. He lives in Princeton, Illinois.

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