#Anxiety!!

Anxiety is an increasing worry. It is being reported at record levels, which suggests it is being talked about more freely, as well as increasing in incidence. Doctors are treating it more than ever, prescribing medication to dull its edge - what else are they going to do, when people demand an answer? Public personalities are talking about it, which helps legitimise it, or at least give voice to the many that suffer from it – things are less mysterious when in the light. None of this goes near explaining it.  

It seems few are exempt, neither are we sure as to the why. Like good old-fashioned guilt, it may be in relation or reaction to something, or not.  It threatens us, whispering fears that rarely materialise; anxiety doesn’t tell the truth. People from good homes suffer from it, and people from a less-than-ideal home life suffer from it.  In some cases, it is debilitating, in others not so.  In some cases, it is physiologically diagnosed, as in being explicable, but in others, it can’t be, even though its effects are visceral.

I get it in small doses and my best way to describe it is – it is faceless.  It comes, it goes, it lacks definition, and knowing this helps me care the less – in a proper sense.  It passes, deserving no attention. But I suspect what happens to me barely registers on the anxiety scale – in that it may be normal in the light of several factors, factors of nature and nurture. 

Some diseases take a long time to make their presence known.  They have been doing their deadly work unnoticed, and when we do it can be too late, sadly, tragically.  Mistakes and foolish lifestyles and decisions made by the young tend to make themselves known later in life as well – via fears, anxieties, guilt, regrets, and their kind.  It’s enough to make you sweat. 

Alain de Botton wrote in his perceptive “Status Anxiety’ that people were once socially stratified in a way that left them without the modern anxiety of having to find their place or more to the point feel the pressure that going up in status is inherently better, even necessary. They spent little time trying to discover themselves, and their apparent destiny. How refreshing (in some ways). He suggests the American dream of riches, and being who you want to be, is impossible and the factory of status anxiety.  The result is a neurotic blend of disconnection from reality, and a life spent chasing the wind.  He says much more than this brief précis, but he insists it has profound implications. 

Another layer that may point to the wellspring of anxiety is the gradual, deliberate and dramatic breakdown of family structures.  Children need safety, and formal family structures to mature properly, and yet more and more have foisted on them a myriad of alternatives of family structures (mix and match) to either deliberately destroy the Judeo-Christian ethic of family or to provide alternative moral structures we are told are healthy and freeing - the new normal. But a child cannot and should not be made the guinea pig of social engineering.  Anxiety is likely one of the first things they feel.  

Easy divorce once sounded good to us, but it is often a disaster on nearly every level.  Children are rarely the benefactors, no matter the blandishments touted by the rich and famous saying it is for the best and that they are putting their divorced energies into the welfare of their children. Somebody forgot to tell them that would be the case if they worked on their egos and infidelities and stayed married. Abortion, which was sold sounding humane in specific cases, is now little more than the alternative contraception of choice.  Why would we think it strange that a woman suffers at some point for the choice of abortion? That is a story getting no airplay. 

We can’t rule out the increase of anxiety due to the decrease of an ethic that reaches much deeper than my wants and needs, preference and choices.  It may take a long time to see that anxiety is often related to the sense of security and well-being we were meant to feel as children, but many adults, acting like children, are undermining the future health of generations to come.  We can’t rule this out.  Unpick fabric and you will be left with a lot of loose ends.