The essay is right to resist treating all anxiety as pathology. Existentialists understood that anxiety is often the emotional cost of freedom, responsibility, and self-awareness. But modern anxiety is not simply Kierkegaardian dread. Much of it is environmentally amplified. Human stress systems evolved for intermittent threats, not for permanent exposure to outrage cycles, status comparison, political catastrophe, and algorithmic stimulation. That is why today’s anxiety often feels both existential and exhausted at the same time.
The danger is not only medicalizing anxiety away, but also mistaking every form of anxiety for depth or insight. Some anxiety can sharpen reflection and moral seriousness. But much of today’s anxiety is simply what happens when evolved minds are placed inside systems designed to keep them continuously alert, emotionally reactive, and uncertain.
I think applying an existentialist interpretation to anxiety is interesting, given how differently anxiety has manifested in today's society. I would argue that, given the proliferation of technology (and especially social media), we are living in an era where we are actually less free than we have ever been. Given one's reduced time to ruminate on dreary existentialist topics such as the indeterminable gravity of one's freedom, an existentialist would posit that today's generation should suffer lower levels of the traditional form of anxiety.
Rather, however, as Haidt argues, anxiety has paradoxically only seemingly increased within the technology-dependent Generation Z. This then begs the question: Should we be redefining what anxiety really is in this modernist interpretation, or does our unhealthy attachment to technology indicate a brooding discontent with life that parallels that of our anxiety with unending freedom?
The former would be an easier interpretation -- to differentiate between 'existentialist anxiety' that we feel over the gravity of our choices and our legacies in the world, vs. 'everyday anxiety', which manifests itself trivially within the situated experience, but is not symptomatic of greater ail.
However, the latter interpretation is one that I find more interesting. Perhaps existentialists were right that humans have a knack for pondering the big questions about meaning, rain or shine, technology withstanding or not. Our technological devices seek to reduce our autonomy, insofar as we have become attached to these gadgets in lieu of the productive activities that our ancestors have historically engaged in. However, perhaps it is the case that we are acutely aware of this foolish dependency, hence enabling us to question our agency (and the missed potential of such agency) even more. I recall examples of multitudes of people who have wasted their professional careers doing jobs that are nowhere aligned to their 'true passions', and the severe dissatisfaction that these professionals feel because of the knowledge of their potential in other fields. Perhaps our attachment to technology is analogous to this discontent with our own agency, and hence the greater form of existentialist anxiety for many of today's generation -- shackled by our very own choice, succumbing to the fear of the gravity of liberty through infinite dopamine renewals.
I agree with your assessment of anxiety; however, I disagree with your grounding of anxiety upon the "inescapable responsibility for our own choices, for our own lives". For me anxiety is symptomatic of the world we live in; instead of being a symptom of what one's own responsibilities regarding life choices. By grounding anxiety in the kind of world, one can demonstrate our precarious nature of situatedness at a far more fundamental level. Interestingly, historical instances that you offer to argue for a different interpretation of anxiety, does hint at such a grounding that I subscribe to.
Stein is right to refuse the war on anxiety, but the essay leaves us with only two doors: feel it, in all its existential weight, or numb it with a pill, a screen, a scroll. The consulting room knows a third thing, and it is neither. Some anxiety arrives already thinkable: the vertigo of a real choice, a dread that points somewhere. That kind we can feel, and Stein is its good defender. But some arrives as raw sensation with no object and no shape, not the dizziness of freedom but a body in mutiny with no one at the helm. That kind cannot simply be felt, because there is no one yet there to feel it. It has to be metabolized first, dreamt into a form a mind can hold. This is the work that falls between Stein's two doors, and it is most of the work. The clinical question was never whether anxiety is meaningful or pathological. It is whether a given anxiety has found someone able to think it, or is still waiting, wordless, for that someone to arrive.
“Today, research shows that an alarming portion of the world has an anxiety disorder. It’s the most common mental health condition across the globe and regarded with a strictly negative connotation”
Just a thought, perhaps what we define here as anxiety is the basic state of things and not a disorder.
Possibly, in our attempt to create the utmost achievable form of comfort which we seem to be equaling with stability, we have gone and reclassified anxiety as a disorder.
I mean to hint at correlation does not equal causation kind of thinking.
Anxiety can be a disorder, but just like with democracy, if group A wants something and is larger than group B, group A is still the default, not the extraordinary. As opposed to the viewpoint of group B.
This article seems to equivocate between different meanings of "anxiety."
There is the existentialist sense of anxiety, which involves a feeling of responsibility for choosing our own future.
And then there is the ordinary sense of anxiety, which involves a chronic feeling of stress or danger.
