How About "No?"

From The Week's Saturday Wrap for June 21st, 2025.

It's a common enough question: "Should we be worried?" But I don't understand how it's a useful one. I've seen a lot of media stories about the effects of social media on teenagers, citing studies that seeks to establish a causal relationship between spending time on TikTok or Instagram and increases in anxiety, depression and other markers of poor mental health. A habit of "doomscrolling" is listed as a common culprit, but as the definition suggests, one can doomscroll perfectly well outside of social media.

I'm aware that I've written about this topic previously, and I realize that I'm swimming against a fairly strong tide here; using the formulation "Should we be worried" or something similar as a way of conveying the seriousness of a topic to the audience is as firmly entrenched in style guides as the "get passive." But I'm still of the opinion that this phrasing, especially when there is no pushback against it in the article itself, acts to increase anxiety to no good end.

The roundup from The Week that I'm using as my example here notes that:

Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who refused to sign a non-disparagement agreement when he resigned from the company in April, foresees “something like a 70% chance” that AI will catastrophically harm—or even wipe out—humanity.

I can see that raising some people's blood pressure, and the irrelevant mention of "a non-disparagement agreement" hints that OpenAI thinks of Mr. Kokotailo's foresight as something more than simply one opinion among many.

In the end, I understand the impulse; to prepare people for something that may be coming down the pike, but the journalists doing the writing don't have any concrete ideas for what those people may be able to do to prepare themselves. And so they fall back on "informing" people, and calling it a day. But it's difficult for people to, as Katherine Wu might say: "React wisely and react sensibly and use the tools we have," when there's no indication in a piece as to what a wise or sensible reaction might be and what tools are at the collective disposal. And people are left to wait in fear that they'll eventually get steamrolled by something they can't control and can't accept.