The Meaning of Anxiety

Author
Rollo May
Publisher
Norton
Year
1950
Collection
Work
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Rollo May refutes the assertion that mental health is living without anxiety, proposing instead that anxiety is a necessary condition for creativity, intellect, and freedom. He defines anxiety as the “experience of Being affirming itself against Nonbeing,” as that which propels us to more self-awareness, consciousness, and life. He likewise shows that the refusal to embrace this anxiety, to attend to it and work with it and through it, is an invitation to authoritarianism and fascism. When we lack the skills of being with our anxiety, and feel our only option is to flee, we often flee right into the hands of a strongman who promises security at the cost of liberty. May wrote during the height of fascism in the last century; we read it during the renewal of the same in this one. The lessons hold.

Reading notes

Automation conformity

Rollo May asserts plainly in the opening pages of The Meaning of Anxiety that anxiety in fact has meaning, and that our aim cannot be to eliminate it but to work with it, and through it, to use it to propel our creativity and vigor for life. And yet, anxiety is often deeply, even intolerably, unpleasant, and the effort to embrace it can test us beyond our abilities. We are wont, then, to look for an escape hatch, an easy path to relief; but those paths always come with a cost.

It is to be expected that certain “mechanisms of escape” from the situation of isolation and anxiety should have developed. The mechanism most frequently employed in our culture, [Erich] Fromm believes, is that of automation conformity. An individual “adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him [sic] by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be.” This conformity proceeds on the assumption that the “person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more.”

May, The Meaning of Anxiety, page 180

It does not take a hard look to spot the evidence of this conformity in our own time. Millions of nearly identical LinkedIn posts, all saying the same thing, in the same jittery staccato, the same strained performance of revelation when in fact nothing at all is being revealed. (I am picking on LinkedIn here, but it is symptom of this phenomena, not the cause.) Worse, we now have chatbots who will produce and reproduce this pablum at scale, bringing a kind of double-edge to that conformity: we conform when we use those tools, when we accede to the assertion of their inevitability; and we conform again when we place them in our mouths and in our minds, when we outsource our speech and thinking to them. We become automatons twice over.

Fromm and May here posit that when we make this trade, when we adopt those cultural patterns, we give up our unique selves in exchange for a relief of anxiety. In the light of our current drive for automation, I will make a counter proposal: we give up our unique selves in the hope that it will bring some relief, but that relief is ever deferred. For at present, becoming an automaton nearly guarantees that you will be left out to dry, as the promise of so-called AI is that the more you use it, the more it uses you. Such that in the act of becoming automatons, we bring ourselves that much closer to the thing we really fear: being left alone, without any of the care or materials we need to survive. We give up our individual selves for the appearance of security, without any of the conditions that can actually create it.

This is the trap anxiety lays for us: in our effort to escape it, we run further into its jaws. But perhaps there are yet alternatives. May connects that impulse to escape with the experience of isolation: can we become less isolated without becoming automatons? Can we find community not in the center, but on the outskirts, among the weirdos and the outsiders, the people who never seem to fit in, who are always playing a different game? There are fewer of them, by definition, but not so few that we cannot find them. We won’t find the comfort of the majority among them, of course—but as we have seen, that comfort is mere illusion—but perhaps we can find the community and camaraderie that is so necessary for our survival, and without giving up our precious selves to get it.