See the guest-post “How Will You Be Remembered on Facebook?” at Mark Schaefer’s {grow} businesses blog.

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The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.

This story has stuck in my craw all week. We have people of this age in the household, so it’s not an alien concept to me.

I am very sorry to hear about the depression and anxiety, because 18-year-olds shouldn’t be in the fast lane to Ulcerville. They have their entire lives ahead for that.

The article mentions the usual suspects: paternal unemployment, dim prospects for success upon graduation, the near solipsism that tells these kids they’re the only one with this problem. I understand and sympathize will all of that.

The worst part, I think, is that these kids dwell on it and succumb to hopelessness. I would like to see them talk about their feelings, but realize that that’s quite a stretch for the average late-teen male.

At the risk of sounding like a proponent of denial, I offer this counsel:

Don’t look down.

I posted last month on the tough lessons of 2010, one of which is not to look down.

Remember those cartoon scenes in which Elmer Fudd chased Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck off a cliff and into thin air? Bugs and Daffy made it to the other side, but Elmer made the mistake of looking down. He lost confidence and plunged body-part by body-part into the canyon below.

I think that the kids feeling all of this stress are looking down. They’re still figuring out what most adults have assimilated as second nature: Life is a tightrope-walk over a lake of piranha, and the more energy you devote to balancing and walking, the less time there is to focus on the piranha.

“I need to do something.”

Kids this age have boundless energy. It’s hard for them to take the long view and hunker down for all the preparatory work that is their lot. They’d rather build a bridge or belt out a song or nail a 250-pound bench press.

If you had that kind of energy but couldn’t get free to start your post-educational life, wouldn’t you feel anxious and depressed?

I’ll spend this life trying to understand the problem. Maybe in the next one I can come up with an effective way to deal with it.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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Focused on nothing but the fortune stashed in the gas tank of his motorcycle and the brass ring of retirement in Florida, Dennis Hopper’s “Billy” character in the 1969 classic Easy Rider crows, “Wow, man, we really did it! We did it! We got what everybody wants, man, and we pulled it off!”

Billy’s biker pal, Wyatt (Peter Fonda), focused on the intolerance and violence  they’ve endured on their cross-country pursuit of freedom, counters tacitly, “We blew it.”

Billy, incredulous, wants to know what he means. Wyatt repeats, “We blew it. G’night, Billy.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of several milestones: the Apollo 11 moonshot, Woodstock, the Altamont concert, the height of campus unrest, a half-million US troops in Vietnam, a half-million demonstrators for peace in DC.

Somehow, these revolutionary events were meant to free us – or free somebody – from something:  communism, capitalism, war, social stagnation, bigotry. Did the revolutions get us closer to that freedom, or did we blow it?

The revolutions didn’t play out as we’d anticipated because it took longer than overnight for everything to sink in. The Beatles broke up. We remembered how to use colleges for education instead of social change. We started worrying about oil and inflation. And did we really think that social order was on track for radical change with Richard Nixon in the White House?

Consider Pete Townsend’s 1971 lament, as he observed the gap between the revolutionary effort and the change that hadn’t happened: “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” This revolution didn’t work; see you at the next one.

Still, if the revolutions were two steps forward, the 1970s were only one step backward. A lot of the progress stayed in place; it just doesn’t look the way the revolutionaries in the 1960s through it would look. The green movement, the Internet, the role of technology in leveling the imbalance between rich and poor countries, and the greater awareness of climate change and global warming are hints that it has taken a long time for all of this to sink in, but the result is a series of smaller revolutions, not the complete overthrow of old-think.

Fonda is less sanguine, sticking to his conviction that we blew it. “Look out the window today,” he muses in a 2009 interview. “The air is bad, everything has gone further south; it’s all gone to hell in a handbasket. We all had this idea you get rich and you’re free. And that’s wrong.”

Billy and Wyatt may have blown it, but the revolutions still worked.

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