Issue #4: Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom
We all feel anxious all the time but do we really understand anxiety in its current context?
Hello Hardeners, hope you are doing swell. Today’s mood is Kendrick Lamar's new album. In this issue, we are going to talk about the blindspots of our modern digitally dominated work and social culture. We will also touch upon early solutions to mitigate the problems that are caused by missing these blindspots.
I see startups spring up every day to solve a use case in the mental health space. But I’ve seen few to none that are thinking about the problem in terms of our own relationships and tendencies with digital technology. And how it is modifying our social structure and the texture of our experience hiding in plain sight.
So, let’s direct our gaze towards the elephant in the room.
Everyone is anxious, stressed, and tired all the time.
However, merely stating the problem is not enough. We have to let our guards down and accept it without any “but”s. Anxiety has always been there but what changed specifically in the technological age?
The prolific Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) once said:
Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.
Extending on Kierkegaard, the illusion of choice or freedom has exploded in the age of hyper-connectedness. Any information is one web search away. As I explained in the second issue, the mind doesn’t differentiate between the proximity of choice between the physical and the digital reality. It measures both of them as equals. But the proximity of choice is an illusion for any significant change that can only be brought about by authentic human interaction, relationships, and trust. So, the splurge of choices and our failure to materialize them into existence shoots the anxiety meter in our modern minds.
Three kinds of people
There are roughly three kinds of people based on their relationship with digital technology in the world right now -
One who believes that only technology can solve all of our human problems. Even the problems that have nothing to do with technology. On the perils of ignoring that certain problems are beyond solving and they simply can't waste their time and energy thinking about those. They end up choosing other battles to fight.
One who believes that technology can't solve shit and we have to return back to the roots (whatever that means). In reality, they don't know the path forward or they are hopeless. They are trying to lean into whatever coping mechanism they find that can return and retain their sanity in the long term.
One (like me) who thinks that technology is an unstoppable force and has become simply too big to cap its speed of progress. Technology really compounds. On the other hand, we also think that apps and services are not going to solve our modern and complex human problems. Technology should act as a bridge to bring people together to solve their human problems. Also, it should actually help in reversing the damage that its unchecked use has caused to our psychological health and nature.
The mood of the times is that everyone's stressed. Teens are stressed and afraid of entering college. Students are stressed because the industry is failing to provide a good work-life balance. Parents are stressed because of the rising cost of education and parenting. On top of that, everyone is internally isolated surrounded by digital fog and noise. Although digital technology has significantly lowered the barrier of physical distance, it has also built psychological barriers between people that are only getting stronger.
Where’s the blindspot?
Our current work culture is pervasive with productivity porn. It’s weird but very intricate fantasy, especially in the tech ecosystem. There’s an illusion of incentive, based merely on propagating appearances — to get loosely attached to the people that are involved in this fantasy. The reasons could range from a wish to become part of super uber-productive operators in the ecosystem, to get their direct attention, to get the attention of people directly attached to them, to befriend people based on their technical inclination and their social signal, etc. I don’t want to drown you in this vicious cycle but you get the point.
But actions don’t exist without consequences. Performed repeatedly, they start to manifest in the system and affect the people involved in the game. You get busy in imitation, only to realize the time you have wasted afterward. If everyone’s idea of leisure is a productive output, maybe I should not waste my precious time on leisure without any indicative productivity metric.
So here is the blindspot:
There is a huge difference between productivity that makes your life better and one that makes your life miserable. The former takes time and patience but the latter surprises you rendering you numb.
Where you see everything from the lens of effort ➡️ outcome, vitality in life is lost in translation. The more you try to “optimize” for happenings in your life, the more you suppress and extinguish the serendipity and surprise that is native to the chaotic beauty of life.
Think about why making friends and forming relationships is becoming harder now. Because of this cultural bug that is installed in our psyches. The bug is the illusion that we have access to a lot more people than before. So, we must use our time effectively to decide who to meet and when. When corporate patterns and behaviors seep into our personal and social lives, we end up with anxious minds.
Are we ready for acceptance?
So, let’s start from scratch. We need to stop being ignorant and indifferent. Ignorant of the fact that this is merely a personal issue and indifferent to the fact that this is affecting us and the people around us at a deeper level than we care to imagine. Some forces are too complex to be understood by a single mind when they are already overwhelmed by the gravity of information overload.
The force is so strong and dominating that the people who need to raise their voices merely do it in the form of self-deprecating jokes. And the people who are able to solve it or at least bring people together to solve the problem are too busy with the logistical solutions or at best copying the existing solutions on the digital infrastructure.
The voices are raised ever so slightly only to be buried in the cacophony of absurd worldly affairs on social media. The shadow of unceasing information shuns the voice or at times, makes us numb to truly express what needs to be expressed.
