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 yearwere 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 unhappy and feel bad. That is normal. That is the regular standard. Happy all the time? No, that is chemical manipulation, but it does not and cannot last.

Yet somehow or other in the 20th century we have been fed the lie that happiness should be perpetual. It is an elevated state, a big smile all through, but that is not a normal resting position for a human. I wouldn’t go as far as to echo the old slogan “if you’re not worried, you don’t know what’s going on”. But in the “average” life there are always considerations which could be termed negative – health, housing, work, relationships, personal performance. If one or all are going well, in some divine conjunction of positivity, we feel happy. We’re happy on a night out with friends, or at a sports match we love, or resting with a good book and a glass of wine. But if we don’t have that feeling, just trucking along, that’s normal resting state. 

Capitalism and its discontents could be a culprit. Buy this and you’ll be happy! Social media is a suspect. Excessive looking inward is another likely cause. If you’re always asking yourself if you are happy, then you are hunting yourself down.

This causes anxiety. And the “anxiety epidemic” has just been getting worse in recent years, if popular culture and lifestyle gurus are any indication. My inward flows of newsletters, event notifications, book suggestions, inevitably feature anxiety assessment and relief. Most recently, The School of Life was offering a book to help with the A word, and various online event providers have been offering talks on anxiety, or advice on happiness from veteran feelgooder Deepak Chopra.

Were people always this anxious, or is 21st century living, compounded by a pandemic and now a nasty war, just too much for people’s nerves? What do you think? 

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