Anxiety is having a cultural moment. Op-ed columns and TV news features have seized on anxiety as the definitive malady of our age. They point out that anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses today, suggest that anxiety is on the rise, and fret that our young people are particularly susceptible.
And, as Op-ed columns and TV news features do, they sometimes leap from these assertions to quite generalized and scantly-evidenced explanations of where this anxiety is coming from: the political climate, hyper-competitive schooling combined with helicopter parenting, media and social media consumption, and so on.
In the process they frequently muddle the phenomenon of anxiety disorders—diagnosable maladies such as phobias, panic attacks, and social anxiety, which are extremely disruptive to people’s lives and require medical attention to manage—with non-clinical worry about current events. All this can be gathered into a sweeping claim that anxiety is a condition that particularly marks this time in history.
Generalizations of this sort are, of course, so vast as to be virtually unprovable. We’re skeptical of them here at Everyday Life in Middletown, in part because one of our primary inspirations was the British Mass Observation project of the 1930s. Part of their mission was to correct media distortions about what the public was feeling and thinking. Newspapers of their age, they felt, were constantly making specious claims about public opinion. “Although the papers are always playing up to the desire for this kind of information,” the Mass Observation founders wrote, “they take little trouble to be factual about it.”
Today of course, there is an overwhelming amount of factual information—of widely varying empirical solidity—available to the working journalist at the click of a few keystrokes. (Note the cascade of statistics, many from small-scale, non-epidemiological studies—in the links above).
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All that said, worry and anxiety, whether of normal or clinical intensity, is intimately tied up with everyday life. Worry is an everyday emotion because consciousness, in its ordinary operations, produces it. It does so because our minds naturally range across the past, present, and future.
Psychologists suggest that our ability to mentally time-travel helped us evolve into civilized beings. We have benefited enormously, as a species, from our ability to plan, which in turn relies on our skills for drawing inferences from the past. “You can’t learn without living in the past, and you can’t plan without living in the future,” writes behavioral economist Eyal Winter.
But this boon to human flourishing is also the driver of the unpleasant, and potentially crippling, emotions of regret and anxiety. Living in the past foments second thoughts. And looking to the future allows us to worry.
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Studying the Everyday Life in Middletown diaries reveals an expected amount of worry, but it does not support the ambient narrative of a populace beset by anxiety. This is not to suggest that the diaries refute this narrative. Like I said, we’re wise to be skeptical of large claims, so I won’t be making any of my own here.
In that spirit I offer the following suggestive but largely undigested fact: none of these words show up as leaders when we use basic text-mining technology to analyze sentiment and word frequency in the diaries: “anxiety,” “anxious,” “worry,” “worried,” “worrying,” “fear,” “afraid.”
As always, it is possible that something about the day diary as a form is influencing what we produce. Our prompt is to write down everything you do, and what you think and feel as you do it. This emphasis on the immediate and on action may prompt greater attention to our physical sensations and surroundings, our motions and tasks. Indeed, keeping a day diary may function as a kind of mindfulness practice, forcing attention to the immediate and tamping down our tendency to drift to the past or the future.
Still, we have our worries, and the diaries are both poignant and revealing about their sources and the ways they travel through our days. Some of these worries do seem tied to our historical moment: not only to the widespread sense of epochal political crisis (see below) but also to such economic factors as the costs of higher education, prescription drugs, and medical care.
Other concerns seem evergreen, like worrying about when our kids will get home at night, or fretting over aging and infirm relatives and pets. As you would expect, we also worry about work and money and our health.
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Political anxiety is common, if not pervasive, in the diaries.
It comes out, for one, in response to daily rituals of news consumption: “Sick of that and tired of watching our country circle the drain,” one diarist reports, after having snapped off CNN in the morning.
“NPR is still lively with tales of Alabama Senator Roy Moore,” writes a school teacher, launching into a laundry-list of the day’s headlines, which include discussions in the U.S. Senate of whether the president should have sole power to launch a nuclear attack. “I truly fear for our republic, and I have never felt this way in my 56 years,” he concludes.
The ambient political anxiety also hides behind corners, ready to be activated by memory or association or in other, unexpected ways. The diarist who turned away from CNN on February 4 later finds that his daughter’s college-admission essay touches on the political situation. This “leaves me a bit depressed. I shift between thinking I’m watching the American Republic unravel and that we’re experiencing a bad period but one from which we will recover. Right now, the first interpretation seems more convincing.”
Walking to have lunch with a friend on campus, a professor is reminded of having walked the same route on inauguration day: “Then got into Noyer and walked through the lobby with the big TVs, and remembered walking that way as Trump was giving his inauguration speech. An example of how the political anxiety, anger, and anguish is always there, like a thread waiting to be pulled…”
A fascinating diary charts how another writer seeks comfort in the everyday—in the quiet and the humble material comforts of his home—in the midst of the political distress:
“I note that as I get older and am made aware of current mass shootings at schools and other venues, listen to the chaotic and idiotic political news coming from Washington D.C., realize that the values of our country seem to be going in the direction of less concern and care for fellow human beings and more concern about large business earnings, less tolerance of people with different colored skin, less tolerance of religious beliefs different from the popular Western version of Christianity, and feel more threatened by a backlash against gay, lesbian, and transgender people, I feel more anxiety. Quiet times and pulling away from the felt unsettledness seem more and more needed.”
Later, working a crossword puzzle, he surfaces to find that “It’s warm and pleasant in the house. I’m comfortable and happy.”
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Two specially vivid evocations depict anxiety from quite different sources: one from a (largely mastered) fear of flying, the other from—well—nowhere, or nowhere that the diarist can identify.
Returning from work travel, an academic braces herself for the usual spate of fear upon takeoff. She describes it in detail:
“The moment between just lifting off and starting to level out is the worst. I’m always convinced that the plane isn’t going fast enough to actually make it into the air, and I have a few minutes of ‘what the fuck are we all doing on this thing?!!!’ My heart is in my throat, I feel kind of sick, and I’m totally sure we’re never going to make it to our destination. Do the people I love know that I love them? Will someone take care of SW? Will M ever remarry? Will he be happier with them than he was with me? And then we start to level off…and I’m fine. It’s not as bad as it used to be; I used to get full on panic attacks the entire time I would fly. Thank GOD that is over; now I just have an existential crisis for 5 minutes and I’m better until we land.”
In the growing academic field of affect theory, scholars have been emphasizing the degree to which moods and feelings, including anxiety, are public and shared: while we experience them in our individual bodies and minds, they result in part from shared outside forces acting on our similar biological equipment, and they take forms that are part of our acculturation. The diarist’s fear of flying is, after all, not a unique or even uncommon response to the residual cognitive dissonance of human flight and the physical sensations involved.
But sometimes the quirks of the individual body, or the individual self, produce some passing anxiety without an external source—or whose external source will remain a mystery.
“I feel an increasing sense of nervousness I can’t shake,” a professor writes. “I have nothing especial to be nervous about. The usual end-of-semester tasks await. No more, no less. My in-laws are arriving today but they don’t usually stress me out. I don’t think I’m stressed about turning 51 except perhaps that it feels closer to 60 than 50 did, probably because it is, but why should I care? I’ll have to work on my breathing.”
Later, with the morning’s teaching under his belt, this odd, floating anxiety passes. “Morning work shook off the anxiousness I woke up with. Great.”
–Patrick Collier