250 YEARS YOUNG & STILL SHOWING OFF

CHAPTER ONE: AMERICAN DREAMS / AMERICAN NIGHTMARES

What We Fear, and What We Keep Doing Anyway

The Chapman University Survey of American Fears is one of those documents that reads like a fever dream crossed with a grocery list. For the tenth consecutive year, corrupt government officials topped the list, with 69% of respondents saying they are afraid or very afraid of it. A loved one becoming seriously ill came in second, economic or financial collapse third, and cyber-terrorism fourth. 

These are the rational fears. The ones you can name at a dinner party without people shifting uncomfortably.

But underneath them, something stranger is churning. Ask Americans what they’re really afraid of and the answers start to drift. They fear becoming irrelevant.They fear being replaced — by a machine, by a cheaper worker, by a younger version of themselves that the algorithm will find more engaging. A third ofAmericans are currently experiencing what researchers carefully call an “existential crisis,” and another 37% say their entire lives feel out of their control. Gen Z clocks in at 52% on that last number. More than half of the country’s youngest adults feel their life is not theirs to steer.

Then there are the fears that live below language altogether. The ones that can’t be measured by a Gallup poll.

Americans in 2026 are afraid of AI in a way they can’t quite articulate — not the movie-version robots, but something more mundane and more disturbing: the creeping sense that intelligence itself is being outsourced, that the quality of your thinking, your creativity, your distinctiveness is being slowly averaged out into a prompt response. They are afraid of their own memories — specifically, that they no longer make any. That their entire emotional archive is stored on a device that could be dropped in a toilet. They are afraid of silence. They fill every gap with a podcast, a reel, a notification. When silence accidentally happens, it feels like something has gone wrong.

There is also the metaphysical unease, the kind that shows up at 3am. The suspicion that meaning itself has become unstable — that the old scripts (work hard, buy a house, have children, retire, die having meant something) no longer load properly. Americans are spending more time alone than in any period for which we have good data. This is especially true for young Americans, who have historically been the most social group. Loneliness as a background condition. Loneliness so normalized it no longer even registers as something wrong. 

Nearly three in five Americans say that no one truly knows them. Read that sentence again. Sit with it.

And crime: although crime rates have steadily declined over several years, the survey shows that fear of crime continues to rise. Americans are, statistically, safer than they’ve been in decades. They do not feel it. Reality and perception have divorced. This is perhaps the most distinctly American condition of all.

CHAPTER TWO: THE DECADE THAT MADE US

The 1970s: America’s Most Honest, Most Terrifying, Most Alive Era

Here is the thing about the seventies that no one admits when they’re busy romanticizing the aesthetic: it was genuinely frightening to be alive in America then.Not in the abstracted, geopolitical way of today, but in the very specific sense that the stranger at the bus stop might be a killer, your president was a crook, your city might actually be going bankrupt, and the economy had delivered something economists didn’t think was possible — inflation and unemployment at the same time. The country had just watched, on live television, the chaos of Vietnam and then Watergate, and the combined effect was a kind of mass disillusionment sototal that it broke the idea of authority itself.

And into that crack, an entire culture poured.

The 1970s produced American cinema’s greatest decade almost by accident. Directors who’d come up through the counterculture, who’d read European art filmsand were furious about the world, suddenly had studio budgets and almost no oversight. What they made was extraordinary. The Godfather (1972) showedAmerica that its mythology of success was underwritten by blood. Chinatown (1974) demonstrated that power always protects itself, and that the truth doesn’t saveanyone. Taxi Driver (1976) put the camera inside a crumbling male psyche in a crumbling city and asked the audience to recognize itself there. Network (1976) predicted cable news rage culture with such precision that watching it now feels less like satire than documentary.

And then there were the horror films — which weren’t really about monsters.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was a film about the working class left behind — literally, a family of slaughterhouse workers displaced by industrial automation, taking their trade domestic.

There is no happy ending. The final girl screams on an empty road as the sun rises and nobody comes. Jaws (1975) invented the summer blockbuster as a side effect of being a genuinely terrifying movie about a town that needs tourism money more than it needs to warn its residents about a shark. Carrie (1976) made a telekinetic girl the most comprehensible character in a film full of ordinary cruelty. She is pushed too far. She snaps. Audiences cheered.

These were not escapist films. They were the American ID, projected at 24 frames per second onto the walls of a country that had stopped trusting its own institutions.

Meanwhile, on the street, something else was happening that seemed unrelated but wasn’t.