Mixing these two senses can be misleading.
If I'm a teenager who stresses out whenever my Instagram posts have fewer than 100 likes, this is probably not healthy. There need not be anything worth gleaning from this experience. My trouble sleeping and inability to focus are not "intrinsically valuable." My friend who chooses not to obsess over social media is not in "denial of being human." It's perfectly fine to not care about getting 100 likes on Instagram.
Or if I'm worried that crime has recently gotten out of control in America so I choose not to walk down the street to my local grocery store, this debilitating anxiety might be misplaced. This chronic feeling of danger will not always "convey knowledge." It might not be "instructive." Instead, it might just be out of line with crime statistics, which show that violent crime is much lower now than it was in the 1990's. A person who doesn't experience my kind of anxiety, who can comfortably get groceries, isn't necessarily missing out on any deep wisdom.
And more broadly, anxiety can have a paralyzing effect on people. I might give up on doing anything about climate change, for example, if I think the world is going to end in 10 years regardless of my actions. I might not invest in my education or I might not try to build lasting relationships, since the world will end soon anyways. This is also not a healthy attitude.
And importantly, these manifestations of anxiety are not "common to us all." And the root causes do not stem from "the inescapable responsibility for our own choices." Rather, they stem from being hyper-online, having inaccurate beliefs about crime, and having inaccurate beliefs about the environment, respectively. And it would be a mistake to lionize these anxieties as a form of wisdom about the human condition.
You seem to focus on the concept rather than the delivery – a little narrow-minded. The pedantic point about ‘which anxiety’ misses the purpose of the piece.
Anxiety is a message to us; it arrives uninvited. We are then left with a choice: how to deal with it?
Jon is asking for (I know I sound a bit cliche) the courage to act in the face of overwhelming pressure derived from within. He also makes the important distinction between anxiety and fear:
“Fear has a known object which threatens you from the outside, but the anxious person struggles internally.”
Both originate in the Amygdala and elicit similar responses in the body. Yet anxiety can arrive without any external influence. Fear is a response to a perceived threat or danger…
This keeps the piece out of materialism and on the existential mood. The end prefigures a call to action.
In an article titled "In Defense of Anxiety" I think it's important to be clear on what the meaning of anxiety is supposed to be. One might even say that, rather than being "narrow-minded," this is directly addressing the central point of the article.
It would be like someone arguing "Banks are destroying the local ecosystem" but it's unclear whether they're referring to financial institutions or the edge of a river. The meaning of your key terms makes a big deal. And if someone waffles between these two meanings, it's not narrow-minded to point this out.
And no, Jonathan does not consistently describe anxiety as an "internal struggle."
He describes "crime, inflation, social inequality, [and] corruption in finance and politics" as causes of anxiety. He implies that school and other people cause anxiety. He explicitly describes smartphones and social media as causes.
In this context, I think it's reasonable to bring up social media, crime, and climate change as causes of anxiety. And the point of my earlier comment was that the feeling of anxiety does not always point to some deep underlying wisdom. Sometimes it's just a sucky feeling. Sometimes cognitive behavioral therapy combined with an SSRI is the correct approach.
This is interesting, and I appreciate it. I think we sometimes treat people as though they have a individual pathology when they are responding in a useful way to damaging social structures. We blame the canaries instead of the coal mine.
A complication is that "anxiety" is a bit of a catch-all term; it refers to a lot different (related) phenomenon. Sometimes, it refers to a thought-pattern that involves considering every little possible thing that could go wrong when this thought-pattern is not helpful. (It would be helpful if you were, say, launching a space shuttle, but it is not helpful when making a sandwich.) Sometimes people mean a nervous system state. It could be either hyper or hypo activation (fight, flight, or freeze). When people believe they have anxiety disorders, their nervous system states generally result in actions (or lack thereof) they do not think help them out in life. The freeze response can be particularly pernicious; it sometimes advises inaction when doing almost anything would be more helpful for the individual in question.
PTSD is deemed a disorder because the brain/body/nervous-system has adapted to a dangerous condition one is not in fact in, leading to unhelpful behavior. Hypervigilance is an adaptation to being in immediate danger. If one is not in immediate danger, it just prevents rest.
We probably should tune in and listen to our existential anxiety (anxious states regarding human nature, the state of the planet, the state of the government) rather than merely distracting ourselves from it or tuning it out. But whether any particular anxious state leads to useful action (or simply avoidance) depends on what exactly we mean by "anxiety." It also depends on how we choose to encounter that anxiety. When someone is diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, it's often because the person believes the anxiety they have leads to subpar choices, such as avoidance or freeze.
