Lao Tzu said this in 525 BC when anxiety didn’t yet define an entire age of human existence.

But as temperatures boil over actually and politically, what has us in its thrall isn’t anxiety, but high anxiety. How else to describe Umair Haque’s mordant prediction that We’re Not Going to Make It to 2050. Or even the “best of times, worst of times” predictor, Max Fisher writing in The New York Times, who asked: “Has the world entered a time of unusual turbulence, or does it just feel that way?”