Eco-Anxiety: The Billion-Pound Industry Built on Your Fear of the Future.
They need you anxious. Here's why.
They say every day is another day in the school of life. Well, I learned something new this morning that I’d never heard of before. And it grated on me to the point where I had to investigate further.
I’m lying in bed. The radio is on — because that’s what I do in the pre-breakfast hours when the rest of the world is still pretending to be asleep. A presenter, in that particular tone of careful, therapeutic seriousness that daytime radio has perfected, is taking a phone-in from someone who cannot work.
Not because of illness. Not because of injury. Not because of anything that has actually happened to them.
They cannot work because of something called eco-anxiety. Yes, you read that correctly. Eco-anxiety.
I’d never heard of it before. So I dug. And this is what I discovered.
Before we go any further — I’m not here to tell you climate change isn’t real, or that worry about the planet is foolish. It isn’t. Some concern about the world your children inherit is quite valid for a lot of people.
But here’s what my digging uncovered. Eco-anxiety is a construct. It didn’t exist until somebody created a label for it. Before the label, people were just worried. Worry is human. Worry is ancient. And crucially — worry is free. It doesn’t require a professional. It doesn’t generate revenue. It doesn’t build institutions.
Give worry a name? Give it a clinical identity, a diagnostic framework, a support community and a treatment pathway? That’s an acorn. And from small acorns, as we shall see, very large things grow. You know, like an industry?
And here’s the first question I want you to hold — just hold it, don’t answer it yet: who benefits from that person staying exactly where they are?
Cannot. Not can’t — cannot. The full word. No contraction. Already laundered through a doctor’s surgery, a therapist’s notes, a signed piece of paper. By the time it reaches a radio microphone it doesn’t even sound like a choice anymore. It sounds like a diagnosis.
Cannot. As in: the capacity has been removed. As in: there is no door. As in: I am a passenger in my own life and the climate is driving. The formalisation is the point — “cannot” has institutional weight that “can’t” doesn’t carry. It has been processed. Validated. Stamped. The argument is already over before you hear it. The system has spoken.
But strip the formality away. Remove the official packaging. And what are you left with?
Won’t. Don’t. Choose not to. A decision dressed in clinical clothing and handed back to you as a condition.
“Cannot” is the language of the permanently helpless. It closes every exit. It removes agency so completely that the only logical next step is external rescue. A therapist. An organisation. A political movement. Someone to save you from the thing you’ve decided you’re powerless against.
Now here’s the second question — again, just hold it: when did you last use the word “cannot” about something you actually chose NOT to do?
This is a person — an adult, capable of finding the number, dialling in, and waiting on hold long enough to give a coherent interview about their incapacity — who is signed off, unable to function, because of a feeling about something that hasn't happened yet. A projected catastrophe. A future that exists primarily in media coverage, advocacy reports, and the kind of documentary you choose to watch for ninety minutes, feel terrible throughout, then turn off and order a takeaway.
The same person could drop dead from a heart attack next week. Statistically far more likely. Immediate. Concrete. Personally relevant. Zero anxiety about that whatsoever.
So, chronic dread about 2075. Or a heart attack next week? Prioritise.
That asymmetry — chronic dread about 2075, not a flicker of concern about a more likely heart attack, or other fatal outcome — doesn’t happen by accident. It is manufactured. And the manufacturing process involves a great deal of money, a great deal of institutional interest, and almost no scrutiny.
Notice what nobody ever mentions. Not the presenter, in this case. Not the guest. Not the organisations, therapists, or political parties. Nobody mentions that previous generations carried fear about nuclear annihilation, economic collapse, and world war — and went to work anyway. Not because they were stronger. But because nobody had yet told them they couldn’t.
That omission is not accidental. It is load-bearing.
If you’ve ever wondered who actually benefits from a generation living in a permanent state of environmental dread — read on. Because it isn’t the planet.
The numbers don’t add up. That’s the point.
That acorn needs one thing to grow. Numbers. Without numbers there is no scale. Without scale there is no funding. Without funding there is no industry.
So the numbers arrived. And they are something to behold.
