Panic attacks when there is nothing to panic about are absolutely not healthy or normal. Most people agonize over financial decisions such as this without panic attacks.
This sounds like anti-anxiety over correction to me.
We don't know how much future planning anxiety is warranted without knowing the future. We certainly know that past societies have a strong survivor bias for people who worried about the most significant life decisions they had.
A very flexible person and a turnip may both be well tuned to the economy at the moment but a less flexible person should be anxious as much for the behavioral effects of making decisions lightly on making future decisions in different circumstances.
We don't know if it was a panic attack though. The journalist could just be describing pessimism.
> “I have this feeling that the bottom is gonna fall out,” Fox told me.
Take this quote for example. If we take even a mildly evidence based approach, this is rational. Sometimes the bottom does just fall out of the economy. It happens around once a decade. It is entirely healthy to consider spending large amounts of money as potentially risky and consider the possible consequences.
We don't know how much future planning anxiety is warranted without knowing the future. We certainly know that past societies have a strong survivor bias for people who worried about the most significant life decisions they had.
A very flexible person and a turnip may both be well tuned to the economy at the moment but a less flexible person should be anxious as much for the behavioral effects of making decisions lightly on making future decisions in different circumstances.