Published January 19th, 2012 by Future Atlas
What Are People Afraid Of?
Polling suggests many Americans fear these things:
- Their children’s life will be worse than their own (28%, 2011 Kaiser-Washington Post poll)
- The American economy is in long-term decline (63%, 2008 Washington Post)
- Global warming is a very or somewhat serious problem (65%, 2009 Pew poll)
- The 21st century will be more Chinese than American (41%, 2010 Washington Post poll)
- Another world war will occur by 2050 (58%, 2010, Pew / Smithsonian in GOOD)
- There will be a major nuclear terrorist attack by 2050 (53%, 2010, Pew / Smithsonian in GOOD)
- Jesus Christ will return to Earth and the world will end by 2050 (41%, 2010 Pew polling)
(This is for a Twitter-based chat today, which you can follow with the hashtag #futrchat.)
This may all mean less than it appears, however, due to a bias toward optimism in applying the future to ourselves. People may hold these beliefs casually or temporarily, or may think that somehow things will still be good in their own lives — as some of the same polls in fact show.
More fundamentally, when it comes to fear, the proximate and the personal — fears around money, family, jobs, health, etc. — may swamp theoretically larger issues like these.
Can fear even have a constructive role in thinking about the future? Or do we want only concern, as true fear is too raw an emotion, inevitably obstructing constructive responses? How does this jibe with the fact that their are outcomes in technology or geopolitics that we should truly fear?
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Image: Irargerich (Flickr)