Coping with Anxiety in Our Fearful Digital World

Anxiety, stress, and fear plague our modern world, especially during the pandemic, our deep recession, and polarizing politics. While materially humankind has never been so well off, our modern technology has brought the anxieties and problems of the entire world to our screens, newspapers, and collective consciousness. During the Trump presidency, liberal anxiety was enormous, resulting in the weekly podcast, The United States of Anxiety (2016-Present). Anxiety is universal and can easily be traced back to ancient times, even back to the religious myth of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The renunciation of instinctual desires that civilization requires, as Freud pointed out, inevitably results in increased anxiety. Therapists help people manage their anxieties, which young people can find overwhelming. People attempt to lessen their anxieties by losing themselves in activities and movements. As an Eriksonian participant observer, the author discusses this coping mechanism in himself as well as observing it among others, including the followers of Donald Trump. He acknowledges his own anxiety about the future of American democracy.

News is mostly about bringing the dangers and fears from around the world to our doorstep, leading to endless anxiety. NEWS represents North East West South, which I trace back to our ancestors wiping the sleep from their eyes as they looked out from the safety of their tree or cave in all directions to check on the dangers of the world. Our news media, seeking to attract eyeballs to its news, heightens our fears as a way of justifying their existence to stockholders; “If it bleeds it leads” is a regional newspaper, radio,

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and television station mantra.

The threat of Trump’s possible and then actual presidential election led to the establishment of a weekly National Public Radio (NPR) podcast hosted by Kai Wright called The United States of Anxiety, “a show about the unfinished business of our history, and its grip on our future.” Its first episode’s image was of the nation divided and splintered between blue and red. The anxieties of liberals were greatly increased by the Trump presidency, and this podcast struggles to understand the nature of what is happening to the sharply divided country. The episode “Who Owns the Deed to the American Dream?” reflects this division. President Trump and his movement enormously increased the anxieties of liberal and academic America.

Anxiety is universal. Ancient society certainly had a sense of anxiety. In the early 16^th century, the English adopted the word from the French anxiété or Latin anxietas. In the 19^th century, anxiety came into the language of medicine. Common synonyms are angst, anguish, fear, sorrow, and worry. Aristotle wrote about it in the ancient world, and I suspect that in an inchoate form we may even experience it in utero. Although we humans are drawn to the idea of a place where there is no anxiety, fear, knowledge, or work, as represented in the Biblical Garden of Eden, this is merely a hope rather than a reality.

The colleague who introduced me to psychoanalysis and psychohistory argued that the Garden of Eden was a dream of returning to the womb where there was no need to labor or know anything. You may recollect from Bible class that when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were expelled from their heavenly garden. (Note that, in keeping with the male tendency to blame women, Eve is held responsible for giving Adam the idea of breaking God’s commandment to not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.) The severe anxiety of pregnant women impacts the fetus, so it is likely that in utero the unborn child experiences anxiety. Peter Petschauer emailed me on March 28, 2021, that at the recent 2021 German psychohistorical conference there were several papers on the “trauma and anxiety of fetuses.”

There is no life without fear and the anticipation of fear (anxiety). Some anxiety can be a nice motivator to action, but why do we have so much of it? Freud’s answer, with which I agree, is

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because renouncing instinctual impulses is part of the cost of civilization. Today, due to civilization, we are digitally connected with the fears and problems of the entire world.

Therapists are aware of the enormous anxieties their patients often feel as they strive to heal. Perhaps these are the miseries of everyday life that Freud wrote about—miseries that are compounded by our modern technological connectedness. Freud was acutely aware of the anxieties occasioned by living in civilized society, as reflected in Civilization and its Discontents (1930). When I reached for my copy of the Concordance of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1983), I found that “anxiety” was referenced 1,709 times and “anxious” 113 times, but “fear” and its related words were referenced only 788 times. Thus, the anticipation of fear (that is anxiety) is 2.17 times more prevalent in the founder of psychoanalysis’ thinking than the perhaps more realistic danger. Therapists make their living in considerable part by helping their patients come to terms with their fears and anxieties.

