Show and tell: Why Anxiety is the new villain

Pixar Animation Studios is breathing a sigh of relief. After the failure of Lightyear and the gingerly success of Elemental, its latest release, Inside Out 2, has turned out to be 2024’s biggest blockbuster yet, raking in $1.26 billion so far.
 

Inside Out 2 is a sequel to a 2015 coming-of-age drama about the personified emotions inside the mind of a young girl named Riley. In the new flick, Riley has hit puberty and is facing a fresh set of emotions. The ringleader of those antagonistic emotions is Anxiety.

Depicted as a dainty, shrivelled, orange-skinned girl, Anxiety by no means looks like the lead antagonist of a Hollywood blockbuster. But we must not judge the book by its cover. Anxiety, when it gets into action, is unknowingly sinister, quite like in real life.

Pixar knows anxiety well enough. This is a studio that has seen towering success since its inception, rarely misreading the pulse of its audience. Directors and writers at Pixar spend years in the development phase of a movie, churning out iteration after iteration in a time-consuming and exorbitant process.

“There is a cost associated with exploring ideas, writing scripts, storyboarding images, and doing it all over and over again. But the costs of iterations are relatively low... Production is where the costs explode,” write Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner about
Pixar, in their book, How Big Things Get Done. Of late, it was not quite paying off for the studio. Pixar was, so to speak, facing its own anxieties.
 

So when Pixar chose to make Anxiety the lead antagonist in the mind of a teenage girl, the studio knew it would resonate. And it has.

But why? Why are kids anxious? Why are we all anxious?

Some answers probably lie in the recently-released book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, written by Jonathan Haidt, an American social psychologist who teaches at the New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Haidt talks about the two big mistakes parents have made in the last couple of decades — they have overprotected children in the real world, where they need to learn from vast amounts of direct experience, and they have under-protected them online, where they are particularly vulnerable during puberty — which have given birth to this “anxious generation”.

“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and unsuitable for children and adolescents,” Haidt states.

Avoid the physical world, embrace the virtual world, is what the parents have inadvertently taught their kids. It has rewired their brains. Meanwhile, the rates of depression and anxiety among adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the United States nearly doubled between 2010 and 2019.

Among various measures, Haidt recommends no smartphones before high school and more unstructured free play for children to deal with this issue.

Riley, who is 13 years of age, has a smartphone in the movie. She plays ice hockey, but not in a “free” or “unstructured” manner.

Do parents around us understand the gravity of the issue? It is unclear. One thing is certain though: The act of handing over an iPad to a two-year-old just so she would stop crying is not as innocuous as it looks. But it is not as if adults are doing any better.

Just observe the number of times your attention has gone to your social media apps while reading this column. People holding face-to-face conversations, without checking their smartphones once every minute, is a thing of the past.

We are all anxious.

We are all hooked to the next ping.

This is very much Anxiety’s world now. She is the new villain. With artificial intelligence rising, and preparing itself to invade more of our physical spaces, the new antagonist is only going to get bigger and stronger.