I would think anxiety is the body's emotional intelligence stating that something is not right. And still not right. And still not right.
In a traditional society, this might mean lions are near, but I feel anxiety is more of an ongoing, cumulative conversation of our bodies with our natural surroundings. When you live in a dying ecosystem, how are you supposed to feel? When you live in a story that no longer makes sense, how are you supposed to feel?
The other day I figured out that my anxiety is 100% social. If a plague killed everyone in the world except for me, I would become fearless. Even though I would be much more likely to be killed by wild dogs, that danger does not fill me with dread -- it feels like an adventure. On a deep level, I understand the danger of wild dogs and how to face it.
But if I have to call an insurance company, or go into an auto parts store, or cross a national border, those are all Kafka nightmares, with layers upon layers of stuff that I don't understand, and can get in trouble for not understanding, with vague punishments that might lead to even deeper dreadful worlds.
When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm. In one trial, a single person accounted for the difference between success and failure.
A nice video, Alan Watts Chillstep Mix #1.
From earlier this year on reddit: If they made a show called "White Mirror" that was about all the positive aspects of the human/technology relationship, what would be the plot of certain episodes? Lately I've been thinking about therapy bots, AI's that can talk people through metacognition and changing their mental and emotional habits. On the one hand, AI is still really clunky for that kind of thing, but on the other hand, old-timey Freudian psychotherapists would just listen and reframe the patient's talk into new questions, something that AI's have been doing for decades, and sometimes that helped.
Related: Ask Hacker News: Is there a new habit you cultivated recently that is really paying off? I've been doing a few things lately that seem to be helping. One thing is going two or three times a week to a weight room and swimming pool. That practice is rubbing off on the rest of my life, so now when there's some little thing I don't feel like doing, I frame it as a "workout" and push through it more easily.
I'm also using a crazy practice to deal with anxiety, where a couple times a day I'll relax, close my eyes, and "turn up the volume" -- try to feel that fear as long and as hard as I can. In theory, we should be able to burn out on pain just like we burn out on pleasure, and it seems to be working. Here's a bit of verse from a creative project I haven't made public yet: "If you want to fly / You must love your fear / As you fear to die"
We see this scarcity in other industries that require traditional master/journeyman/apprentice systems, like master machinists, masons, or plasterers. That there are no baseline jobs, like light bulb manufacturing in glassblowing, that allow a sufficient pool of talent to acrue so that the very best, the "10x" artisans, can be found. That pool also gives a fallback so that people who are trained but do not possess the talent or dedication to become masters can still be gainfully employed.
This goes back to mechanization. Supposedly, mechanized manufacturing allows tedious labor to be done by machines. But making stuff by hand is not unrewarding -- it was made unrewarding by an economic system designed top-down for profit, not bottom-up for people to continue enjoying what they do all day. I'm not sure how hard the system has to crash to get from here to there, or how many generations it's going to take. But at the very least, as a culture, we have to stop measuring success in terms of economic growth.
Related, from the subreddit: Steven Pinker's ideas are fatally flawed. Pinker's gig is to tell beautiful lies to the neoliberal elite, linking their ideology to real improvements in quality of life that are mostly happening for other reasons.
I've stopped writing about this stuff because there's nothing any of us can do about it. But I do find it darkly fascinating that the people with real power are so out of touch.
I have visitors arriving this afternoon, so I probably won't be posting again until next week. Some good news: last week when I posted that video of sacred harp singing, I had no idea it was still going on, and there's no religious requirement to participate. Thanks Rochelle for pointing me to fasola.org.