The Severity of Anxiety

By far the greatest injustice in the modern world is that of personal anxiety. The modern world has seen an unprecedented number of individuals suffering, knowingly or unknowingly, from the burdensome disease of anxiety. It raises a question: where does this anxiety arise from?

It must be from no other but the over-arching Games. Whether it be societal expectations or governmental regulation — these games that we blindly participate bring about rules and goals that must be met in order to be deemed a functioning person in and about the functioning world. Our participation in the Games only feeds, perpetuates, the Games. The functioning world operates and subsists in virtue of the phenomenal Games — imaginary super structures that cease to exist once understood as nothing more than false realities that bear no actual permanence in the world.

Now, these Games for all intents and purposes, though imaginary, are exclusively real to the individual raised in these Games. We shouldn’t expect that isolated tribes in remote areas abide by our same expectations nor rules. They would have their own Games that appear foreign and alien to us Westerners. The society in which an individual is raised is crucial to the development and understanding of anxiety.

Anxiety arises out of the failure to meet the Games. Similar to any other game, there are rules and goals, metrics of success, and measures of failure. Anxiety is acting out of accordance with the Games, or more precisely, failing to play the game.

Let us take an extreme example such as suicide. Suicide has a negative stigma largely due to others’ conception. What is that conception? The conception that the individual who wishes to take their own life is forfeiting from the Games. The pressure, the expectations, the rewards and failures. The Games are built in such a way that forfeiting is deemed to be a sign of weakness or inability. This is far from the case. There is nothing in the act of suicide that can prove one’s weakness and inability. If anything, forfeiting from the Games is perhaps the strongest example of power, ability, and courage in the face of criticism and hopelessness.

Of course I think suicide is wrong. I want to believe it’s wrong. I want to believe there are several things that are inherently wrong. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be anything inherently wrong with anything.

Anxiety is a glimpse into the meaninglessness and the meaningful in the void. This duality, this constant back and forth will cause strife and suffering. What is one supposed to do? Is one supposed to simply continue their meaningless and blind blissfulness of the functioning world? Or is one supposed to abandon all such Games and become a proper subject?

Such thoughts ultimately lead to guilt and shame. Guilt and shame are by products of anxiety. They measure failure in the Games. But Anxiety only exists in the Games. So long as we continue participating in the Games, we will continue to suffer guilt, shame, and anxiety, but abandoning the Games gives us a different anxiety. An anxiety of loss. We’d lose our connection to the world, and by extension, our connection to the only life we’ve ever experienced…so far.