As a therapist, I had helped lessen or eliminate the anxieties of a variety of patients. Some examples include a middle-aged paranoid man who wanted to punch the mailman for allegedly staring at him, a young man who was afraid of intimacy and thought that his facial characteristics made him unlovable, a young woman who obsessively fantasized about redoing her college education to make it perfect, and so many others. Unlike many of my academic colleagues and members of the Psychohistory Forum, they managed to mostly avoid anxieties about the future of our democracy. Focusing on one’s immediate anxieties is certainly a way to protect yourself from larger anxieties that are so much more difficult to control.

In twice teaching a pre-COVID course called Self-Growth, I was amazed by reading the weekly diaries of my students, as well as by the in-class discussion, at just how fearful most of them felt. To escape, some threw themselves into working long hours for pay or playing video games. Most found mindfulness, meditation, or medically prescribed tranquilizers to at least temporarily calm them. A few referenced therapy as beneficial. There were occasional references to the commonplace methods of self-medication that are alcohol and drugs (legal and illegal). While I don’t think these students were completely typical of my college’s population, they left me more concerned about how their generation handles anxiety.

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Anxiety over our inevitable death is the ultimate concern. COVID-19 is the primary focus of anxiety at the moment. Will I get it? Will I die from it or is that only for the elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions? How will it affect me? There is currently a lot of anxiety as to what the reaction will be to the second COVID-19 shot. A 24-year-old medical worker just told me that COVID-19 couldn’t be as bad as what he was experiencing from his second shot.

In the 2020-2021 worldwide pandemic, realistic fears and unrealistic anxieties are on steroids. Families, businesses, communities, economics, and social relations have all been severely disrupted. Fearing for their own lives, families have had to allow their loved ones to die alone without the comfort of their touch and presence at their bedside. Even if people are willing to take that risk, they have been prohibited from doing so by law. Depression and mood swings, significant in normal times, have become greater due to the threat of COVID-19. So how can people manage to cope with their anxieties while in isolation from one another? Psychohistorian Mel Goldstein (1945-2012) used to talk about “shopping therapy,” “travel therapy,” and “boyfriend/girlfriend therapy,” to which I would add activity therapy, party therapy, work therapy, and writing therapy—the latter two work well for me.

We humans are prone to running away from our fears by losing ourselves in some activity. Our anxieties and fears are simply pushed to the back burner rather than dealt with. Love and work, which Freud called “the cornerstones of our humanness,” are most helpful in dealing with the pandemic and other anxieties, such as scrupulously wearing a mask and struggling to maintain proper social distancing while doing essential shopping. Of course, some “shopping therapy” can be conducted online, but it is not nearly as satisfying as the window shopping and in-person purchasing we are mostly denied presently. Although this is not entirely true since in the name of individual rights some governors, especially of red states, are precipitously lifting prohibitions on dining together, attending sporting events, and generally congregating in close spaces.

We humans need each other! Despite all our talk about individualism, humankind is very social. Last night’s NPR television news focused on a teenager who committed suicide. His mother is now focused on a crusade to avert the tragedy of teen suicide. Throwing herself into a movement is her way of warding off some of the overwhelming feelings of guilt that she couldn’t avert her

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hyperactive and troubled son’s self-destructive act. In this period of limited activity, we may have to face our own severe mood swings, depressive tendencies, and worst fears. Suicide, which causes so much pain to others, is a tragic way of stopping the pain within. One way of escaping our anxiety is to get lost in a movement. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has given purpose to millions of Americans who can go to rallies of the “good people” where they can share their savior president and denounce their shared enemies. By merging a part of themselves with their “can-do-no-wrong leader,” they come away feeling better in a country that they fear is becoming less like them, which is threatening their sense of identity and economic well-being.

