Name: Why modern life is designed to keep you anxious — and what to do about it | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T16:44:29.000Z
Duration: 35 min 22 s
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He's a philosopher and the author of a wonderful book called A Philosophical Guide.

I love this book because it's not trying to explain anxiety away or offer some magical cure.

It is really just trying to make the case that anxiety is an inescapable part of being a human being in the world.

And if we can accept that fact, there is a lot that anxiety has to teach us about ourselves and the world.

Check it out, enjoy it, and I'll see you next time.

Before we get into the book, I just kind of want to ask about your interest in the topic.

I mean, how did you land on anxiety as a philosophical subject?

You know, it's sometimes said, I'm not quite sure who said it, that the only things you can really genuinely philosophize about are things that are problems for you.

So in that sense, writing about anxiety was a natural thing for me to do.

Though I wrote this late in my academic career, it had always been a topic of great, deep personal interest to me.

The problem with anxiety, or the term is that we use it to describe a lot of different things.

Brain states, moods, disorders, existential dread.

Why is there so much confusion around this term?

Is there just a deep disagreement about what anxiety actually is?

I think just even in the kinds of examples you gave of the definitions that people gave of anxiety, these formal definitions where we are trying to capture a mood or an emotion, it's also the case that there is a wide range of emotions and moods and feelings at play.

In fact, if you look through the literature, the term anxiety is a relatively new one.

I would say it's a kind of 18th or 19th century term that we've come to use transculturally.

There's so many different names given for it.

And there's also this, you know, what I would call a sort of a turf war in some ways that different disciplines lay claim to anxiety.

Philosophy does, psychology does, psychiatry does.

And it, given its placement in our culture, given its placement in our society, it makes a difference in who gets to treat it, who gets to be authoritative about it.

So there is perhaps a little bit of jockeying for position to see who, who gets Anxiety, Right.

But I'm content to let anxiety be relatively not undefined, but

for there to be some imprecision in its edges.

I think we can try and make a distinction between anxiety and fear.

That can be fruitful and productive, and probably that's all we need in order to get started.

So once we've established that, I think we can start talking about anxiety.

It is, especially in the world of philosophy, it's very often that you can define something most clearly by explaining what it isn't.

What is the distinction between anxiety and fear?

They are clearly cousins of some sort, but how do you draw a line between them?

So one line traces its origins back to Freud, who suggested that anxiety was a fear that didn't have a specific object of fear.

you didn't have something precisely well defined in front of you to call it fear.

An example would be something like, I am on my way to the mountains to go climbing, right?

As I'm driving to the trailhead, as I wake up in the morning, I feel a pit in my stomach.

At that moment, nothing is happening that is concretely endangering me, Right.

But I can anticipate some of the situations that might arise.

I might get into bad weather, I might fall down, I might get lost.

None of them have taken determinate form as yet.

When I'm actually in the mountains, when I'm climbing and I step across a chasm and.

And I feel the ice slide beneath my feet, and

I feel that I could fall at this moment, then that's fear, because there's a very concrete object.

I am apprehensive of the presence of dangerous wildlife.

When I have the mountain lion in front of me standing and blocking the trail, and

I feel my bowels start to loosen, that's fear.

And I would say in later existentialist treatments, the thing that is not formed, the thing that is indeterminate, is the future.

It's not upon us yet, and we dread what it might bring.

So in that sense, is anxiety almost fear of fear or kind of like a preemptive.

Like, just to go back to the wildlife example, the mountain lion isn't upon me yet, but

I can anticipate how I would feel if the mountain lion were to confront me.

But when I think ahead of what it would be like to drown, I feel a chill run through me because I can almost feel my lungs starting to implode, dragging the water in.

So I anticipate, I imagine, I fill the space with my imagination, and

I'm fully able to feel the fear that I would feel in that situation.

So I think that's a very good attempt to capture the sense of anxiety.

It does sort of the experience of it, subjectively.

It does feel like your mind is sort of turning on itself.

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Why modern life is designed to keep you anxious — and what to do about it | The Gray Area

anxiety

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