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“I’m scared,” the student said to her classmates

Francisco Miraval

At the beginning of every school year, the proverbial butterflies return to my stomach due to that mix of anxiety and anticipation created by not knowing who will be in my class and how the students will react when I tell them I am their professor. Obviously, students experience similar fears, especially during their first year in college.

Therefore, I was not surprised when a young student said to her classmates the first day of classes that she was scared. More experienced students shared some good advice about how to handle that fear.

One student told her it was normal to be scare when you are facing the transition for being a teenager to being an adult. Another student suggested to remain calm and live a day at a time. A third student said the key to reduce anxiety is to be organized, for example, keeping a calendar of the deadlines for all the assignments.

The student said that this is her first year in college and that she recently moved to a new home. Those changes affected her, yet, she said, her fear was not related to entering a new time in her life or to facing a college career.

She was scared, she said, not because of her present, but because of her future or, better said, because of the future of humankind. Thinking about a future that she described as “unthinkable” and “unavoidable” created such a level of anxiety that she decided not to think about the future.

Contrary to what happened to the generations who grew up in the second half of the 20th century, when they expected an atomic war to destroy the whole world, this young student is afraid not that the world will end, but that the world will continue.

In fact, she said, if you know the world is about to end, then you can at least prepare yourself to the best of your ability for such an undesirable event. But what can you do to prepare yourself for a future you can’t even imagine? That’s why she was so scared, she explained.

She became aware of her fear, she said, when in the middle of so many changes in her life, she had a conversation with her mother when her mother mentioned how many things had change in the world since the time that she (the mother) was about the age her daughter is now.

Projecting those changes into the future, the young student concluded that, thanks to modern technology, we are going to see faster, deeper, more numerous, and irreversible changes to the point that she will probably be unable to understand those changes and, therefore, to enjoy that future, similarly to what she sees in her mother when the mother interacts with modern technology.

Can anybody really live, grow, study, mature, and reach his/her potential living in constant fear of the future? And what kind of future are we building if our young students are already afraid of it?

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