Anxiety
Inside the settled life, the locus of age, gender (though sometimes variable in late modern times), work, and personal history, resides an unsettled life, the received bombardment of what could be, should be, might be, the conditional and subjunctive hoodoo that assails each person at daily inopportune moments. Beyond the awareness of the majesty of sky and earth, which in calmer moments may promote awe and appreciation, lurks the enormity of what could happen next. Some of it will happen for sure—the geometry test third period, the job interview tomorrow, the dreaded but necessary romantic breakup over wine and French onion soup on Friday night. Some of it will happen but at an undetermined time, such as death. Some of it may happen. Some of it is unlikely to happen but dreadfully compelling, such as an apocalypse that means the so-called end of the world, be it brought about by nuclear, galactic, or divine means. Some of it is minute and forgettable, the mental tide that surges back and forth between oblivion and obsession. All of this is invisible yet tangible.
As moments have grown technological tentacles, there have been more externals to focus on in modern times. Since there has been more to control, however uncontrollable matters at-large may be, there has been more pronounced anxiety. People have panicked and worried forever, but modern anxiety is something more pervasive, a gift of the glowing, ringing, importuning era. With every flick of a switch or swallow of a pill or push of a button, anxiety has been at once allayed and increased. The human predicament, lodged squarely in the realm of unknowing, has been massaged by a sense that though all may not be well, all may be dealt with and turned into knowingness. The advent of ever more thorough technologies allows everyone to keep track of everyone else, though there remains the anguish of separateness. “I’m on the train headed to the city.” “I’m at Cathy’s house.” “I’m eating a bowl of cereal and staring out a window that needs to be cleaned.” Each day millions of messages speak to that now mild, now crisp anguish. Nothing can make it go away.
People have tried hard, however, and partially—always partially—succeeded. The unhappy shadow remains: the more that can be seen to, the more will be seen to. The trap of technology lies in the creation of new, inveigling protocols for old purposes. Human beings could not deal with all the protocols that were there before—“Keep your elbows off the table, pay the loan by the end of the month, see the priest and confess”—much less take on new ones. Yet they have, and gladly, as new verbs announce new actions. “I’m blogging, texting, tweeting, and friending. I’m too busy to be anxious.”
There is going to be some waiting, though, some in-between time when some form of idle hell is being paid. The human ability to project interior, imaginative situations will never be matched by technology’s ability to realize those situations. For all its bright, violent energy, a video game must partake of finitude. Its repetitions demand new versions and products, ballyhooed changes to the formula. Anxiety’s alter ego, tedium, is waiting right around the corner. After the game or phone or computer is shut off, the inexhaustible questions start up: does she, will I, what if? There is still a human head on a human neck. There is still a very vast world out there whirling at its own speed and multiplying circumstances at a rate beyond any head’s reckoning.
On the other side of anxiety lies indifference. “Whatever” is the perfect word to meet anxiety, not head on, but at a soft angle. The over-stimulation that technology proffers may result in a sort of amiable deadening, not just in terms of the senses but in terms of feelings. When Dante wrote of l’accidia, a mixture of boredom, sloth, and indifference, an overall tepidness of the soul, he was writing about a defined vice, a form of death-in-life. In modern times such a vice was not a vice but a more or less benign attitude toward all that a human being could not control.
The catastrophes, crises, and weird horrors offered daily via various media are enough to make anyone not just wary but permanently immune to the slings and arrows of others’ fortunes. There never has been a surplus of human caring to go around. The prodigality of images and reports reduces responsiveness to a parody: “That’s too bad. Pass the ham.” The anxiety that goes along with the images and reports—“could happen to me”—gets duller and duller and finally disappears. There is no thankfulness for being spared. Tomorrow will bring new situations of molestation, abduction, civil war, and random murder. Having fallen asleep to the drone of the day’s dark news, each parent in the morning clutches his or her cell phone a little more tightly.
When we are anxious, we spark intermittently, protesting our vitality. When we are indifferent, we mumble. When we suborn anxiety, we invite a zombie state. Modern times witnessed a vast psycho-drama and referendum on how to proceed from day to day in a world that institutionalized uncertainty—life as febrile and rumored as a stock market, as an ideologue’s principled whims, as a celebrity’s latest affair. The insouciance that humanity summoned from day to day could be credited to the genetic tenacity that drew across time’s blank visage a solid scrawl of endeavor. A closer look, however, revealed endless minute gaps, those moments when uncertainty entered and a person was left with his or her consternation, fear, and confusion. Inside those gaps lay the child who was not told what to expect, who stuttered an answer to some impossible question, and wished to hide. W. H. Auden, an apostle of the Age of Anxiety, wrote of “Children afraid of the night / Who have never been happy or good.” All the lights and gizmos failed to console those children.
I look forward to reading your posts --this one, like others, expresses the swirling anxieties of our time so magnificently.
I’m thinking of the response to anxiety that is an aggressive lashing out at those near and far.