One of the hallmarks of the Age of Anxiety* is that bad news, really the worst news, reaches you much more quickly and from a lot more places. A compounding issue is what I call the A$$h043 Principle, which is basically that only bad people make the news. Good people are boring. Bad people are interesting. The most interesting people are the very worst people. And so, you have this confluence of bad news about bad people infiltrating your mind through a panoply of channels, online news, social media, RSS feed, etc., and the result is that you come to believe the world is more terrible and more dangerous than it really is.
*The term ‘Age of Anxiety’ was coined by WH Auden in a poem about humanity’s struggle to understand the rapidly changing world after the Industrial Revolution, a revolution, I’d argue, is very much ongoing.
Ah, but before we acknowledge that genuinely awful things ARE going on, which I will not list here, let’s instead zoom in on the places we live. If you’re reading these words, you’re likely living someplace where a person can ride their bike. Your home is relatively safe, and the key word there is ‘relatively,’ because safety isn’t an absolute. It’s not digital, safe or unsafe, though we often talk about it in those terms, and that’s really the dynamic of the Age of Anxiety, taking something relative and making it absolute.
In the cycling world, one of our third-rail topics is helmet use. Wearing a helmet makes riding relatively safer than not wearing a helmet, but that doesn’t mean that a helmet makes you absolutely safe, nor that not wearing one makes you absolutely unsafe. I have never had a head injury from riding (or crashing) my bike, so what is the relative gain in safety for me when I click that strap under my chin? It’s nearly impossible to calculate, though in the Age of AnxietyTM an amateur actuary might tell me what the net gain in safety is by extrapolating a number from the general populace, frequency of rides with helmet, without, and then resulting head injuries.
I am not the general populace though, and this is really the crux of the thing.
I saw an article in the Atlantic last week that lamented the decline in bike riding among children. The money stat was this:
Over the course of the 1990s, an average of 20.5 million children ages 7 to 17 hopped on a bike six or more times a year, according to data from the National Sporting Goods Association, a sports-equipment trade group. Only a few decades later, that number has fallen by nearly half, to about 10.9 million in 2023. Of those kids, according to the association, just less than 5 percent rode their bikes “frequently.” – Erin Sagen
Why? Well, neighborhood streets have become unsafe, goes one line of reasoning. Parents have succumbed to an overwhelming fear that their children will hurt themselves or be hurt, goes another.
Do we think our streets are less safe than they used to be? I don’t. You might say that the rise of the mobile phone has created a distraction that makes drivers more error-prone than they were, but you might also observe that cycling infrastructure has improved massively.
I think the real issue is a misunderstanding of how safe our communities (ok, not all of them) really are, predicated on the basic paradigm of the Age of Anxiety. An injured child somewhere is an injured child everywhere. The world is dangerous.
As I was reading about the precipitous decline in bicycle riding among our youth, I saw another, related article, Let Your Kid Climb That Tree (and I apologize for linking to subscription-based sources. The Atlantic is certainly worth your time and money, if you’ve got either one to spare). The gist of that piece, by Henry Abbott, is that allowing your kids to encounter the world, to gauge its real risks and dangers for themselves, ultimately makes them safer, and more confident people, too.
None of this is really original thought, and I suspect, again if you’re reading these words, you’re sympathetic to these views. My point in bringing it all up is not to help you be a better parent (if you have kids), though that would be pretty neat. My point is to get us to think about we process information, how we gauge our real-world circumstances and enjoy the time we have here on Earth.
As Conner wrote the other day, that time is limited.
And as there’s nothing much original in this post, I’ll leave you with one last quote, one I think of often.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. ― Frank Herbert, Dune
