Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.

McLuhan argues that much modern unease comes from a mismatch between rapidly changing conditions—especially those created by new media and technologies—and the older habits of mind, institutions, and conceptual frameworks we still rely on. “Yesterday’s tools” suggests inherited methods and media; “yesterday’s concepts” points to outdated categories for understanding society. The line captures a recurring McLuhan theme: when the environment is transformed by new communications forms, people initially interpret and manage it using assumptions shaped by the previous era, producing confusion and stress. The implied remedy is not simply better coping, but updating our conceptual vocabulary to fit the present technological and cultural situation.