Depending on who you ask, eco-anxiety affects anywhere between 5% and 93% of the UK population. Read that again. Five percent. Ninety-three percent. Same country. Same condition. Same year. That’s not a measurement. That’s a raffle.
When any condition produces numbers spanning ninety percentage points, you’re not looking at a medical phenomenon. You’re looking at a methodology problem — someone deciding in advance what answer they want, then designing the question to deliver it.
Third question — hold this one too: if the numbers can be made to say anything, who decides which number gets on the radio?
A 2022 University of Bath study — peer-reviewed, rigorous, independently conducted — found that while over three-quarters of UK adults said they were worried about climate change, only 4.6% reported experiencing clinical climate anxiety. Only fractionally higher than 4% two years earlier.
Contrast that with a poll commissioned by an environmental campaign group, which found 68% of Brits experiencing eco-anxiety. That same poll found eco-anxiety significantly more prevalent among Remain voters than Leave voters — 82% versus 57%.
Stop. Read that statistic slowly. Not once. Twice.
A clinical condition that tracks political affiliation. A medical diagnosis that correlates with how you voted in a referendum a decade ago. If this were a genuine physiological condition — like asthma, or diabetes, or a broken leg — it would not care how you voted. It would not cluster along political fault lines. It would not be twice as prevalent among one half of the electorate as the other.
At what point does the condition stop being a condition and start being a demographic?
Because if your anxiety correlates with your ballot paper rather than your proximity to a flood plain, something other than medicine is doing the diagnosing.
The Bath study found something else. It wasn’t direct personal experience of climate impacts that predicted eco-anxiety. It was media exposure. Storms on television. Heatwaves on social media. Flood footage on repeat. You’re not anxious because the sea is rising outside your window. You’re anxious because the algorithm kept feeding you content about rising seas until the anxiety became its own habit. That’s not illness. That’s programming. And someone wrote the programme.
Here’s what no commissioned poll will ever ask. Whether the people reporting eco-anxiety are better informed about actual climate science than those who aren’t. Whether the anxiety is proportionate to genuine personal risk. Who funded the awareness campaigns that preceded the anxiety spike. Small omissions. Enormous implications.
Is it practical? A condition that cannot be consistently measured, cannot be resolved by individual action, and cannot be cured until a geopolitical problem is solved is not a practical diagnosis. It is a permanent revenue stream.
The acorn has found its soil. Now watch it grow.
So who’s cashing in?
A construct like this doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists within an ecosystem. And every organism in that ecosystem has a reason to want it to survive, grow, and never be cured.
Fourth question — add this to your collection: can you think of a single stakeholder in the eco-anxiety industry whose income goes up when someone recovers?
Keep that one close. We’re coming back to it.
The therapy industry acquires something close to the perfect client. Unlike a phobia with a discrete, treatable object — a spider, a lift, an open space — eco-anxiety cannot be resolved until the planet is saved. The therapist is not racing against a cure. The source of distress is geopolitical, atmospheric, permanently unresolvable. Indefinite sessions. Indefinitely billable. The Climate Psychology Alliance reported as early as 2019 that it was being inundated with requests for therapeutic support. That was before the real growth phase.
The NGO sector gets something more valuable: a pre-radicalised population. People experiencing eco-anxiety aren’t passive — they’re primed for action, ready to channel the dread. Environmental organisations catch that energy, direct it, and fundraise from it simultaneously. The same campaign group that commissioned the 68% poll also published a flow quiz to help you manage your eco-anxiety. They created the presenting problem and supply the product. They complete the circle — and charge you at every point around it.
Ask yourself: when did you last see a campaign group celebrate a member becoming less anxious? When did a fundraising email ever open with “great news — our supporters are feeling much better”?
Academia gets grants. Eco-anxiety has generated entire departments, specialist journals, longitudinal studies, and career-defining professorships. The research reliably concludes that more research is needed. In a funding environment where climate-adjacent work attracts significant institutional support, eco-anxiety sits at a comfortable intersection of the fashionable and the fundable.
