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anxiety

Tue May 24 17:45:48 -03 2022

"Anxiety" means what? It comes from where?

I feel that anxiety comes from being pressed, compressed, in a way in which your daily life isn't about expressing or processing what is being pressed on you, so you solve some things, and others remain compressed. This way, few things get done, because much is compressed and neglected.

When life is compressed, there isn't time to even think about how I feel, much less to talk about it. Some people say everything that goes through their heads, and decry someone who doesn't speak as passive. But that doesn't mean what they say has quality or truth to it.

Going to university, working most jobs, compresses lots of our lives. Our fields of study and work are rarely about thinking, feeling, and speaking about the experience or how one feels. They are only about the objects of that study or work. But how can these be separated?

In the past, my eyes were more critical, today they feel a kind of panic, with this pressure to abandon or hide the critical views to see if that way the system will pay you a bit more. But it doesn't work that way.

The system selects those who are socially skilled and able to learn fast. It presents itself as accessible, diverse, plural, but that's only a façade. It's the opposite of all these things.

I've been reading less, in special less news, but also many pages I used to follow. I've been reading much less lately. I've also stopped playing computer games, something I dedicated time to almost every day. But time has not opened up, it seems to shrink every day, and that's with less pleasure, less leisure, because you are supposedly becoming more productive.

When will I have some return? I don't know. It seems that I study and work as a future investment, but with no present security. At this moment, there is only uncertainty on the horizon, and that creates more anxiety. The anxiety creates exhaustion, because there is never quality in the time spent. The exhaustion creates irritation, and this one ends up creating the feeling that you are unable to love.

This last situation is what creates and deepens the chasms between the alienated beings that make up the system.

Perhaps "love" is too strong a word, loaded with christian meanings. But some measure of care, of kindness or friendship, is really lost, and without this kindness the connections are poisoned by noise and loneliness becomes endemic. Not the kind that you relax into, the kind that breeds collective despair and abandonment.

Churches pretend to have the remedy for all this, but they are only part of the scheme of its justification. They present a logic where you first have to believe the dogma, to only then receive the grace of its gods, but they piously believe that their gods love unconditionally.

Because they blame the individuals themselves for their alieantion, and because they exclude so many ways of being and existing, in special because they invest politically on the exclusion and stigmatization of other ways of thought, religions are not the answer to this mechanism.

Perhaps the answer is in creativity, on the kind of faith that goes beyond what is already given and arrives at creation. And a specially sacrificial cliche of religion is the idea that humans are not supposed to create, they must only conform to what was created and how it was determined to be.

Beyond creativity, there is also listening. To speak is hard, to speak something new is even harder. But if there is no capacity to hear, also something hard to accomplish, creation will be in vain.

Writing and reading are my refuge, perhaps for reasons such as these. In writing, time is asynchronous. There is no pressure to speak in immediate fashion, nor to pick your words intuitively, on a fraction of a second. Listening in the written sense is reading, which can be done centuries later, at the reader's own pace, not requiring skilled oratory or a proper social occasion.

But I don't live these dreams. I just dream. What I live is the anxiety of not knowing how much or when I'll be able to free myself from debt and financial and psychological insecurity. What I live is not knowing when I'll be able to write about my joys and about what I am experiencing in life.

Today, my experience is about solving problems, one after another, without much time to truly live. Some complacently call this "adult life", so to "truly live" is just a lost hope, and the rest of life is supposed to be worst than religious asceticism, only debt slavery motivated by an illusion of social mobility, like a carrot hanging on a string.

My wish was to be able to have and give banquets, health, care, quality of life, to myself and others around me. But we are, collectively, sinking in debt and under domination by a system that uses clocks and calendars to keep us permanently under the pressure of its anxiety.

Hoping to write, at some point in the future, writings that celebrate our victory,

~ daze