The essay is right to resist treating all anxiety as pathology. Existentialists understood that anxiety is often the emotional cost of freedom, responsibility, and self-awareness. But modern anxiety is not simply Kierkegaardian dread. Much of it is environmentally amplified. Human stress systems evolved for intermittent threats, not for permanent exposure to outrage cycles, status comparison, political catastrophe, and algorithmic stimulation. That is why today’s anxiety often feels both existential and exhausted at the same time.
The danger is not only medicalizing anxiety away, but also mistaking every form of anxiety for depth or insight. Some anxiety can sharpen reflection and moral seriousness. But much of today’s anxiety is simply what happens when evolved minds are placed inside systems designed to keep them continuously alert, emotionally reactive, and uncertain.
I think applying an existentialist interpretation to anxiety is interesting, given how differently anxiety has manifested in today's society. I would argue that, given the proliferation of technology (and especially social media), we are living in an era where we are actually less free than we have ever been. Given one's reduced time to ruminate on dreary existentialist topics such as the indeterminable gravity of one's freedom, an existentialist would posit that today's generation should suffer lower levels of the traditional form of anxiety.
Rather, however, as Haidt argues, anxiety has paradoxically only seemingly increased within the technology-dependent Generation Z. This then begs the question: Should we be redefining what anxiety really is in this modernist interpretation, or does our unhealthy attachment to technology indicate a brooding discontent with life that parallels that of our anxiety with unending freedom?
The former would be an easier interpretation -- to differentiate between 'existentialist anxiety' that we feel over the gravity of our choices and our legacies in the world, vs. 'everyday anxiety', which manifests itself trivially within the situated experience, but is not symptomatic of greater ail.
However, the latter interpretation is one that I find more interesting. Perhaps existentialists were right that humans have a knack for pondering the big questions about meaning, rain or shine, technology withstanding or not. Our technological devices seek to reduce our autonomy, insofar as we have become attached to these gadgets in lieu of the productive activities that our ancestors have historically engaged in. However, perhaps it is the case that we are acutely aware of this foolish dependency, hence enabling us to question our agency (and the missed potential of such agency) even more. I recall examples of multitudes of people who have wasted their professional careers doing jobs that are nowhere aligned to their 'true passions', and the severe dissatisfaction that these professionals feel because of the knowledge of their potential in other fields. Perhaps our attachment to technology is analogous to this discontent with our own agency, and hence the greater form of existentialist anxiety for many of today's generation -- shackled by our very own choice, succumbing to the fear of the gravity of liberty through infinite dopamine renewals.
I agree with your assessment of anxiety; however, I disagree with your grounding of anxiety upon the "inescapable responsibility for our own choices, for our own lives". For me anxiety is symptomatic of the world we live in; instead of being a symptom of what one's own responsibilities regarding life choices. By grounding anxiety in the kind of world, one can demonstrate our precarious nature of situatedness at a far more fundamental level. Interestingly, historical instances that you offer to argue for a different interpretation of anxiety, does hint at such a grounding that I subscribe to.
Stein is right to refuse the war on anxiety, but the essay leaves us with only two doors: feel it, in all its existential weight, or numb it with a pill, a screen, a scroll. The consulting room knows a third thing, and it is neither. Some anxiety arrives already thinkable: the vertigo of a real choice, a dread that points somewhere. That kind we can feel, and Stein is its good defender. But some arrives as raw sensation with no object and no shape, not the dizziness of freedom but a body in mutiny with no one at the helm. That kind cannot simply be felt, because there is no one yet there to feel it. It has to be metabolized first, dreamt into a form a mind can hold. This is the work that falls between Stein's two doors, and it is most of the work. The clinical question was never whether anxiety is meaningful or pathological. It is whether a given anxiety has found someone able to think it, or is still waiting, wordless, for that someone to arrive.
— Dott. J. Froidog
“Today, research shows that an alarming portion of the world has an anxiety disorder. It’s the most common mental health condition across the globe and regarded with a strictly negative connotation”
Just a thought, perhaps what we define here as anxiety is the basic state of things and not a disorder.
Possibly, in our attempt to create the utmost achievable form of comfort which we seem to be equaling with stability, we have gone and reclassified anxiety as a disorder.
I mean to hint at correlation does not equal causation kind of thinking.
Anxiety can be a disorder, but just like with democracy, if group A wants something and is larger than group B, group A is still the default, not the extraordinary. As opposed to the viewpoint of group B.
This article seems to equivocate between different meanings of "anxiety."
There is the existentialist sense of anxiety, which involves a feeling of responsibility for choosing our own future.
And then there is the ordinary sense of anxiety, which involves a chronic feeling of stress or danger.
Mixing these two senses can be misleading.
