Do you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night, fretful, on the verge of panic? Welcome back to the 1950s - yet again.
For some reason, the ‘50s return eternally, at least in the United States. Just about every subsequent decade has, at some point, recalled some aspect of the ‘50s.
The fun ‘50s of rock ‘n’ roll and streamlined convertibles. The pipe-smoking, sweater-vested ‘50s of conservative politics, mores and fashions. The footloose ‘50s of sloppy beatniks be-bopping on the road to mirages of Buddhist bliss.
Each of those ‘50s sets of happy days has enjoyed at least one revival.
Now returns perhaps the darkest side of the ‘50s: that which led to its being dubbed the Age of Anxiety.
According to the Milbank Quarterly, a health policy journal based in New York, the emblematic mental health problem of the ‘50s, anxiety, has re-emerged with top billing in the 21st century.
There certainly are obvious reasons for anxiety today, foremost among them the precariousness of contemporary employment and how that threatens our status, security, comfort ? and health. (The Times reported that people who were laid off suffered adverse health events, many of which persisted even after they were rehired.)
But at the existential root of our anxiety may be something we share with the ‘50s: loneliness, in particular what Ronald W. Dworkin, author of “Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class,” calls interior loneliness, “the paradox of friendship without any real connection between people.”
That such loneliness must be a problem once again, as the ‘10s get under way, is surely indicated by a trend reported in The Times: in some American and European cities, even those traditionally most solitary of people, night owls, have taken to assembling in cozy, convivial late-night work groups.
Perhaps that burning of the midnight oil with others does help to assuage interior loneliness. But can the same palliative be derived from what our age has principally contrived to combat loneliness: social media?
Facebook helps us create the illusion of having ever-expanding legions of friends. But most of these “friends” are people with whom we have only the most tenuous connection, who barely rate as even mere acquaintances. And it surely doesn’t help that many Facebook users, as The Times reports, are not fans of Facebook itself, seeing it as an overbearing utility like electric and gas companies.
Some of us might prefer the more dubious solutions that the fed-up lonely crowds of the ‘50s came up with as their decade shaded into the ‘60s: the alluringly messy ways glamorized by the hit American TV series “Mad Men.” In other words, loads of extramarital carousing with plenty of stiff cocktails and clouds of cigarette smoke.
Katie Roiphe in The Times wistfully suggested the obvious: that our age may be longing for some of the madness of “Mad Men.” “These days, the careful anthropologist observes brief furtive forays into the world of excess in highly functional and orderly people,” she writes.
The series’ producers, of course, may have suspected as much. They probably saw the parallels and sensed that their period drama would tap into the spirit of this new Age of Anxiety.
Of course, we should not forget what the Mad Men’s debonair dissoluteness led to. “The Age of Anxiety in the 1950s,” writes Mr. Dworkin, “became the Age of Depression in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.”
CARLOS CUNHA
