The Age of Hyper-Trauma

Why Just Existing in an Age Like This Is Pervasively Traumatic

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Yesterday, a double whammy of a warning. The Surgeon General warned of a “profound risk of harm” from social media, especially to kids. Meanwhile, the White House said — and it’s startling for a White House to say this — “The United States is experiencing an unprecedented youth mental health crisis.”

This isn’t just about kids, though they bear the brunt of it in many ways. This is about an Age of Trauma. What do I mean by that? I mean that we’re surrounded by stressors of extreme kinds, which are profoundly distressing. Incredibly difficult to cope with. And yet they’ve become, and are still becoming, just part and parcel of everyday life. We’re the walking wounded out there these days. And we should recognize it, instead of just trying to suck it up, and pretend it’s not happening.

These stressors are new. We’re now experiencing the distress of civilizational risk, decline, collapse, at individual levels. It’s creeping into our lives, and so of course, no matter how hard we try to deny or repress it — and we’ll come back to that — it affects our minds, emotions, spirits. It depresses them. Fills them anxiety and worry and despair. Not at minor-league levels, which, in a way, can even be healthy. But relentlessly, in a pervasive way, and of a severe kind.

Our world is changing now, and not in good ways. And it is stressing us all out. It is hurting us, not just in spiritual and emotional ways, but in those ways, because it’s hurting us socially, economically, relationally, even, yes, politically. This is the age of the extinction. How could also not be an Age of Trauma?

Let me call all this “hypertrauma,” to distinguish it from the regular kind. It’s one thing for a person to be traumatized, and it’s bad, and it happens, sadly, all the time. But it’s another thing for entire societies, generations, social groups, civilizations to be. That’s hypertrauma, and it’s beginning to happen now.

Let’s begin with the one that the Surgeon General and White House highlighted — just briefly. I used to say, way back when, that “social media was the new smoking.” I was an early user of Twitter, and after a while, I noticed that something was…happening…to me. The more I used social media, the angrier, more depressed, and more anxious I got. It didn’t matter, really, if “good things” happened. The net effect was the same. Why is that? Well, by now we have a pretty good inkling: social media isn’t really social, it’s parasocial. That means it provides the illusion of real relationships — but not the real thing. So we end up a lot like the Instafluencers — trying to fake it to make it. It ends in misery, and for young people of a severe kind. But this isn’t any old trauma — it’s not just “a” kid here and there. It’s all of them. They’re not all as badly affected, but they are very much all affected.

Hypertrauma.

Where else do we see it? My friend Miles and I were talking the other day. There’s a thing he says to me often. “I realized I’d never be able to give my family as good a standard of living as my dad gave me.” That realization shaped many of his life choices. Miles is experiencing the grim reality of downward mobility. That’s another form of trauma. It might not sound like much, but you can bet that there are legions upon legions of men and women like Miles, haunted by this thought, dwelling on it. Baffled and bewildered by it. And under norms of masculinity which say the man should be the winner, of everything, from bread to sexuality, power and resources — this empty feeling turns a whole lot of men towards the macho preachers of hate and supremacy, to reclaim some sense of all that lost purpose at all.