We live in an era of unprecedented anxiety. The future holds too many questions and few answers, so we can often feel like we’re on a roller coaster that, as it reaches a dangerously high peak, divides into too many uncertain possibilities.
Over just a decade, anxiety disorders doubled among young people in the United States, affecting 14.66% in 2018. In the wake of the pandemic, facts about anxiety have only worsened around the world. A study published in The Lancet estimated that there were 76.2 million additional cases, an increase of 25.6%.
What is happening to us?
The gravitational force of worries
Will we survive climate change? What are we going to do when robots “steal” our jobs? Will World War III break out? Where will the economy go? And our health? What will we do when we are older? What future awaits our children?
Many questions arise from the uncertainty of the future, casting their long shadow on the present. And that is precisely the root of modern anxiety.
Philosopher Alan Watts wrote in “The Wisdom of Insecurity” that the source of current frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future. “If to enjoy a pleasant present, we must have the security of a happy future, we are ‘asking for the moon’. We lack that security. The best predictions are based more on probability than certainty, and as far as we know, every one of us is going to suffer and die.”
Our insistence on security in an unpredictable and uncertain world that is constantly changing gives us existential anxiety. We continue to look for a better future, a future in which we can feel more secure. But that future is just an abstraction. It does not exist. And the faster the world spins, the less certainties it will bring and the more anxiety it will cause us.
How do we get rid of that obsession with the future?
Watts says we must live fully in the present. But of course, it’s easier said than done. No matter how much we try to force our minds to be in the here and now, worries about the future exert a powerful influence, causing us to gravitate around them.
The key is to understand – intellectually and emotionally – the contradiction contained in the desire to be perfectly safe in a universe whose very nature is changing and fluid. “If I want to be safe, that is, protected from the flow of life, I want to be separate from life. However, it is this very sense of separation that makes me feel insecure,” Watts wrote.
In reality, the desire for security means isolating ourselves from our own life, walling ourselves inside a castle in which we see the world go by, but we are not part of it. And it is precisely this isolation, a distinctive characteristic of modern societies, that scares us the most because we do not have the necessary protection networks, so we feel like we are launching into the air without a parachute.
In this way, the search for security becomes a snake that bites its tail. The more security we manage to achieve, the more security we will need to feel calm because the more alone we will feel.
What generates insecurity in us is not so much the change itself, but the absence of that support network that sustains us and the lack of confidence in our resources to manage whatever comes. Isolation from the world disconnects us from the flow of events, which we perceive as alien, which makes them seem even more threatening.
“The isolated ‘self’ feels distressingly insecure and panics because the real world seems a blatant contradiction to its being,” explained Watts.
Curiously, the secret to eliminating anxiety from the roots consists precisely in tuning into that universe that generates so many fears and worries in us. Watts was convinced that “The only way to make change meaningful is to immerse yourself in it, move with it, participate in the dance.”
When one plunges into life, he begins to flow with it. You become more sensitive to small changes in the environment and learn to anticipate them or act accordingly. Watts reminds us that “Life is entirely momentary, there is no permanence or security, and there is no ‘self’ that can be protected.”
Serenity and plenitude reside precisely in lowering the barriers and opening ourselves to change to merge with the present experience, with the confidence that whatever happens, we will be able to deal with it. Maybe that won’t change the world, but at least it will change our way of being in it and responding to what happens. It may not change the world, but it will certainly give us the serenity and security necessary to deal with whatever happens. And that’s enough.
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References:
Santomauro, D. F. et. Al. (2021) Global prevalence and burden of depressive and anxiety disorders in 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lancet; 398(10312): 1700-1712.
Goodwin, R. D. et. Al. (2020) Trends in anxiety among adults in the United States, 2008–2018: Rapid increases among young adults. J Psychiatr Res; 130: 441–446.
Watts, A. (1994) La sabiduría de la inseguridad. Barcelona: Kairós.
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