The case for anxiety
One cannot hope without knowing anxiety. One cannot live without understanding fear. Hope for a world without fear is a hope destined to cripple the best of humanity. It is a project undertaken with great zeal in every elite corner of society. What looks to be sympathy disguises a concerted effort to convert pain into conformity. For what could be a more effective pacifier than the promise of absolute tolerance?
In one breath, they say anxiety is a sign of discontent that must be quelled. In another they claim tolerance for every kind of negative emotion—so long as you subscribe to their treatment. These people have no unifying belief other than a shared interest in profit and ego. The doctor who sells his patients the most expensive treatment is no different from the life guru selling suffering as a way of life.
The act of diagnosis has become its own kind of performance. Everyone is a doctor now. A doctor might as well be a the parent you never had. You can see it in their eyes, can’t you? Shades of menace and sympathy twisted together into a smile you know is fake. In fact, they know it to be fake as well. They’ve practiced faking compassion for your situation. What do they even know about your situation? They don’t even know what they’re doing with their life. When profit is at stake, the venom comes out. Sympathy no more. Unease is all you feel. All of a sudden, morality is thrown out the window. The insinuation is clear. If you don’t believe them, what kind of future can you hope to have?
So let me get this straight. Anxiety is only bad when they say it’s bad. Anxiety is very good for you when preaching tolerance is better for business. Even if playing both sides leads to more anxiety for the people they claim to help, that’s just further proof that people need help.
All paths lead back to the warm embrace of belonging. Home, the feeling of home in a fragmented and heartless world—is that all we need?
Anxiety is the pulse of existence. Nothing can replace it. Not certainty. Not therapy. Not calm. Not dogma. Not reason. No scientist can cure that which we need to feel the world in all its richness. We don’t need some expert to tell us that it’s okay to be imperfect, only then to pull the rug under our feet. Experts like them don’t need to exist anymore. The world has moved on. Orthodoxy is dead.
We don’t need permission to be imperfect. We don’t need justification to seek perfection. Anxiety is not the enemy. The industry around it is. The enemy is the insistence that the human soul can be understood completely. To lay the soul on a cold, sterile exam table does not remove anxiety from the world. It is a crime unto itself.
The next time they lament young people for being gripped by anxiety, they would do well to look in the mirror. Perhaps the problem was never anxiety itself, but a ruling power terrified of what anxiety reveals about the human condition.