The pharmaceutical industry gets a new anxiety population. Medicalise a construct — give it a name, have it recognised by professional bodies, create clinical guidelines — and medication becomes a treatment pathway. The UK mental health market was worth £14.78 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach £19.12 billion by 2033. Eco-anxiety is explicitly cited in market analysis as a growth driver expanding the addressable patient population.
The media gets permanent content. Find a photogenic young person who cannot function. Locate a sympathetic expert. Reference the latest alarming report. Publish. The story refreshes itself with every climate data release, every extreme weather event, every international summit. There is no resolution, because resolution would kill the story.
The Green Party gets a recruitment pipeline. People medicalised into eco-anxiety are politically pre-sold on the idea that only systemic change can save them. The construct positions conventional politics as inadequate and activist politics as therapeutic. Voting Green isn’t just political preference. For the eco-anxious, it becomes self-care.
Now notice what none of these six industries needed to do. None of them conspired. None of them sat in a room and planned this. They didn’t need to. Each simply followed its own institutional incentives to the same destination — a population in permanent, manageable, monetisable distress. You don’t need a conspiracy when the incentive structure does the work. The system isn’t broken. From where they’re standing, it’s functioning perfectly.
Is it logical? Six separate industries. Zero financial incentive to cure. All arriving independently at identical conclusions about what you need. You do the maths.
Six industries. Six income streams. All feeding from the same root system.
Your anxiety. Maintained. Indefinitely.
The sapling is becoming a tree.
Real anxiety doesn’t get a radio slot.
Genuine anxiety disorders are not selective. They do not limit themselves to approved causes. Generalised anxiety disorder does not check whether the object of fear is socially credible before activating. It attaches to anything: the phone ringing, a slight change in a loved one’s tone, a physical sensation the catastrophising mind turns into evidence of terminal illness. It is exhausting, indiscriminate, and deeply unwelcome.
Real anxiety sufferers do not get too many radio slots. They do not always emerge from incapacity to participate in media narratives. They are too depleted.
I know what that depletion looks like. Not from a textbook. From the kind of lived experience that doesn’t come with a diagnosis, a support network, or a flow quiz. The people who genuinely cannot function — cannot in the old sense, before the word got laundered — are not calling radio stations. They’re surviving. Quietly. Without an industry built around them.
That contrast alone should tell you something.
Now look at the language the eco-anxiety movement has built around itself. Helpless. Powerless. Unable to cope. Overwhelmed. Paralysed. These aren’t neutral clinical descriptors — they are a carefully constructed vocabulary of surrender. Every word does the same job: it removes the person further from their own agency and places the solution outside themselves. In a system. In a movement. In a therapist’s room. In a ballot box.
Cannot function. Cannot work. Cannot cope. Cannot see a future.
This is the canopy now. Thick enough to block the light. Dense enough that the people underneath it have forgotten there was ever a sky.
Here’s what nobody in that ecosystem will tell you. You can. You’re choosing not to — and that’s a legitimate choice — but cannot is a lie you’ve been handed, formally dressed, institutionally stamped, and asked to repeat until it feels like fact. The moment you swap cannot for won’t, or don’t, or choose not to — the entire clinical architecture starts to look a lot less necessary. And a lot of very comfortable people start to get very nervous.
Which brings us back to question two. When did you last use “cannot” when you meant “won’t”? Because you have. We all have. The difference is whether someone in a position of institutional authority handed it back to you with a signature on it — and whether an entire industry built itself around keeping you exactly there.
That is not how clinical anxiety works. That is how identity works. And identity, unlike illness, is something you can change on a Tuesday afternoon without a prescription.
What’s the likely outcome? A generation fluent in the language of helplessness, organised into movements that require their distress to function, voting for parties that promise salvation from feelings rather than solutions to problems. You’re looking at it.
Ask yourself this — and be honest. Have you ever seen a single headline that reads: “Eco-anxiety sufferer makes full recovery, gets on with life”? No. You haven’t. And that silence is the whole story.
Here’s the follow-up question. The one that really stings.
