One of the consequences of an individualist society such as ours, a society in which each of us is expected to forge her own identity according to her own lights, is that we feel what the sociologist Norbert Elias called “pressure for foresight,” the compulsion (perhaps a better translation of Elias’s German) to look ahead into a future for which we must plan, but which—the future being the future—we cannot see. That is why some therapists who work with young people today say that the single greatest source of stress and anxiety for them is the sheer number of choices they have before them,
...more
