Something's Not Right

King of the Meadow, by Steve Falser (source: flickr, Creative Commons)

Something doesn’t feel right.

Deeply, existentially. Not right.

Do you feel it, too?

 

My family, between my wife and myself, makes $100K a year. I'm rich and comfortable by any objective measure. I've lived in lots of parts of the country (northeast, midwest, and south), in neighborhoods that are both "rich" and "poor," and I've traveled across the world, to countries that are "rich" and "poor." I've seen how people live. We live well. I have every one of my basic needs fulfilled. I never fear about a next meal, or whether I can fix something that breaks. I never worry about missing a house or car payment. If my kids need something, we can probably afford it. We give about 10% away. I have money to save.

I should be fine. I should be at home in my life. But often I'm not.

My life has its share of anxiety. I’m up at night, worried. About all kinds of things. Am I accomplished enough? Are my kids going to be OK? Is my relationship OK? None of these anxieties make sense--anxieties, by nature, don't have a concrete referent. They're real and they feel lousy. And my kids... a lot of times, they are anxious, too... as much, or even more, than I am.

What is the source of this anxiety? Why, if I have everything I need, am I still worried? Why are you worried?

 

The first, responsible answer would be to conclude that something is wrong with me. To assume that it's something in my own psychological make-up that's leading to my anxiety. It's my job--it's each of our jobs--to "do our own work." Human beings must explore our inner life and see whether there's something about our own souls and spirits that haven't adjusted themselves properly to life as it is. And yes, there are plenty of things I need to work on--quick to anger and judgment, guilt, a need to please others. But after years of good therapy and counseling, I can honestly say that I'm fairly well-adjusted. My operating system is running fine.

I've come to believe that it's not me that's the source of the anxiety. It IS the world. Something about the world we inhabit--the world we create and share--our culture, our customs, our norms, is not right.

I suspect a lot of folks in my situation--perhaps you?--feel a similar kind of anxiety about being-in-the-world. Just look around and see how many solutions the market now offers for our baseline, diffuse anxious existence. 

1. A “wellness” industry, with yoga, fitness plans, diet tips, homeopathic medicines, heavy blankets, meditation. Many of these things do FEEL good. But why do we need expensive "extras" in life to jolt ourselves into simply feeling OK?
2. Consumption is the go-to anxiety fix. We have long been told we can find happiness in nicer things: nicer houses, devices and tech, cars, clothes, golf clubs, even books.
3. Experiences are a related form of consumption. We are offered so many different kinds of experiences that promise to give meaning to our lives: travel to famous or out-of-the-way places. Adventures like climbing rocks, swimming with dolphins, sleeping in igloos. I love to travel and I love seeing new places, but I should not have to go on crazy adventures to alleviate the anxiety of being at home.
4. Retreats offer all kinds of things, notably the opportunity to "detox"... from what? From our ubiquitous phones? From our family? From life? Why do I have to detox from normal life?
5. Political movements offer meaning for some of us. Join the DSA, and fix what's wrong! I love politics, but political power and movement-building are not existentially satisfying.

This is not a set-up. I'm not about to tell you the "real" answer is religion. There is no real answer. What there is, I think, is a diagnosis that we must all make of the nature of the problem that inheres in our human existence in this moment.

 

One source of the problem is the vast world of choice, created by affluence and the omnipresence of media that presents us with a relentless, limitless world of possibilities. Choice makes life profoundly unsettling. We are led to believe there is always something better, something more rewarding, something richer and more meaningful out there than the life we are currently living.

 

Social media amplifies the illusion of choice and control that the consumer economy creates. Facebook and Instagram project a world in which others are currently--right now!--enjoying the perfection we lack. The images on social media are always exciting, always inspiring, always showing people living life fully and sucking out the marrow. Social media largely ignores the unlovely parts of being alive. Imagine if the balance of social media posts resembled an "ordinary life"--if it showed pictures of parents arguing, kids vegging on devices, people stuck in traffic commuting. Instead, it teases us with the vision that life not only can be... but should be shinier, healthier, rosier, more meaningful, more perfect.

 

At the same time that that this fantasy world of more and better is being projected before us at every moment, we're losing (or have lost) the fundamental grounding practices of being human. We are social animals by nature. We evolved to relate to others, through speech, and sharing, and work, and play, and art, and worship. The architecture of the practices of daily living is increasingly(?) anti-social. We rumble through our days, mechanically connected to cars, devices, climate-controlled spaces. Everything around us is designed to give us choice, preference, autonomy. Anything that troubles us or inconveniences us is, by implication, "wrong." Such a world, in which everything that not conforming to my desire is bad, is unbearable and ultimately untenable.

 

I went camping last week. It had been a while since I slept outside--as those of you who camp know, it can be challenging to get a family of 5 to do anything, let alone get everyone (and everything) on board for a week outside. But we did it and part of the draw was a purchase we made--a 2001 Coleman pop-up camper. It promised us the best of both worlds--getting us all into the precarious, lovely natural world, while keeping a baseline of creature comforts.

When we arrived at the campsite--a state park in south Georgia, I was stunned by the size and the elaborateness of the campers. There was one site with tent campers. Every other site had an RV--from tiny to zip code-worthy. Each camper was stuffed with the comforts of an actual home--running water, TV, climate control. They were beautiful. They were all connected to the campsite's wi-fi network. I was struck at the paradox of this thing we were all doing: we had come all this way, gone through all this trouble and expense to go into nature, into the place where we are supposed to be small and insignificant... and we had brought every comforting thing with us so that nature would not trouble us in the slightest.

 

This felt to me like an expression of deep anxiety--in all of our campers and RVs and equipment and gear and tech, we were all expressing a deep need for ease, a need to make things comfortable, a need to smooth out the rough edges of life, a need to control every unpleasantness. And of course we all did it ourselves: 40 campsites, each of us self-sufficient in our fortresses, hardly interacting or sharing with one another.

I used to camp in my 20s, and I would take a backpack and food and clothes and not much else. When I went outside, it was, in part, to recall that outside--that the world--is bigger than me. That it doesn't yield to my wishes. That I am not in control. I would always go out with a few others. We would laugh and talk and share the work and the load. The bonds of backpacking are some of the strongest I've ever felt. That experience made me feel more deeply aligned with the nature of things. More vulnerable, less choice, needing and cherishing my relationships. It was an experience that disempowers and disorients the self, then re-calibrates one's sense of power through social collaboration and re-orients the self to the rhythms of the natural world.

I do believe that something is deeply wrong with the way our world is constructed. I function in a world that is always taunting me with illusions of control and autonomy. Our world causes anxiety, then sells false remedies that will never truly heal it. How rare it is that I ever do anything that gives me a true "cure"--a sense of ultimate vulnerability to the contingencies of the world, and yet at the same time allows me to feel more connected to the people around me. That, I think, is what would heal my--and our--anxiety.