Our Era of Insecurity

In 2025, I’ve interviewed a number of people who saw themselves as living in “survival mode.” At first, their professions might surprise you. They are government contractors, public broadcasters, and tech workers, formerly safe professions. And some of their jobs disappeared this year due to DOGE “efficiency” cuts, the dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and AI acceleration. They are among the millions now living through an experience that I call terra infirma, a new level of economic and social uncertainty.

It’s the mood that encapsulates so much of Trump 2.0. A November 2025 Pew study found that almost half of U.S. adults are uncertain about having enough retirement income. When it comes to health insurance, they may be waiting for their ACA health subsidies to sunset or for their partner’s premiums to skyrocket. Addressing unaffordability and uncertainty is even the newest theme song in politics, most recently in the Maine campaign of gubernatorial candidate, oyster farmer and military veteran Graham Platner.

Seventy years ago, the critic Raymond Williams used the term “structure of feeling” to describe a collective emotion that is tied to a time and place, as well as social and economic conditions. Today, our “structure of feeling” is uncertainty. You could even take it further, and call “precarity” the last monoculture as it’s a condition shared by so many Americans. As Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, says, insecurity is a “defining feature of our time.”

As far as mass moods go, “insecurity” is certainly a disconcerting one. The economist Pranab Bardhan writes in A World of Insecurity, that “insecurity, more than inequality, agitates people.” What makes 2025 different from other years, however, is the degree to which we all experienced this precarity. The usual uncertainty level has been turned up from a whine to a 135-decibel air raid scream.

What’s happened? Tariffs have raised our costs. Medicaid will be scaled back over the next decade by a trillion dollars. Meanwhile, dozens of Venezuelan fishermen have been exploded by our armed forces. And while two-thirds of Americans are already living with economic insecurity, their feelings about it don’t necessarily involve the discrepancy between their lot and those of the very rich. As Steven Semler, the co-founder of Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI), explains it to me, these Americans have a mindset that “is more fearful of poverty than aspirations of being a millionaire.”

The people of terra infirma do describe such fears. In the words of one, they’ve experienced a “mental health decline and a loss of purpose” and in another, “a serious financial pinch”, because they are their family’s main breadwinner. Uncertainty is the common refrain of the growing number of laid-off software workers, according to Human-Centered Design scholar Samuel So. In addition to feeling destabilized about their professional security for the first time, software workers have experienced disillusionment and alienation from the technology industry’s “military and police partnerships.”

Jobs themselves are part of this insecurity, with never-ending hiring processes, the race of automation, and ghost jobs, the twisted contemporary version of the perished Russian serfs of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, except now professional opportunities are offered that don’t actually exist. People are also nervous about their future, because insecurity is a temporal emotion, as much about the future as the present. Many of us wonder how our security will further erode, as our health plan premiums soar, or as our subways catch on fire, or as ICE comes to our cities. This causes not only stress in the moment, but discomfort about what lies ahead.

Of course, it’s not just Trump 2.0 alone that has caused this. The forces behind Trump’s win in 2024—and the anger at the traditional Democratic party—have something to do with this disposition, as well. In the weeks leading up to Trump’s election, people surveyed by the Federal Reserve Board ranked one of their top concerns as pricing and their top concern as inflation. Disparate phenomena—AI slop, job cuts, relentless and confusing cutbacks in crucial academic research—are entwined. It’s as if they were all figures in a paranoiac Thomas Pynchon novel. In a “world of insecurity,” as economist Bardhan writes, instabilities interlink. In other words, what I think of as “informational insecurity”—bots, false ads, fake news—often joins up with economic instability.

These different instances of confusion and instability blend into a gnarly color wheel of distress. Economic distress, sure—that is also accentuated by societal, cultural, environmental, and physical examples of insecurity we see all around us, every day.

How do we pick apart these knotted-together insecurities? For starters, we can embrace candidates who address economic uncertainty head-on, including New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, and Virginia’s governor-elect Abigail Spanberger. These politicians, as Nicholas Jacobs has written of Maine candidate Platner, are “speaking to grievances that are real, measurable, and decades in the making.”

Another line of defense is being brave and grasping for community in any way we can. I think of the ordinary people blowing whistles near Chicago to alert their neighbors when ICE showed up in their suburban towns: they were accidental upstanders, refusing to be part of manufactured uncertainty and instability.

One traditional definition of security is “freedom from fear.” And while we are unlikely to experience that freedom from fear as long as the populist American Right continues its goosestep, it’s also important to remember that uncertainty, like any “structure of feeling,” is an unfinished emotion.

Yes, insecurity shapes us now. But we, as a collective, are so much more than it. Because even if we are living in a time of such negative uncertainty, it won’t necessarily stay that way. We can still redefine ourselves and, most importantly, recognize we are not alone.