The 'Anxiety Economy' Is Booming

But technology is not neutral. Indeed, it can serve to amplify this instinct. A tracking app like Life360 sells you peace of mind, but it can also create new anxieties. If your child's location dot pauses for ten minutes, you might feel compelled to check, to call, or to worry. The reassurance is real, but so is the unease.

The illusion of control offered by these products gives us the sense that monitoring reduces risk, when in fact it can serve to increase our dependence on the technology. In fact, some research suggests that the harder we try to suppress anxiety, the worse it becomes .

Anxiety often presents as a vague unease. The genius of marketing lies in giving that unease a focus; for example, your home might not be safe , your child might not be learning enough , or your skin might not be radiant enough.

Once the unease is named, a product can be offered as the solution. In the contemporary and commercial world, consumer products become the“fixes” that we use to defend ourselves from this constant instability.

Parenting is one area of life that marketers have been able to exploit with products to both relieve and reinforce those fears.

The“guilty mum” trope captures the way marketing exploits the gap between the actual self (“I can't always be there for my child”) and the ought/ideal self (“a good mum should always know and protect.”)

That gap produces guilt, which ultimately creates demand for products such as baby monitors, organic snacks, and tracking apps. And while the relief is genuine, it is temporary, because the underlying self-discrepancy remains.

This helps to explain why facts rarely calm us. Statistically, most children are safer today than at almost any time in history, with lower mortality rates, less violence and better health care.

Yet we are drawn to extreme and noticeable events, a bias that makes threats stand out more vividly than the quieter, more ordinary evidence of safety. And because parents do not feel safer , marketers can take advantage of this gap between facts and feelings.

This is why calling it an“anxiety economy” is not hyperbole. Economies emerge when a resource can be cultivated, extracted, exchanged, and scaled. Companies identify new triggers for anxiety, create tools to manage them, and sustain the unease they claim to solve.

Algorithms then capitalize on this fear by testing millions of tiny interventions to determine which notifications, prompts and stories most effectively push our emotional buttons. By agreeing to the terms and conditions , we become part of a larger corporate consumer behavior experiment.

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The concern with these apps is not that they are inherently bad. In fact, they can and do provide a degree of comfort. However, the deeper issue is when the exploitation of anxiety becomes normalized.

Once we believe in the necessity of monitoring, it becomes difficult to resist. These convictions are initially framed through the commercial lens built around personal choice , but bleed into daily routines and eventually become part of the economy.

So, while the chief executive of Life360 may have been unusually unguarded, her statement raises a deeper question: do we want a society that commercialises fear? Anxiety is a universal human emotion, yet choosing to exploit it for profit is entirely cultural.

Markets do not care for us as people do. When even the financial press casually describes investment in a company like Life360 as a“lucrative roller-coaster”, it is worth pausing to ask whether we want investment markets and economies that reward the monetization of anxiety.

Paul Harrison is director, Master of Business Administration Program (MBA); co-director, Better Consumption Lab, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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