The term “serial killer” was coined in the 1970s, when FBI agent Robert Ressler gave a name to what the bureau had been tracking with growing alarm. Americans who previously left their doors unlocked and hitchhiked with abandon were suddenly caught in the sights of predators. Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, JohnWayne Gacy — they arrived in clusters, and they became, in a way that now seems inevitable given everything we know about media dynamics, celebrities. It’sstriking how much the culture of true crime — lurid magazines like True Detective — fascinated killers like Bundy, and how subsequent killers were obsessed with Bundy in turn, basically fans who aspired to be like him.

The “technical” definition of the serial killer as a kind of person became available in the mid-1970s. Prior to that, the phenomenon we now brand as serial killingwas not so named in popular understanding. The naming made the monster. Or rather, it made the monster legible — gave it a category, a profile, a face for the front page. Philosopher Lauren Berlant noted that starting in the 1970s, the image of the good life as an economic good life started losing its traction, and a “crueloptimism” lulled people into a false sense of security about the world they lived in, even as many of their freedoms were being eroded. Serial killers, in this reading, are the nightmare underside of the American Dream’s collapse — what happens when the promise breaks and someone decides the whole thing wasalways a transaction.

And yet — this is the part people forget — the 1970s were also gorgeous. Physically, aesthetically, carnally gorgeous.

The gay liberation movement, post-Stonewall, was producing something extraordinary in American cities: a visual language of desire so exuberant it bordered on surreal. The physique magazines of the late sixties had gone underground for years. Now they exploded into the open. Playgirl launched in 1973 — the first major mainstream magazine to feature full male nudity — and sold out its first issue. The clone look emerged in places like San Francisco’s Castro and New York’s Christopher Street: tight Levi’s, flannel shirts, work boots, handlebar mustaches, the maximally male body deliberately deployed as both armor and advertisement. It was a visual argument made with flesh, and it was stunning.

The women looked equally spectacular — if, in retrospect, equally complicated. The beauty queen wasn’t just a pageant tradition; she was a national archetype. Long-haired, golden-tanned, feathered and frosted, she appeared on Noxema commercials and Faberge shampoo ads and in the background of every Burt Reynolds movie. She was the California dream, the cheerleader fantasy, the girl-next-door reimagined with studio lighting. She was also, as Carrie so acidly understood, potentially merciless — the beautiful girl who makes the locker room a torture chamber. American beauty in the 1970s was never innocent. It was always already a power structure.

CHAPTER THREE: BODY POLITICS

70s Freedom + 80s Power = 2026 Confidence

Three distinct eras of American body politics have folded into each other to produce what we have now, which is something genuinely new and genuinely unresolved.

The 1970s body was liberated. The sexual revolution had happened. Second-wave feminism had happened. Studio 54 had happened. The body was a site offreedom, full stop — you could take it off, show it, use it, and the culture would at least partially applaud you for the audacity. Health food stores opened. Running became a national obsession. People discovered their bodies as things that could feel good, deliberately, and they pursued that feeling with the same intensity they’d previously reserved for career ambition. The photographs from this era look almost physically warm — tanned skin, natural hair, the slightly hazed glow offilm stock that made everything look like a memory before it even happened.

The 1980s body was weaponized. Reaganism’s great gift to the culture was the equation of physical perfection with moral worth. Big shoulders. Big hair. Power suits. Gold. The gym culture that emerged from the 1970s gay community went mainstream and got competitive. Aerobics videos. Nautilus machines. The idea that the body should announce your dominance before you opened your mouth. It was the era of the body as achievement, which was exhilarating for some andpunishing for almost everyone else.

What 2026 has produced is harder to categorize. It is a genuine mess — which is to say, it is more interesting than either of its predecessors.

The body positivity movement, which peaked somewhere around 2019-2022, is visibly fracturing. The rise of weight-loss drugs has created new pressures for those who were just starting to embrace their bodies. If even the most confident influencers have used medication to shed pounds, what does that say to the average person? The irony is almost perfect: a movement dedicated to freeing people from beauty standards colliding head-on with a pharmaceutical product that makes those standards more achievable than ever. The result is a kind of confused truce, with no clear winner.

What’s emerging instead is something older and stranger: a return to the body as pleasure object, but without the guilt that1980s fitness culture attached to it, and without the defensive crouch of 2010s body positivity. Young Americans arerediscovering the idea that your body is something to enjoy, not to optimize, not to apologize for, not to perform for the internet. They are going to saunas. They are swimming in cold water. They are cooking actual food. Small rebellions. Very, very 1970s.

Read the full cover story in our Summer 2026 Issue. Get your hands on it here.