St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, Epc

I’m noticing a rising trend of people willing to publicly broadcast their struggles with anxiety. This was once a hush-hush condition, but today a Google search of TED talks on anxiety produces 340,000 results. Teenagers talk openly about their anxiety as if it were akin to acne – unwanted, but basically unavoidable. “Pop a Xanax” is becoming a common and often lighthearted prescription for just about any level of emotional discomfort. This uptick is actually not too surprising, given the kind of society in which we live. An entire population of deeply anxious individuals is just one of the logical conclusions of a capitalistic society.Let me explain: in our free market, the work of the advertiser is to actually create a tension in the consumer that only the purchasing of their product can relieve. The wildly successful AMC series Mad Men was based on this idea and its consequences. Fear mongering is at work underneath not only toothpaste and auto sales, but also cable news channels and educational choices. W