The Areas of Our Concern
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There was a thing I noticed when I absent-mindedly opened Twitter on my phone the other day. I say absent-mindedly because if I’m not using Twitter for work, I’m almost certainly doing it out of habit, not because I have something to say or am experiencing a sudden hunger for tweets. Anyway, the thing I noticed was how my anxiety level went up almost immediately.
Hold on, Paul, I can hear you thinking. That’s not some novel insight. Everyone knows that Twitter makes us all crazy. Yes, yes, but before you so rudely interrupted me, I was going to say that I noticed why I became so much more anxious (compared to my normal slow-boil-anxiety that is ever-present).
Yes, Paul, you’re butting in with again. We know why: because everything is terrible and there’s nothing to be done. You’ve already written this essay, Paul. Well, that’s what you think, know-it-all imaginary reader! I’m still one step ahead of you.
What I noticed-and no more interrupting, please-was that my surge of stress had less to do with the particulars of each individual example of things-being-terrible, and more to do with the dizzying variety of topics of concern to which I was being exposed, and about which I was implicitly expected to feel something. Strongly.
And I just wouldn’t.
Now, I almost typed “couldn’t,” but in fact the whole point of me even telling you about this (assuming you haven’t already left because I made you mad earlier in this piece) was because I realized that I had a kind of agency here. I realized, or at least remembered, that I could choose my areas of concern. I actually don’t have to have Big Feelings about everything.
Think of this. In another era, before the internet was a thing, there was only so much we were likely to be exposed to in our day-to-day lives. Assuming a moderate degree of cultural literacy and interest in affairs beyond oneself, a person might have Big Feelings about things in their own lives, in things going on in their families and communities, and in the broader sweeps of current events (in other words, what was in the newspapers or on the evening news).
In addition to these more universal areas of concern, a person might have particular interests in one or more subject matters of some social relevance; the…