If I'm a teenager who stresses out whenever my Instagram posts have fewer than 100 likes, this is probably not healthy. There need not be anything worth gleaning from this experience. My trouble sleeping and inability to focus are not "intrinsically valuable." My friend who chooses not to obsess over social media is not in "denial of being human." It's perfectly fine to not care about getting 100 likes on Instagram.
Or if I'm worried that crime has recently gotten out of control in America so I choose not to walk down the street to my local grocery store, this debilitating anxiety might be misplaced. This chronic feeling of danger will not always "convey knowledge." It might not be "instructive." Instead, it might just be out of line with crime statistics, which show that violent crime is much lower now than it was in the 1990's. A person who doesn't experience my kind of anxiety, who can comfortably get groceries, isn't necessarily missing out on any deep wisdom.
And more broadly, anxiety can have a paralyzing effect on people. I might give up on doing anything about climate change, for example, if I think the world is going to end in 10 years regardless of my actions. I might not invest in my education or I might not try to build lasting relationships, since the world will end soon anyways. This is also not a healthy attitude.
And importantly, these manifestations of anxiety are not "common to us all." And the root causes do not stem from "the inescapable responsibility for our own choices." Rather, they stem from being hyper-online, having inaccurate beliefs about crime, and having inaccurate beliefs about the environment, respectively. And it would be a mistake to lionize these anxieties as a form of wisdom about the human condition.
You seem to focus on the concept rather than the delivery – a little narrow-minded. The pedantic point about ‘which anxiety’ misses the purpose of the piece.
Anxiety is a message to us; it arrives uninvited. We are then left with a choice: how to deal with it?
Jon is asking for (I know I sound a bit cliche) the courage to act in the face of overwhelming pressure derived from within. He also makes the important distinction between anxiety and fear:
“Fear has a known object which threatens you from the outside, but the anxious person struggles internally.”
Both originate in the Amygdala and elicit similar responses in the body. Yet anxiety can arrive without any external influence. Fear is a response to a perceived threat or danger…
This keeps the piece out of materialism and on the existential mood. The end prefigures a call to action.
In an article titled "In Defense of Anxiety" I think it's important to be clear on what the meaning of anxiety is supposed to be. One might even say that, rather than being "narrow-minded," this is directly addressing the central point of the article.
It would be like someone arguing "Banks are destroying the local ecosystem" but it's unclear whether they're referring to financial institutions or the edge of a river. The meaning of your key terms makes a big deal. And if someone waffles between these two meanings, it's not narrow-minded to point this out.
And no, Jonathan does not consistently describe anxiety as an "internal struggle."
He describes "crime, inflation, social inequality, [and] corruption in finance and politics" as causes of anxiety. He implies that school and other people cause anxiety. He explicitly describes smartphones and social media as causes.
In this context, I think it's reasonable to bring up social media, crime, and climate change as causes of anxiety. And the point of my earlier comment was that the feeling of anxiety does not always point to some deep underlying wisdom. Sometimes it's just a sucky feeling. Sometimes cognitive behavioral therapy combined with an SSRI is the correct approach.
Could’ve just watched Inside Out 2
This is interesting, and I appreciate it. I think we sometimes treat people as though they have a individual pathology when they are responding in a useful way to damaging social structures. We blame the canaries instead of the coal mine.
A complication is that "anxiety" is a bit of a catch-all term; it refers to a lot different (related) phenomenon. Sometimes, it refers to a thought-pattern that involves considering every little possible thing that could go wrong when this thought-pattern is not helpful. (It would be helpful if you were, say, launching a space shuttle, but it is not helpful when making a sandwich.) Sometimes people mean a nervous system state. It could be either hyper or hypo activation (fight, flight, or freeze). When people believe they have anxiety disorders, their nervous system states generally result in actions (or lack thereof) they do not think help them out in life. The freeze response can be particularly pernicious; it sometimes advises inaction when doing almost anything would be more helpful for the individual in question.
PTSD is deemed a disorder because the brain/body/nervous-system has adapted to a dangerous condition one is not in fact in, leading to unhelpful behavior. Hypervigilance is an adaptation to being in immediate danger. If one is not in immediate danger, it just prevents rest.
We probably should tune in and listen to our existential anxiety (anxious states regarding human nature, the state of the planet, the state of the government) rather than merely distracting ourselves from it or tuning it out. But whether any particular anxious state leads to useful action (or simply avoidance) depends on what exactly we mean by "anxiety." It also depends on how we choose to encounter that anxiety. When someone is diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, it's often because the person believes the anxiety they have leads to subpar choices, such as avoidance or freeze.
JESUS IS THE AMSWER AMEN 💟✝️🤍