Anxiety is our fundamental state for well-founded reasons:
– Because we are intensely vulnerable physical beings, a complicated network of fragile organs all biding their time before eventually letting us down catastrophically at a moment of their own choosing.
– Because we have insufficient information upon which to make most major life decisions: we are steering more or less blind.
– Because we can imagine so much more than we have and live in mobile-driven, mediatised societies where envy and restlessness will be a constant.
– Because we are the descendants of the great worriers of the species, the others having been trampled and torn apart by wild animals, and because we still carry in our bones – into the calm of the suburbs – the terrors of the savannah.
– Because visible objects and locations, oak tables and beaches, can only symbolise calm to our eyes rather than instill it in our psyches
– Because the progress of our careers and of our finances play themselves out within the tough-minded, competitive, destructive, random workings of an uncontained capitalist engine
– Because we rely for our self-esteem and sense of comfort on the love of people we cannot control and whose needs and hopes will never align seamlessly with our own
All of which is not to say that there aren’t better and worse ways to approach our condition.
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