Anxiety in 280 characters - The Hindu

WebMD tells me that anxiety is a normal emotion. And that it’s a way of alerting the brain to potential danger and a standard reaction to stress. But when all that I consume every day is meant to create the feeling of potential danger, is it a wonder that I am permanently anxious?

Sociologist and Marxist writer Richard Seymour’s book The Twittering Machine suggests instead that it would be easier to ask as to what is wrong with us rather than what is wrong with these systems.

Philosopher Renata Salecl in her beautiful exploration ‘On Anxiety’ is wary of the popular account that anxiety is an obstacle to well-being and prevents us from functioning in the world or engaging with others. Instead, she says that a world without anxiety would be a scary place for it would give truth to the lie that happiness is freely available, and that we are not in an age of cruelty, misery and danger.

Perhaps we are all anxious because no matter how hard we scroll, how incessantly we post, and how intently we binge-watch, we do not have the capacity to deny the state of the world. To rephrase anthropologist Clifford Geertz, we are unable to believe the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. Anxiety in this case can be a powerful space to stay in and to ask about the stories we no longer tell, and perhaps even to find newer, better and kinder stories of the world.