Gareth O'Callaghan: Auden's 'age of anxiety' has never been more relevant
General unease and lack of meaning sum up life for many people right now. Our country’s mental health is in a very bad way. File photo
On a wall in my office hangs a framed poem by WH Auden called – a phrase he coined to describe the post-Second World War era’s general unease and lack of meaning. “We are always peering into our mirrors…” is one of its lines that has stayed with me since I first read it.
October is Mental Health Month. Next Friday marks World Mental Health Day. It’s almost 80 years since Auden’s poem was published, but its message has never been so relevant. General unease and lack of meaning sum up life for many people right now. Our country’s mental health is in a very bad way.
According to a 2024 survey by mental health support organisation Aware, more than half of respondents reported depression, with 60% experiencing anxiety. Healthy Ireland’s research released last month found that 74% of people living in Munster know someone who has died by suicide.
Factors impacting mental health, according to Aware, include financial worries (56%), family responsibilities (36%), work (31%), economic climate (24%), and the housing crisis (21%). However, despite its growing impact on mental health, there’s no mention of social media.
I’m no stranger to depression or anxiety. I don’t have a problem talking publicly about it. I was suicidal a long time ago. These days I know what triggers to avoid. That said, depression and anxiety are often unavoidable reactions to unexpected challenges.
Call it a package – two for the price of one. I have lived with both, on and off.
My earliest memory of anxiety was on my first day at primary school 60 years ago. Its all-consuming ability to disrupt at the deepest human level was nothing short of terrifying – no different to how it would feel now if I were to give it space. That’s what happened two years ago.
I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. My recovery following a car crash was slow, so my phone became my third crutch. Confined to bed or to a chair for long periods turned social media and ‘scrolling’ into my window on the world. I no longer felt isolated – or so I thought.
At first, it felt stimulating. I could post on Facebook or Twitter whenever I liked, check my emails, and read up on and watch the latest world news as it was happening. Then, I spent the rest of the time mindlessly scrolling through trending stories on Google, or video shorts on TikTok, or music nostalgia on YouTube that would never have held my interest before.
Until it was time to check comments on social media again, and look through more news stories. It didn’t take long before I was checking my phone every half hour. Then it became every quarter hour; then I found myself staring at it every few minutes.
It achieved what I always believed it couldn’t – it stole my focus. I was its slave, and I began to feel that stomach-churning anxiety I hate. It was back. Except this time I couldn’t break free.
The mere feel of the phone gave me a sense of safety and freedom. But now I wasn’t reading full articles anymore, or watching videos from start to finish. It quickly became an exercise in skimming. Impatience got the better of reading more than the first few lines. Then it was time to refresh and move on.
If I left it down, that voice in my head would constantly remind me to “check your phone”, but I wouldn’t; until the voice would say “but what if you’re missing something?” So I would pick it up, and the cycle would start over again.
It became relentless, and mentally exhausting. My anxiety levels soared. I was caught up in a vicious circle of not wanting to be dependent, but feeling isolated if I didn’t check in. All the time I scrolled, it felt as though I was searching harder for a gem that would give me a stronger dopamine hit for longer.
In the months this nightmare consumed me, my cognitive brain changed. Without my phone I was in free fall. How I lived before was now interrupted every few minutes by the compulsion to check and scroll. My world had shrunk, just like my mind.
What really bothered me was that I could no longer concentrate. Reading books has always been one of my favourite escapes. I could lose hours in a great book, to the point where I would forget to eat.
I could read two books a week. Now, I could barely manage a couple of paragraphs before having to go back and read them again and again.
I ate breakfast while checking emails and a host of apps, then onto Facebook and WhatsApp, while trying to recall the last page of the book I was reading while still eating. It was multitasking I told myself, except there’s no such thing.
According to 2004 research from University of California, a group was asked to perform two or more tasks and then tracked to see the effects. It turned out they couldn’t remember what they had done, unlike those who undertook a single task at a time. Multitasking interrupts how the brain concentrates.
Social media anxiety disorder is destructive. I’ve been there. I spent years reading about behavioural psychology, but even all I learned couldn’t prevent me from being dragged hook, line, and sinker into a modern-day freefall few will admit to.
Eventually I decided cold turkey was my only way out of this mess. Normal life slowly resumed. Now, social media is a choice, not a compulsion.
In the words of psychologist James J. Gibson, “Ask not what’s inside your head, but what your head’s inside of”. Comparison culture and the fear of missing out are a deadly mixture. Both are at the heart of social media.
Most of us never get an hour to ourselves without being interrupted by something online. That’s bad for mental health. We need uninterrupted time, often; but even that has become a vicious cycle because we’re at a stage where many people can’t cope without disruptions.
A crisis arises when you can’t distinguish the real world from the virtual world, and that’s where we are now, I believe — not just for adolescents, but for adults; where you can’t tell the difference between what is happening and what you are imagining.
When it comes to social media, safety and freedom are poles apart. Familiar platforms are taking full advantage of this online freedom. Make no mistake — they don’t just want your passing trade, they want your soul. And they want your children’s too.
In 2017, discovered a Facebook document marked “Confidential: Internal Only”, which outlined how the network can target moments when young people feel “stressed”, “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “anxious”, nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, and a “failure”.
“When depressive content is good for engagement, it is actively promoted by the algorithm,” according to Guillaume Chaslot, a French data scientist who worked on YouTube’s recommendation systems. Optimising watch time at any cost is the name of the game.
To paraphrase WH Auden, when it comes to social media we are always peering into our mirrors. But the price of unresolved online dependency is often more than we could ever hope to deal with alone.
If I could offer a timely warning during mental health awareness month, it would be Johann Hari’s book, . It was my wake-up call. It could be yours too.
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