Anxiety epidemic based on a fable of contentment
08 March 2022: ANXIETY “A culture of achievement … destroys my students in terms of anxiety” – Harvard “professor of happiness” Laurie Santos, quoted in The New York Times We must be happy. We think we should always be happy. If we’re not, something’s wrong. But this is like the illusion that led so many doctors to prescribe opioids to patients in the US, creating a situation in which tens of thousands a year were dying of desperate addiction: there must be no pain. Pain is not to be tolerated. Life is to be painless. That’s mad, right? As mad as Vlad the Invader. Pain is part of life, unhappiness is part of life, happiness is part of life – but it’s not ALL of life. A rich tapestry, as a heartbroken reporter (failed romance) said sadly to me once back in Australia. Life is a tapestry, but that tapestry is not made up of threads of all the same colour. We are just bobbing along most of the time, sometimes we are happy and feel great, sometimes we are unha...