It doesn’t happen often or even regularly but occasionally I will talk about the careers I have had prior to becoming a psychologist. One such occasion went a little something like this.

“You weren’t always a psychologist?”

This question always amuses me. It is childlike in its innocence, like a child coming to the realization that mom or dad wasn’t always mom or dad. They were in fact, at some point in the not too distant past, just Bob or Sally or whomever.

“Actually in the late 90’s and early 2000’s I worked for a company that supplied the equipment which makes the internet possible and many of my former clients built the internet that exists today.”

A blank look of utter bewilderment fell across my patient’s face, “what do you mean you built the internet?”

I like to be clear at times like these so I don’t end up sounding like vice president Gore claiming to have invented the internet while in office, “I didn’t invent the internet but my company sold the equipment and designed the networks which made the internet possible.”

The bewildered look hadn’t changed, “I don’t understand.”

Trying not to give voice to my growing frustration I asked, “you do understand how the internet and cell phones work, don’t you?”

Gingerly picking up and cuddling her cell phone, “no I don’t. I guess I’m not the usual millennial in that way. I don’t care how my cell phone works, I just need it to work.”

At this point in theses conversations I will either suggest that a degree or two of understanding of the technology one depends on to facilitate their life might be a worthwhile pursuit or I will actually give a dumbed down explanation of how the internet and other complex network systems work.

In this instance I chose the later and as usual it was a mistake but the session was already over time and I figure what the heck. Turns out I like to show off as much as any other prepubescent boy. My inner child is a bit of a nerd.

My point at times like these and now with this post is this: Carl Sagan once said in an interview that he was afraid for the future of humanity because he could see society moving toward a place where the average citizen was increasingly dependent on science and technology to survive but had an ever decreasing understanding of how science and technology work.

Two fine examples are the belief that vaccines are dangerous and should be avoided, most recently the uproar over the Covid vaccines, and the large number of people who come to see me, of all ages not just millennials and zoomers, who are completely dependent or dare I say addicted to their cell phones, yet have no idea how the technology that makes cell phones possible work.

Not surprising, to me anyway, these people come to see me for treatment of anxiety. Recall from my earlier posts that anxiety is the appropriate emotional response to potential threat. Put another way, and to paraphrase another psychologist, anxiety is the natural response to a confrontation with chaos (the unknown).

Ignorance, that is a lack of knowledge or understanding, is a chaotic state. Of course you have anxiety, you live in a world which works in ways you don’t understand, and you read and listen to and watch things that tell you these things you don’t understand are not safe at best and at worse are actually a threat to you.

Run Forest run! We can and should do better than this but it will require some personal involvement and responsibility.

Carl Sagan must be rolling over in his grave…..

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Carl Sagan 1995