So, we have to first believe that an alternative solution can be worked out. We don’t have to settle for purely technical or purely social solutions. A solution based on the symbiosis of technology and humanity can be worked out to solve the problems of overwhelming anxiety — most of which is not real but detrimental to our well-being. This is one of the missions of this community. We need to correct our relationship with technology first. We have to accept that we have become slaves to it. It might not seem sentient enough to hold a leash around our necks but that is just our anthropocentric tendencies trying to protect ourselves from reality. If we don't honestly accept the temporary defeat, then we can't even begin to think about the eventual win.
Acceptance is a powerful tool if exercised in a thoughtful way. Here is a stark example of acceptance. Alenka Artnik, drowned in unbearing grief, was on the verge of ending her life on a wintery night in 2010. But it was at the same moment that she accepted that the immense pull of grief doesn’t belong to her and that she can’t hold it anymore.
She doesn’t realize it, but by that wintery 2010 night on the bridge, she is drowning in grief. Nearly ten years have passed since Alenka first thought of jumping off the balcony to punish her father. And now, alone and looking at the water below, her remaining reserves of self-esteem are nearly spent.
But her distress call to the universe triggers something deep within her. She realizes that the burden of her family’s struggles has pulled her, like a weight, to this dark place, this bottom. I don’t want this; it doesn’t belong to me, she thinks. I cannot hold it anymore.
So, like a heavy backpack, she takes the weight off and simply lets it go. Her troubles are far from over, but Alenka is no longer paralyzed by her past. She walks off the bridge and goes home.
Is there a possible strategy?
If we can't fight this veil of digital technology individually, can we get together to fight it? We have to overcome the stigma of expressing our complicated relationship with digital technology We have to accept our problems in public. It’s not an alien thing to think about. People are already doing that on Twitter. Sometimes publically and other times in private messages. But the real meat of the problem never shows its face as the platform is not designed to support ideas to build upon each other consistently over time. Nevertheless, it's a good start.
Until we don't have a focused group of people hell-bent on supporting each other, progress is not possible in this domain. We already have communities for all sorts of things but not to mitigate our emerging problems in this increasingly technological society.
We are trying to copy-paste old solutions on the digital infrastructure. Take the example of personal therapy. The current set of startups is trying to solve logistical problems, not the nature of therapy itself. The current form of therapy is one-one that can't be scaled. Why can't we do this on a community level — with proper incentives in place for all the members? Another advantage of solving this problem within a focused and dedicated group is that the knowledge can build upon each other, creating solutions that we can’t even think of right now. That’s because we haven’t thought about solving modern socio-technical problems in this way. The possibilities are unlimited.
I like this story of Drop’s success. It’s a company that makes custom-made music equipment for audiophiles. Since music is very personal and audiophiles have their unique ways of experiencing music, general musical instruments don’t suffice for enthusiasts and experts. The company brought members from the community and merged them with their product and engineering teams to build products that are very niche to audiophiles. So, it’s a self-serving product. It was a completely new way of building musical instruments that had never existed before. Truly a marvelous story of innovation — all possible because a group of enthusiasts find a place that cared for their enthusiasm and people who believed that the whole could be greater than the sum of its parts.
Is that what freedom looks like?
Digital technology is augmenting our skills and abilities but we have to keep asking - towards what end, towards what end? We have to see that we are losing touch with almost any skill that is required to drive your daily life. As a result, any gratification that may come from mastering any of those skills is lost. Part of the reason is that most of these skills were performed in communion. The lure of extreme individuality renders us alone, devoid of any incentive in participating in any of these tasks. Remember how we have come to hate chores so that we can have the time to do something productive. If you remove all the whitespace from your life, where is the time for productive thinking and productive non-thinking?
Every convenience has been provided behind an interface. Need food, call food delivery. Need washed clothes, call the laundry service. Need grocery, call grocery delivery service. Need new clothes, shop online, etc. Note that the Internet is not changing our brain chemistry. However, it is changing the structure and mobility of human beings. And that has second and third-order effects on our mental and physical existence. I call this phenomenon the APIzation of thought and life.
The beauty of physical infrastructure and interactions has been shifted to the beauty of digital abstractions and interactions, stored completely in our minds and the digital sphere. There is no tangibility left. They don't engage our senses the way physical real beauty and interaction do. No matter how much stimulating you can make multimedia, it's still artificial stimulation. There will always be an unmet longing in our souls that can't be fulfilled with the digital abstractions fed to our minds.
What thoughts arose inside you after reading this. Share with me at letsharden@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter @poetofgrindset or leave a comment here.
Don’t hold back. I assure you that I’ll get back to you. But you have to take the first step!
We are in this together and we are going to win ourselves.