What I See with Peter Fiorenza: Society in danger of being ‘gaslighted’ over pseudo-neurotic behaviour

Filmmaker Woody Allen is not my cup of tea, despite his social fall from grace when he left his partner Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter. No, if anything I find his movies dull and quite annoying. Dull because the stories just tend to go around and around in circles, and annoying because the stories tend to go around and around in circles. Perhaps that is the genre and I simply don’t get it. Yet acclaimed actors such as Alan Alda and Diane Keaton have spent a lot of their time working in this space. In my opinion, Allen has spent most of his professional life promoting neuroticism. What is neuroticism? It’s actually a personality trait where individuals experience negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration and fear. The problem I have with Allen is that he celebrates this and seems to make it the norm. This column is not about Woody Allen but what I believe is a current acceptance of a pseudo-neurotic behaviour. From my own experience of severe anxiety and depression, I know mental health is real, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how a growing number of people are “gaslighting”, from relationships through to the workplace, and even in the political sphere. Couples playing mind games, line managers behaving like dictators and governments pushing self-styled agendas. To be more succinct, maybe the human being is becoming more and more selfish. Charity is steadily being eroded from all facets of life. And this is no more demonstrated than in social media, the current king of communication. The selfie, TikTok and comments on X all scream “me, me, me”. The result is that developing generations ignorantly believe that life is all about looking after number one and focusing on their own selfish, mundane lives. Am I getting too deep? Am I out of my depth? Perhaps I am, but if the current attitude and subsequent actions of one recently elected world leader is anything to go by, what hope do future generations really have? Maybe they will get to star in their own Woody Allen movie. Peter Fiorenza hosts Sports Shed Saturday (9am to noon) and Fiorenza on Sunday (10am to noon) on Radio MAMA