In praise of Anxiety.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. Lao Tzu

Is anyone out there anxious? There certainly seems to be, although it’s unclear when anxiety displaced being worried, we know have the most anxious generation. The modern world, with all its tech and concerned governments keen to take responsibility for our welfare, is apparently the most anxiety-provoking epoch of mankind. Compared to living knee-deep in pig swill, or marinating yourself in cheap gin while your kids broke their nails on coalfaces and in chimneys, not garnering enough Likes on your socials is hell on earth.  

Recent studies show that 39% of women reported feeling anxious and 30% of men. It’s unclear if men make women anxious, but anxiety is one of the most googled search criteria, and as any therapist will tell you most patients want it treated. Perhaps, simply existing out there, out on the perimeter, beyond the final gates and watch-posts, where perceived oppression and micro-aggressions roam with murderous intent, feeds this anxiety, but is that why? Are people uneasy due to living in the Badlands?

I suspect not, instead it’s a malingering sense of unease, the sort that accompanies waking up a day late for your homebound flight, or when you’ve absentmindedly worn your slippers to work, or found yourself in the fast lane on the wrong highway with the next exit in 20 miles time. So often this anxiety doesn’t have the decency to even have attached itself to triggering events, but rather bubbles with the relentlessness of an unwelcome river; flushing the body with electrified and indiscernible worries and tingling, appetite-destroying shooting stars of dissatisfaction and discontent. It feels like a waiting room, yet with little idea what for.

What’s causing this pandemic of anxiety? Perhaps it’s telling us all that something is amiss? Worryingly it is assumed that events will be traumatic in some way, as though any stoicism is inappropriate; that simply everything must be a struggle. The NHS even had eleven tips on how to ‘return to normal’ following the Covid hysteria; the NHS can’t even keep patronising advice to a tight ten.  

Anxiety is the affliction of our time. And when profound is genuinely debilitating, stifling plans, and clouding the present in gloom. Anxiety and depression when acute are utterly stupefying.

However, anxiety has become ubiquitous, with a groundswell demanding that via mental health services, workplace safe spaces littered with Lego and children’s crayons (maybe they can colour in a backbone?) , and medication (always medication), anxiety is erased from our lives. Anxiety is seemingly no longer a challenging human emotion to be met with forthright resolve, but a crippling infliction over which we are powerless. There is a generation who desire life to bend to their demands, rather than adapt and meld with the world; they want to wake up to their tea at perfect drinking temperature. We live not in the age of enlightenment, but of entitlement. Somehow there’s an unwritten diktat that we shouldn’t be anxious, yet what if it’s needed, maybe it’s the terror of deeply required, yet resisted, change; what if it is the letting go of the branch, with little idea that if you drop you might fly?

Far too often anxiety is named as a symptom, yet the causes are neglected. Perhaps because symptoms are easier to address than causes, they grab the headlines; after all it’s easier to wear a hard hat around the house than remove all the low roof beams. Anxiety has a purpose. You can suppress its discomfort with drugs, but don’t turn off the smoke alarm without first looking for a fire.   

These days there’s opportunity for anxiety attacks on a minute-to-minute basis: doom-mongering manmade climate change cults, Covid, the environmental damage overpriced EVs are causing, is your Ukraine flag smaller than the neighbours, how to stand out in a crowd all screaming 'I'm unique' with pink hair and BLM badges, or needing to work for a living, or being misgendered. It’s all so triggering. I was never misgendered, although I was punched in the face once for being, or at least appearing, gay. I took it the only way you could, as a compliment, it was after all an elegantly tailored tank top. However, as a teenager I was frequently misidentified for a goal, as I magically attracted high-velocity footballs into the back of my head. Trust me, it’s more painful than someone not using your gormlessly manufactured pronoun. And yes, it was anxiety provoking, but was easily treatable: I never sat with my back to the room again. 

Anxiety is crucial. It tells you to not travel into the ravine without sidearms. It’s anticipation. It’s those flashing lights on the motorway warning of debris in the road. Yet like criminalising hate (love will be next), we have pathologised a human emotion into a condition. A diagnosis of anxiety, which is easier to get than ripe strawberries in a supermarket, secures you 25% longer to sit an exam, although in the 80s that was a punishment, and days off work to fester. Anxiety is a freedom card, that you’re exempt from reality, not dissimilar to whiplash it’s somehow crippling yet unprovable.  

If anxiety is rampant concern for the future, it would seem logical that optimism about the future might alleviate anxiety – it’s certainly a strong argument for the religion that’s been obliterated across the West. Comfort in the knowledge of spiritual resurrection has been displaced by blind faith in The Science alongside prioritising terrestrial concerns and mainlining pessimism via bad ‘news’ and doom scrolling; if it bleeds, it leads. Engaging with the 24/7 media is overdosing on negativity, and you’d better believe it.    

Of course, optimism ebbs and flows, even an optimist must sometimes accept that the light isn’t freedom at end of the tunnel, but an incoming express train loaded with vaccines, CBDCs and digital IDs. It’s the pessimists who can jump aside in time. (‘jump aside in time’ sounds like a summer smash). Pessimists prepare for war, while optimists offer adversaries conferences, scones, and jam. Optimism is the flag of Hollywood, and nothing screams positivity louder than the optimism required in hoping that anyone understands anything that’s now going on in a Marvel film.

Life without anxiety is certainly appealing, and if the pharmaceuticals could provide it then what would it look like? Frankly a world without anxiety would be roads littered with more corpses than a battlefield, everyone in the wrong job or wrong partner and asking none of the probing questions that provides life with meaning. And it is having a meaningful life that counts, not an anxiety free one. Any loser can win is not how mankind found a straight back and a sense of purpose.   

There seems to be contemporary societal cache in avoiding success in case it advertises, or builds upon, your ‘privilege’, but when you’re on your own, worried, and ticking anxiety boxes on health questionnaires, rather than find its cause in Brexit, the patriarchy, Tories, identity politics, historical colonialism or a lack of crayons in your work safe space, the answer might well lie deep within, inside yourself, but that takes resolve.