Do you often think about your future?What thoughts accompany you? Scientists at a number of US universities are seriously concerned about issues related to the perception of the future by people. Leading sociologists, psychologists, physicians and even historians took part in these studies, while experts from Europe and Southeast Asia were also involved.
As the scientists found out, the permanent fear of the futurepeculiar to at least 54% of the inhabitants of our planet. Moreover, people are equally afraid of the future both in “prosperous” countries and in the least developed territories.
What do our fears associated with the future depend on?
“Fear of the future is subjective,” say scientists. It is not connected with the material wealth of the family, with the current difficulties and hardships that a person or his family can experience.
Men fear the future more than women.Scientists explain this by saying that a man initially had to be a hunter and be responsible for his family. As a result, he was more dependent on the future - on the weather, on the success of the hunt. It was important for him to predict approaching crisis situations in time and respond adequately to them. While a woman in many such matters could rely on a man - husband or father.
With age, people are becoming more exposedfears associated with the future. Moreover, with age people become more sensitive to such factors. For example, if a teenager is told that in his future a sandwich will cost ten times more, he can quite easily accept this as a fact, and it will not even cause him the slightest concern. But if you tell a mature man, say, 60 years old, that a year later a sandwich will cost 20% more, he may even be worried, even if he had not been a big fan of sandwiches and avoided fast food in general.
Fears of the future of past eras
In different eras, people are afraid of different things.Today's residents of large cities will clearly seem ridiculous fears of their distant predecessors. So, for example, the inhabitants of London in the middle of the XIX century were afraid that their children would live in very dirty cities, literally they would drown in the streams of horse manure. After all, that era was marked by rapid urban growth, the population of cities grew exponentially. At the same time, the main transport was horses, which produced well-known wastes, which delivered much more trouble for the residents of the cities of that time than, say, car exhausts.
Ещё пару десятилетий назад жители крупных megalopolises were afraid of gas pollution, which carries with it the development of transport and an increase in the total number of cars on the roads. On the contrary, nowadays this fear is not even in the top ten, according to a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Not least this is due to the developmentalternative energy and the development of vehicles on power plants, alternative to the usual internal combustion engines. Hybrids and even all-electric cars have ceased to be a wonder even for our cities, what can we say about the civilized world.
What are our contemporaries afraid of in the future?
There are several factors that significantlyaffect the image of the future and the fears associated with it. Scientists researching futurofobiyu, there are three main factors - informational hygiene, nutrition and sleep.
People who do not sleep much or do not observe a regular wakefulness and sleep regime, as a rule, and this is a proven scientific fact, are more susceptible to future-related phobias.
However, to the greatest extent perceptionthe future is influenced by the current emotional state of the individual, which is closely related to the information that he regularly consumes. If you want to live a quiet life, with a constructive hope for the future, TV is absolutely contraindicated to you. After all, TV programs are the main source of fears about the future, which is connected with the very specifics of creating a TV show and promoting them on TV, and intrusive.
Michael Yurasik, who heads the department of medicalanthropology at Columbia University, conducted a study among his students and found out the main fears of modern youth. Regardless of the ethnic background of the students, as well as the place from which they came to study, these fears turned out to be quite common to all.
In terms of prevalence, from the most typical, to the least typical, the fears of today's youth are distributed as follows:
- Life becomes more complicated.
- Constantly learn new knowledge.
- Uncertainty in economics and politics.
- Fear of your health.
- Fear of the health of loved ones.
It would seem that the fear of health would have toto occupy the first lines of the "rating", but although he was in the top five, he was still pushed out of the first positions by other fears. The head of the research team, Michael Yurasik, believes that this is due to the advances in medicine that we have seen in recent decades.
