The Age of Unspoken Anxiety

But It Ain't All Bad

(Photo credit: Dmitrii Shirnin: Unsplash)

Something is shifting - and most of us can feel it.

We may not talk about it openly. We might not even know how. But behind closed doors, at dinner tables and in texts between friends, a quiet thread runs through the conversation. Something feels off. Not just politically, or economically, or environmentally - but existentially.

We live in the age of unspoken anxiety.

It’s not just the headlines. It’s not just the climate, or war, or the latest constitutional fracture - a move by a politician that undoes something we’ve considered inviolable all our lives. It’s the sense that, somehow, everything is being held together with invisible string - and that the string is fraying.

This is not just a UK story. Or a US story. Or a Western story. It’s global. And, I think, it runs so deep that it’s beyond psychological - it’s actually psychic. Something about the way we’re living no longer feels sustainable. Our systems - financial, political, technological - are mutating faster than our minds can adapt. What once felt like stability now feels like inertia. More than that, even. What once passed for normal now feels uncanny.

And that’s the psychic part. We don’t know what’s coming, but we know in our bones something is.

And yet - here’s the paradox - this isn't necessarily a reason to despair. What if this isn’t just collapse? What if it’s prelude? To something better - an awakening, perhaps.

Why I am I talking about this now? In part, because I’ve been feeling it. In part, because I’ve been writing about it.

In The Light Beyond The Mountains, the book I’ve been serialising every fortnight, I’ve been exploring consciousness, anomalies and, lately, some of the darker elision points between them - not least, the UFO/UAP enigma. Much of this stuff is pretty hard to discuss in polite Western society - or with friends, even.

Despite the evidence for what I’d call a ‘thinning of the veil’ - a sense that reality right now feels indefinably ‘off’ - it’s easier for us to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it all away. Stick to what feels ‘normal’.

But normal, suddenly, is no refuge - normal feels pretty damn out of whack.

Lately, two different groups I’m close to have been talking about this - which is when I realised, it wasn’t just me.

First, a group of my children’s friends. My kids and their peer group are Millennials and should be filled with optimism about the life that lies ahead of them. But for them there is, apparently, this quiet sense of dread. When I asked some of them about this recently, one said: “I - we - get this sense that there’s something coming. It’s a feeling and most of us can’t put our finger on it - it might be good, it might be bad, but we sense it. It’s with us all the time.”

The second group, surprisingly, revealed itself through a discussion with close friends - people, like us, who are fortunate, for the most part, to be weighed down with nothing more burdensome than the usual middle-class preoccupations - how much it costs to heat your home, the price of food, can I afford to go on that big summer holiday this year?

But these friends started to articulate many of the same anxieties that had been preoccupying the Millennials I’d talked to in my snap poll a week earlier. Overriding it was the same sense: ‘There’s something coming, we don’t know what,” my friend said, “but I feel it - here.’ And at that, he pointed to his midriff - this was a gut-driven thing, he said.

It turns out, we are not alone.

In a piece posted late last month on LinkedIn, Why Well-Off Brits Know Collapse Is Coming - and Still Stay Silent, Rob Harrison-Plastow captures something rarely articulated: that this growing, ambient dread isn’t just about external events. It’s about the internal dissonance those events trigger. The deep mismatch between how we live and what we sense we’re meant to become.

We’ve built lives on distraction, convenience, certainty. But now the scaffolding is shaking, and we’re being asked - implicitly, urgently - to look beneath it.

This is the deeper terrain we don’t yet have language for. Because what we’re experiencing isn’t just political decay or economic volatility. It’s a crisis of meaning.

The rules we were raised with - about progress, security, identity - aren’t matching the world we’re actually living in.

And in that mismatch, something stirs: anxiety, yes. But also the potential for something else.

Because collapse, historically - if this is what that unspoken dread is all about - isn’t always an ending. Sometimes, it’s a breaking open, the rupture that lets new light in.

Many people sense this, even if they don’t say it out loud. It’s there in our dreams, on quiet walks, or in the sudden urge to turn off the news. There’s a reason breathwork, psychedelics, meditation and energy healing are now part of the mainstream conversation. We are starting, haltingly, to look beyond the systems we were told would save us.

Because it very much looks like they won’t - not in their current form. And maybe they’re not meant to.

Maybe the sense of impending collapse is less about everything ending - and more about everything becoming visible. Maybe the real breakdown is the crumbling of the illusions we built to avoid asking who we really are, and what we’re really doing here.

Because who we really are isn’t just biology, or a set of social roles, or data points on a graph. It’s something deeper - something we often lose sight of in the noise of daily life. And yet, even now, under growing pressure from political, geopolitical and economic instability, cultural division, and a general sense of unease, there’s something in many of us that knows: this isn’t the full picture.

Something is shifting, and you don’t have to believe in anything mystical to feel it. People are having stronger intuitions. Noticing strange coincidences. Picking up on signals they can’t quite explain. It’s not always dramatic - but it’s there. A sense that, beneath the surface, something is changing.

That change may come with discomfort. Systems sometimes need to break before they can be rebuilt. Crises can force us to look at what we’ve ignored or denied. This moment might be one of those times - a kind of turning point. And maybe that’s why the pressure feels so intense: it’s part of the process.

The controls are tightening, yes. But there’s also something else coming through. You can sense it if you step back from the noise: a kind of signal in the static. Something asking different questions. Offering a different direction. And that thing - whatever it is - is something we can be thankful for.

Not everyone will notice. Not everyone will act on it. But those who do might find that this isn’t just a time of collapse, but of re-alignment. Of remembering what matters. Of re-connecting with something we’ve long forgotten - not just about the world, but about ourselves.

Because we’re not separate from any of this. We’re part of it. Connected across boundaries we don’t fully understand. And what’s ahead of us isn’t just survival. It’s a chance to wake up. To pay attention. And maybe - even now - to find our way back to something that was always waiting for us.

These are some of the themes that The Light Beyond The Mountains delves into as we enter its final section - a race to the end I am particularly interested, indeed excited to explore.