Capitalism is the most revolutionary economic system as it almost continuously disrupts society while providing more goods and services to most people. Rapid change creates new opportunities while causing anxiety. After World War II, American capitalism became the model for much of the world and was copied in many ways outside of the U.S., threatening the ordinary American worker’s standard of living and self-image while providing lots of less-expensive goods made abroad. To add insult to the injury of comparative economic decline, the economy’s need for immigrant talent and inexpensive labor has led to White America facing the prospect of a multi-racial majority in this century. Although Trump and many of his followers are racist, they are perfectly happy to admire and even associate with Blacks and other races who are celebrities, great athletes, or rich, which I detailed in my article, “Trump Profiteering, Racism, and Biden’s Gaffes” (Psychohistory News, Fall 2020).

While capitalism disrupts our lives as it brings lots of less expensive goods, movements help us form our identities. I love my identities as an American (without the flag-waving), author, college professor, father, historian, husband, political psychobiographer, and psychohistorian. These give direction and meaning to my life as they shape my reality and influence the reality of the world around me in certain ways. Of course, their impact is tiny in comparison to the MAGA movement, but they are grounded in my reality, not in identification with a grandiose leader.

As a psychohistorian, I’ve long been fascinated by humankind’s increasing ability to turn fantasy into reality. Starting at the beginning of the 20^th century, Americans turned the fantasy of flying like the birds into an everyday reality; we went from projecting

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“the man in the moon” to actually getting men on the moon; and the democracy we advocated, which was previously shared by only a handful of countries, has now spread to about 15% of the world, with the semblance of democracy through elections (however rigged) everywhere else. The attack on January 6^th of some 800 rioters who felt they were carrying out President Trump’s wishes is a reminder that democracy is a very fragile instrument of government that is relatively rare in history. When democratic citizens feel sufficiently threatened, they incline to favor security (as represented by seemingly strong leaders) rather than freedom, as CNN host Jake Tapper controversially said in 2014. While opinion polls indicate the contrary, these surveys measure what people think more than what they actually do. Stanley Milgram’s studies on obedience reflect the enormous gulf between the ego ideals of society versus the reality of how people act. Even in the most stable, well-established democracies, a certain level of political anxiety is inevitable.

As an Eriksonian participant observer, it is useful to examine how I handle my own anxieties, beyond losing myself in movements I greatly value. My anxieties are diminished by focusing on and caring for loved ones and, to a much lesser extent, students (this involves tough love). By setting work for myself, there are concrete actions to take, including turning fear into action rather than anxiety whenever possible. Humor is such a wonderful way of temporarily laughing away some of the anxiety provoked by the troubles of the world, so I embrace and share humor with my friends and colleagues. Anxieties about health are lessened by taking proactive steps involving exercise, medical care, and weight management. Simply thinking through and writing about the problems of our democracy and the world help to diminish my personal anxiety.

A great deal of the non-COVID anxiety of our readers revolves around the political dangers to our democracy. Trump’s end of presidency threat to our constitutional system of government was thwarted in part because he was such an erratic leader and, in his typical dissociative stochastic manner, he failed to lead the followers he told to “stop the steal” of the election and undo the votes of the 81,009,468 who voted for Biden (7,059,741 votes more than for Trump) and the 306 electoral votes he received (74 more than for Trump). How could Trump come even that close, and what does this mean for more well-organized and courageous authoritarians

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who would personally risk overthrowing the Constitution to gain or hold on to power? Prior to January 6^th, I used to think that the fears of some of my colleagues about threats to our Constitution were simply a matter of their unrealistic anxieties. Now, I’m not so sure.

Conclusion
This essay is rather wide-ranging because on our digitally connected planet we have threats and therefore fears and anxieties coming at us from every direction in our over 200 countries and approximately 7.8 billion people. Of course, the focus is overwhelmingly on the dangers faced and worries of people most like us within our own American society. Methods of dealing with our anxiety include alcohol and drugs (legal and illegal) as well as focusing on love relationships, movements, work, and/or therapy. There’s also the reaction of the denial of what is feared the most, as when in March 2021, Texas officials decide to open their coronavirus-ridden state to business as usual, lacking even a mask mandate.

At the moment, the new Biden administration is working to lessen fear and pandemic-related anxiety through a massive program of vaccination and by pumping money into the flagging economy. This will probably lessen some of our current anxieties, but we will always have to cope with anxiety. However, with a good, responsible government, the task is less formidable.

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