Whatever the causes, it is complicated, and can be a difficult subject to address. As Kathleen Stock observes,

Talking honestly about the explosion of mental health conditions is intimidating, not least because of the numbers of outraged people steaming in to protest about imagined accusations of hypochondria or malingering. Yet, the observation that psychological conditions can ripple across populations like wind through wheat, being especially susceptible to social influences, is compatible with debilitating dysfunction and awful suffering happening at the individual level. There’s no split between “real” mental health disorders and culturally porous ones. The latter — which includes the vast majority of them — are as real as any other. And the suffering they bring feels the same from the inside, no matter what the source.

The suffering is real but the paradox has often been pointed out: objectively we live safer, healthier, wealthier lives than has been the case for the vast majority of people throughout the long history of the human race. Yet we are in the grip of unprecedented emotional anguish. What explains this?

While much attention has been paid recently to the role of the smart phone, there are, surely, larger considerations in play. The past two centuries of industrialisation have witnessed us engaging in a mass experiment in reorganising human patterns of living. It is not impossible that these changes have had a profound psychological impact, which could help explain the current surge in mental health issues. If we are living in ways that humanity has not yet had time to adapt to it would be unsurprising if our mental health were negatively impacted.

Here are four key transitions in the shift from traditional to technological society which I think help explain our emotional discombobulation.

Too much of our own faces
Two hundred years ago no one really knew what they looked like. It is only 190 years since silvered glass mirrors were invented. Prior to that mirrors were rare, and imperfect. Most people would have gone through life without ever seeing an accurate image of their own face. Today, mirrors are ubiquitous. The old saying that you are never more than six feet from a rat is less true than that we are now never more than six feet from a mirror.

This constant referencing of our own faces has only been accelerated, first by the invention of the camera, and then by the reversible camera on our phones and the cameras on our computers. Whether taking selfies or participating in online meetings, we look at ourselves constantly.

Unlike anyone born before 1850 the face we are most familiar with is our own. What has this done to us?

Too much, too fast
It was not until the 1830s that steam locomotives were capable of travelling faster than the horse. Prior to that no one had travelled faster than horse-pace. Life was slow. Now life is fast – both in terms of the actual speed at which trains, planes and automobiles enable us to move, and even more, at the rate that information is expanding.

Technology writer Kevin Kelly says that information is expanding at the rate of a nuclear explosion. That’s too much, too fast.

The diminishment of male-female distinction
The move from traditional to technological patterns of living has permitted (and at times forced) a reduction in the distinctions between men and women. Despite the ‘patriarchy paradox’ which sees the sexes grouping around stereotypically defined work preferences in societies with high levels of sexual equality (engineering in Sweden being dominated by men, nursing by women), there no longer exist defined areas of male and female occupation. In a technological society everyone is just a cog in the machine. Ability is considered more significant than given social position rooted in gender. 

Alongside this we see the shrinking of the domestic sphere. The economy no longer centres around the household but is outsourced to the state, business and industry. In economies centred around the household men and women have clear social position and roles. There is a division of labour, grounded in sex, which is not the case in technological societies.

This is also witnessed in the feminization of education. In traditional societies women are primarily involved in the raising and training of girls, men in the raising and training of boys. In modern technological societies education is largely performed by women – certainly in primary education where it is not unusual for a boy to progress though several years of schooling with no male teaching.

The diminishment of physical labour
In traditional societies most people are engaged in physical labour. Technological society ‘saves’ us from that. While this makes life easier it does not necessarily make us happier. We might be safer and healthier than our labouring forebears but we are all too familiar with the dangers of sedentary living. So we engage in what are essentially pointless physical activities – lifting weights in a gym is all very well but it doesn’t accomplish anything in the way that lifting stones to build a wall would. Going for a run is all very well but participants simply end up where they started with nothing to actually show for it. Or, most pointless of all, running on a treadmill.

In technological societies we use our heads rather than our bodies, but our bodies are still with us. If our bodies are unhappy then our heads tend to be as well.

Almost all human history and experience has been in a world where we didn’t know our own faces, things moved slowly, men and women had clear social roles and most people were involved in hours of physical daily labour. All that has changed, very quickly. Is it any wonder there is so much emotional whiplash?

Unless we choose to go the route of the Amish (a choice that is in reality an impossibility for most of us) how are we to live so as to minimise the whiplash of these changes? As in all things, the gospel shows us a way.

Focus on another face
God has given us the light of the knowledge of His glory displayed in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Whether we seek enlightenment (the Jewish worldview), knowledge (the Greek worldview) or glory (the Roman worldview), the fulfilment of our search can only be met in Christ. We need to spend less time looking at our own faces and more time searching after His. Only in turning out from ourselves and towards Him can we find what the human heart most longs for. Truly, our souls are restless until they find their rest in Him. Our restless, self-focused, age finds its antidote in the face of Christ.

Move at the pace of family
In our accelerating world having children slows us down. As anyone who has ever wrestled a toddler into a car seat or needed to get a teenager out of the door knows, being in a family means slowing down. This can cause great frustration. It is probably part of the reason why so many are remaining childless. But it is good for us. God created us as social beings, not cogs in a machine. If you go for a walk with grannie, you are going to have to slow down.

We are made for family and Christians are adopted into the Lord’s. This is meant to be worked out in full participation in a local church and that means not going at our own pace, or the pace of the world. In the church everyone needs to move together, from little babies to wizened old saints. Very often that means going slower.

Celebrate God-given distinctives
In technological, meretricious, societies it is skill that determines our position, at least in theory. We all know that ‘who you know’ still counts for a lot, and there are reasons that candidates in the current contest to be deputy leader of the Labour Party have to be female. But we have come a very long way from the sexual division of labour evident in traditional societies.

Throughout scripture the principle of male headship, in the church and in the home, is demonstrated, taught and expected. This creates tensions in the church in a technological society and is why such a significant portion of the church has abandoned this aspect of the Bible’s teaching. (Although saying that reveals something of a blind spot towards Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic church.)

As Stephen Clark observes in his definitive Man and Woman In Christ,

A pressure is exerted against all social roles in technological society, with the result that many traditional social roles begin to look more like functional roles. The father-son relationship is one example. Another example can be found in the role of the Christian pastor. One reason that modern Christians have a difficulty in understanding the meaning of “elder” or “pastor” in the New Testament is their tendency to see the position as a set of functions to be performed in a social institution rather than as a role of leadership and care in a communal relationship.

When a role is about function, it doesn’t matter whether the person doing it is male or female - but that isn’t actually how God created us, and it is not how human society has ever operated until just yesterday.

We need to learn to think in biblical, social categories, more than in technological, functional, ones. That is hard to do. That the Lord may have created men for certain roles and women for others outrages the modern mind but ignoring that reality is not a recipe for long term human flourishing.

Be body conscious
Every follower of Jesus is included in His body, and that body is meant to work (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). Our physical bodies are included in this as through them we are
to know and glorify God.

As we read scripture we see a great deal of bodily exertion in God’s service and worship. There is dancing, bowing, kneeling and the raising of hands. There is training like an athlete or boxer. There is walking incredible distances in pursuit of the mission. There is washing of others’ feet. There is feeding of the hungry and care of the sick. 

We need to use our bodies. Works of service, prayer walking, getting out into nature and using it as fuel for worship – all these and other activities are ways in which we can find a greater connection and integrity between the spiritual and physical. Appropriate bodily exertions is a means of pulling our emotions into line.

It is through the ageless gospel and in the eternal church that we can find the tools and context to withstand the emotional whiplash created by the technological society. It is by obedience to Jesus that we can be helped through our suffering.