What would actually happen if someone told these people the truth? That “cannot” is a choice dressed up as a condition. That “helpless” is a posture the system needs you to maintain. That the most radical thing you could do — more radical than any protest, any petition, any therapy session — is to swap “I cannot cope” with “I’ve decided not to engage with this today.”
Watch how fast the support network evaporates when you stop needing to be saved.
The question nobody is asking.
Now we close the circles. All of them.
Who decides which number gets on the radio? The people who need the biggest number. Who benefits from your “cannot”? Everyone listed above. Who loses when you recover? All of them. Every single one.
Who in this entire ecosystem benefits from someone recovering?
The therapist loses a long-term client. The NGO loses an activated donor. The academic loses a research subject. The media loses a story. The pharmaceutical manufacturer loses a prescription. The Green Party loses a vote driven by dread rather than reason.
Not one of these interests is served by a person developing perspective, building resilience, and getting on with their life.
The honest, unspectacular answer to eco-anxiety — you’re worried about something real, that worry is understandable, now go and live your life and vote accordingly — is economically worthless to every single stakeholder in the system. So it doesn’t get said. What gets said instead is: your distress is valid, your incapacity is legitimate, here is a professional to help you manage it, here is an organisation to channel it, here is a political movement to join.
The condition is manufactured. The industry that services it is real. And the gap between the two is where a generation’s energy quietly disappears.
Somewhere along the way, we built a world around learned helplessness. And then we charged people to live in it.
Meanwhile, the man on the phone — the one who cannot work — could drop dead from a heart attack next week. Statistically entirely plausible. No anxiety about that whatsoever.
Would he even notice the irony?
Not a chance. He’s too busy being anxious about something that hasn’t happened yet to notice the thing that’s already killing him.
And there it stands. What began as nothing more than a label — a word that didn’t exist until someone decided it should, a small and unremarkable acorn of an idea — is now a billion-pound oak tree, standing tall in the institutional landscape. Deep roots in therapy, academia, pharmaceuticals, media, NGOs, and politics. Branches in every direction. Canopy thick enough to keep an entire generation in permanent shade.
Nobody plants an oak tree by accident.
The man who called in is still on hold in his life. And six industries just got forensically prosecuted by someone lying in bed listening to the radio. What’s your take on it?
I’m The Almighty Gob — an independent blogger and satirical commentator. I’ve published 88+ investigations into Bristol City Council and UK institutional dysfunction using Freedom of Information requests, primary source analysis, and a consistent three-question framework: Is it practical? Is it logical? What’s the likely outcome? I hold power accountable. Based in Bristol. Unbothered.
Sources and citations
Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, University of Bath — Climate anxiety: What predicts it and how is it related to climate action? (2022 study; n=1,338 UK adults, two data points 2020 and 2022).
University of York / Global Future thinktank — Climate change fear survey published ahead of COP26, Glasgow (October 2021; n=UK general public).
Friends of the Earth — Commissioned polling on eco-anxiety in UK adults (n=1,719; published via Euronews Green, January 2023).
The Reading Agency — Eco Anxiety in the UK: What Our 2025 Survey Reveals (August 2025; n=141).
Office for National Statistics — Three-quarters of adults in Great Britain worry about climate change, Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (November 2021).
IMARC Group — UK Mental Health Market Size, Statistics & Trends 2025–2033 (market valued at USD $14.78bn in 2024, projected $19.12bn by 2033).
MDPI / International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health — A Scoping Review of Interventions for the Treatment of Eco-Anxiety (2021); references Climate Psychology Alliance (2019) report of being “inundated with requests for therapeutic support.”
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) — Eco and climate anxiety: How counselling can help (cites 60% of UK adults reporting negative mental health impact from climate change).
PMC / National Institutes of Health — Determinants of eco-anxiety: cross-national study of 52,219 participants from 25 European countries; notes those with higher tertiary education 2.5 times more likely to report eco-anxiety than those with less than lower secondary education.
Was that bloke who called in for real? Or was he a crisis actor? Because I'd like it if he wasn't that lame.
The 'cannot' reminds me of Marshall Rosenberg's take on 'should' - the most violent word in the English language because it leaves z you with no choice. Exactly as you describe here, it removes personal agency.
Great piece.