I think you need to revise your baseline age way up from 40.
Others have said it other ways. I’m going to say it my way.
It seems to me the 40 to 60 cohort is the group where you start seeing the jaded view of violence and death. We are the people who fought through 20 years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, etc. We are saddened and upset yes, because we shared, in part, the vision of the future of those who came before us. Not because of the violence per se, but because of the loss of what we were hoping for, were so close to we could see it and almost touch it, and in fact for one glorious moment we thought we had it in our hands. Only now we have nothing but the ashes and ruin and things are worse than they were before because now the dream is shattered. Those of us 40 to 60 aren’t shaken, we’re disillusioned and angry.
That is a good explanation. I’m an old guy (in 60s). Due to this I can claim experience at both ends – I’ve been young and old. Anecdotally, I will say I definitely fear things like personal attacks and crime far more than in my youth. Back in the day, hanging around with 10 of my oil-rig coworkers, I was in little danger of being mugged or attacked by a criminal. Today, with various health problems, age and usually alone or with my wife – there is no way I could fight off an aggressor.
World-level events like terror attacks, huge political changes or tsunamis have almost no effect on me and my acquaintances (beyond regret that it happened). They don’t affect my day to day activities beyond possible investment changes. This isn’t a political statement, but the 2016 Trump election had zero apparent effects on my older coworkers at work. We all came in for work, did our stuff, went to lunch, and few even mentioned it. The younger workers were literally freaked out, as though their world had changed overnight.
From my POV, the OP is partially correct. The oldsters around me are more likely to be affected by local things like crime, than by distant stuff like terror attacks.
I’m 64. I did not grow up with all this global, instantaneous news. The Internet gives it to you as it happens, in great graphic detail.
It’s been pointed out that about every forty years society goes through a major upheaval. Certainly true for the 1960’s and 9/11. Living through one upheaval is hard, through two of them is really bad.
I now tell young people “The world you grew up in is not the world you grow old in.”
That’s my guess as well. Just looking at my parents who are in their early-mid 70s, they’ve become more concerned about security and safety than they’ve ever been in the past. Not quite to the point of paranoia, but enough that political nonsense about how unsafe the city/state/country is hits home with them a lot more than it used to, and this is despite both of their children being middle-aged and competent.
So all I can really surmise is that this is a matter of personal insecurity, and most likely due to infirmity and age, and worrying about how relatively vulnerable they feel as a result.
Beyond that, I think there’s a pretty good sense of disillusionment that was brought on by the post-war boom/space program/belief in scientific progress in the 1950s and 1960s when they were young that seemed to point toward a coming golden age, if not utopia, and then over the course of the next half-century, we suffered economic shocks, but we "won’ the Cold War, but ended up in something arguably worse, with renewed Great Power competition, jerkish foreign governments (Russia and China) fucking with the US just short of actual fighting, and internal political upheaval with both parties becoming more polarized and withdrawing from the center. And fueling it all is the Internet, which is something most of them only have a limited understanding about, and that they either irrationally fear, or have way too much trust in.
So today’s circumstances are NOT what they were lead to believe would happen in the future, and are much more scary and uncertain than they’d hoped for.
It doesn’t do any good to come up with explanations for something without first establishing that the “something” even exists. I work in a high school and I will strongly dispute the notion that younger people are less easily jarred than older. I see students worried that things they’ve seen in the news will (not just could) happen to them all the time.
It depends what one means by “younger people”. I don’t think Feldon meant to focus on high schoolers anymore than on pre-schoolers even though they’re all “younger people”.
I’m gonna be a broken record and say that high schoolers’ brains aren’t done developing, especially the prefrontal cortex which is the last to fully finish forming around age 25. Homicide rates start dropping off past 25 Murder in the U.S.: number of offenders by age 2022 | Statista
I am “only” 58, but I have a lot of friends in their 60s and 70s, and I regularly volunteer at an old people’s home. My experience is quite different from the OP. The older folk I encounter are nowhere near as attuned to the latest unpleasantness than folk my age or younger.
My guess (since we are all just hypothesizing with ZERO data) is that the older folk I encounter feel they are secure enough, and isolated enough, that they don’t really need to been too concerned other than to essentially “tsk tsk” over “how things are these days.” Having raised their kids, and retired from the work force, they also might feel less “responsibility” for having contributed to the society in which such things are happening. They basically view themselves as bystanders/observers, rather than active participants.
However, my WAG is that folk my age or slightly younger may feel personally “responsible” for shit that is going down “on our watch.” The politicians enacting policies are the one we elected, and our contemporaries have the majority of positions of power in dominant industries/organizations/etc. If the world we are “presiding” over is worse than we inherited - oughtn’t we feel some responsibility? And oughtn’t we feel guilt over handing a mess over to the next generations? We are in a position of feeling we ought to either propose solutions, or acknowledge that we are obsolete.
Finally, I offer another WAG that younger folk are MORE affected by dramatic events, due to their higher level of consumption of social media, as well as what I perceive is a desire to feel “connected” in some way to events they experience vicariously through media.
Anecdatal set of one, but my stepdad seems to be be a representative model of what I see in his cohort.
After a lifetime of thinking he was a badass, my dad is feeling frail now. He’s functionally blind, anyone with 2 legs can outrun him, and anyone who can withstand 1-2 punches could outfight him. After decades of feeling invincible*, he’s afraid of his physical limitations. He never bothered to be anything more than his physical self - never read for any reason except an assignment, no hobbies, never engaged in anything more imaginative than going dancing.
And today, he spends his time listening to media he engages with emotionally. Football season is a relief, because he gets irrational about whether a teenager missed a tackle. The rest of the year is anger about whatever Faux News is angry about.
He’s scared of everything these days, because he feels vulnerable.
*Coal miner, sailor, trucker. Never learned to moderate anything. Totes a felony because he assaulted a cop who deserved the broken nose, and wasn’t patient enough to let an attorney make his case.
My kids had an active shooter drill at school last week. The 9yo isn’t sleeping well.
I have issues when the gun lobby believes that their rights are more important than her need to feel secure at school. Nothing in the wording of the second amendment says that we can’t regulate ownership to exclude the bugfucking crazy.