Pretty much everyone is a worrier. It's 2019, it's not viewed as socially cool not to be a stress head anymore. We're all ridden with anxiety, fear and have washing machine brains which spin at top speed every second of every day, propelling 'what ifs' around our heads.
It's a natural human trait to worry and anyone who is the happy-go-lucky type or able to compartmentalise their worries from everyday activities is automatically perceived as abnormal. It's become normal, in fact, to fear the future, to stress over the mundane things and to live your life so anxious of what could possibly be around the corner, even if you don't know an outcome is actually certain, that you're unable to live in the moment and appreciate life for what it is.

There's nothing wrong with worrying, of course, it's a very valid emotion and, what with Donald Trump in power, our natural environment crumbling beneath us as a ramification of global warming and constant attacks on the human rights of minorities, worrying about life seems more justified than ever before. We have every right to panic because we just don't know what boulder life is going to hurl at us next. And perhaps that's what has generated this age of worriers, the fact that we're all so culturally aware, well most of us are anyway. The fact that none of us can seem to switch off because we're too invested in, not just politics, but everything happening in society that could require a response or cause conflict. Thanks to social media and news being delivered to us in such a fast way now, we're all so conscious of the sorry state of our surroundings, our governments, our communities, that we can't turn our backs on it. We can't push social issues to the back of our minds because we are all so much more understanding now of the consequences of ignoring them. We're on guard 24/7, which has resulted in a generation of anxiety filled humans who are no longer just worrying about their own everyday problems, but are stressing, sometimes even more so, over the larger scale issues that, most of the time we have no physical control over yet feel a duty to resolve.

However, when it comes to everyday life, I think it's a fair observation that we waste so much time pondering what could happen, rather than simply accepting what is happening. From the moment we wake to the moment we go to sleep again at night, even without social media and the daily news in the equation, we're stressing. Whether that's because of our jobs, other people's problems or because, often, life can just get a little bit too much. It can be overwhelming, this whole existing thing. Everyone's constantly demanding stuff from you, having expectations, forcing decisions onto you and, somewhere in the middle of all that, you're supposed to figure out who you are, what you want and where you want to be. It's exhausting, particularly now the gateposts seem to have moved and there's an overwhelming pressure to have your whole life plan configured by the time you're out of your teens. This can lead to us feeling so lost as we're trying to experiment with different experiences whilst simultaneously being shoved down a singular path. It can lead to us overexerting ourselves because we're trying to adhere to commands and expectations and juggle all of our personal worries at the same time. It can lead to so much stress because we're comparing where we are to where others are and harbouring feelings of despondence and deflation when we aren't where we want to be sooner than planned. It can lead to so much fear of failure and never achieving happiness or being good enough. We're spending our lives worrying about our circumstances and having a detrimental impact on our own mental well-being in the process. Worrying solves nothing, and because most of us nowadays are so self-aware, we know that, but we continue to do it anyway. We continue to watch ourselves self-destruct because we're so afraid of pressing pause.