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Anxiety / stress. Usually it relates to finances either directly or indirectly. I have enough savings to survive few years with zero income but having recently transitioned from employee to being self-employed, there's quite a bit uncertainty about future. I'm not losing any significant amounts of money currently but I'm barely able to save anything either which makes me quite uncomfortable as someone who for the past 10 years has lived well below their means.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
I never understood what was so terrible about the digital watches. I understand that today's smart watches are an absolute detriment to any semblance of privacy that you might have had before in this brave new world, but why would one hate something like a Casio?
I never took it as hate, just an acknowledgement of the simplicity of thinking about your digital watch and going "you know what? this thing is pretty neat!"
that being said it's been a while since I read the books so maybe I'm misremembering some serious digital watch hate from later on.
personally I think my Casio is pretty neat and I also am unhappy for pretty much of the time, largely due to the movements of small green pieces of paper :)
I'm not sure Douglas Adams could have written that today. Most of the people who would have been digital watch people are generally more obsessed with their personal portable computing and communication devices instead. And I like to think that's what he would have called them, repeatedly and often in a handful of paragraphs dedicated to them for no other reason than how well "personal portable computing and communication device" rolls off the tongue.
The sort of phrase that Ford would use when talking to Arthur who would instead be expecting "mobile phone" at most. And then there'd be a little pointless argument about how "mobile phone" wasn't anywhere near descriptive enough.
"What? You mean like 'Mostly harmless'?" asked Arthur pointedly.
"Exactly!" said Ford, cheerily. "Now you're getting it!"
Arthur wasn't getting it. In fact he wasn't sure if that if he had it that he wouldn't want to get rid of it as soon as possible.
A+ ⭐ 🏆
that last line especially is beautiful, sounds like it was written by Adams himself.
have you read the short story The Libertarian Police Department? I've always thought the author channeled Adams' ghost for that one :)