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Monday::Jan, 25, 2023

Anxiously Modern

W

hence cometh anxiety? It's a strange emotion, clearly negative, but not as intense as many kinds of pain we encounter. Anxiety seems to have a component of future-sight to it. We are generally anxious about what-is-going-to-happen, rather than what-is or what-has-happened, unlike, say, shame or guilt.

In the last post, I remarked that the function of the mind is chiefly to predict the future. I should be more clear—the mental processes that come with having a brain (which many more creatures than just human beings do) are concerned, to a large extent, with prediction. However, our self-conscious mind is clearly capable of doing quite a lot more. The conscious mind's role is understanding—we can think of this kind of consciousness arising in order to solve various issues related to the world that our raw "prediction engine" does not handle well. Our consciousness has been brought on board to aid the whole by grasping things like causes.

Anxiety is our background prediction engine's concern that it is not making good predictions. Our consciousness is delivered this information in the form of a stressful, negative emotion, and it is a common situation to be anxious without knowing the cause of the anxiety. This is because anxiety is generally a reaction to a confluence of factors in which our ability to guess what is going to happen becomes limited—it is rarely a single cause. The paradox of choice is thrown into light here—more choices simply means you have less of a clue what you are going to do next, which is the only thing the engine cares about.

There is a certain kind of peculiarly modern anxiety which forms a sort of low hum in the background of a great many people's lives, and is the source of a great deal of suffering. One cause of this anxiety, I believe, is the combination of a great wealth of options for one's life, paired with a general awareness that most people seem in some way to have chosen badly. When we look at the lives of our elders, and what came before us, too often we see people being fired from careers, or stuck in jobs that wear them down, getting divorces at high rates, burning out, fleeing from this or from that—it is a rare life story we are told that feels like a template, that could even in theory be followed. Whether or not it is the case that most people are happy, their lifepaths are not imitable; chance and impersonal forces seem to hold sway over the vast majority of people's lives.

Thus, any sober person viewing a modern industrial society will be extremely unconfident in their ability to predict what their life is going to look like in 5, 10, 20 years, and this is intolerable to the internal prediction engine. Consider premodern societies—their lives were shorter, their choices fewer, and they possessed orders of magnitude fewer comforts than we do now; but they could, with a high degree of fidelity, make predictions about their futures by drawing on the experiences of their elders, communities, and ancestors. Whether the tradeoff of inner calm was worth it is up to the beholder, but I can guarantee that outside of large-scale calamities, premodern societies dealt with far, far lower levels of anxiety than we currently have.

Meeting expectations is the most basic way to happy, in the most basic sense. We live in a world with high expectations across a variety of factors, not the least of which is economic growth. It remains to be seen whether this expectation will continue to be fulfilled. It is a difficult thing to do, to lower one's expectations. Could you find it within you?



The Vanished Past