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In the early ’90s an epidemic of mental disorder was sweeping America and Britain … uncovered by a new system for identifying disorders. Psychiatry had been attacked for relying on the personal and fallible judgement of psychiatrists and instead a new objective methods based on checklists had been invented. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot, BBC 2007
The drug companies announced they had created a new type of drug called an SSRI which they claimed targetted circuits inside the brain that were causing these misfunctions … like Prozac … The result was liberation from anxiety on a wide scale. But in the process the checklists became a powerful and seemingly objective guide for people as to what should be their normal feelings and what was abnormal. ibid.
Large parts of normal human experience, grief, disappointment, loneliness, were all being reclassified as medical disorders. In the process a new system of management was emerging: the drugs took away those complex and difficult feelings and made the individuals happier. But they also made them simpler beings, more easy to predict and manage. ibid.
In America in the 1960s was a man who was convinced that there was something frightening hidden under the surface of the new modern suburbs. Behind what looked like a confident individualism was rising up throughout America there were really hidden fears eating away at people from inside. There were feelings of anxiety, loneliness and emptiness, and he was convinced he could make a lot of money out of these feelings: he was called Arthur Sackler … Valium: he offered it to the doctors as an extraordinary new way to treat these inner anxieties, and he said it wasn’t dangerous or addictive. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything, BBC 2021
A new drug was created: it was made by a company that had been founded by Arthur Sackler. In the 1970s Sackler had marketed the drug Valium to deal with the feelings of anxiety and loneliness in the sufferers. He had died in the 1980s but in the mid-’90s his company released a new drug called Oxycontin. It was a synthetic form of opium and it was sold as a painkiller … The doctors gave them Oxycontin, they got their benefits, they also discovered that Oxycontin made them feel safe, in a bubble, protected from the anxieties and fears of the new post-industrial world. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones *****
The anxieties of the Cold War had conditioned the American public to fear the worst. Alan Hart, Media Morphs II: Conspiracy, Edge Media 2012
The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle. Christopher Hitchens, Love Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. Ingmar Bergman
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Edvard Munch
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Soren Kierkegaard
Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. Anais Nin, diary February 1947
Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength. Charles Spurgeon
Now is the age of anxiety. W H Auden
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the effect of anxiety. Sigmund Freud
With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality – threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we’ve begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena. Will Self
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead 1947
We share our predecessors anxieties about the dangers of scientific progress. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You III: Modern Victorians, BBC 2015
Worrying ourselves sick: is searching for symptoms online turning us into a nation of cyber-chondriacs. Or is digital diagnoses just the start? But does it mean NHS GP practices are being left behind? Tonight: Dr Google: Do DIY Diagnoses Work? ITV 2018
‘I’ve never known such a large proportion of a year group suffer with anxiety. I think it’s gotten worse every year I’ve been in the game.’ School I, teacher, BBC 2018
Prescriptions have skyrocketed in the last two decades. Take Your Pills: Xanax, news, Netflix 2022
Anxiety and addiction: More addictive than we think. ibid.
I don’t know if anyone here’s tried Xanax. It’s fantastic. ibid. comedian
One of the biggest mistakes of my life. ibid. addict
You notice things others don’t. You question what others blindly accept. And slowly, people begin to drift away. Psyphos podcast: Schopenhauer: Smart = Alone: Why Society Rejects the Trully Intelligent, Youtube 2025
Deep down you feel a stranger among your own kind. ibid.
What if society just is not built for people like you? ibid.
The more deeply you think, you more alienated you become. ibid.
Your loneliness might be the highest proof of your mind. ibid.
It’s social exile. Because when you can see through the game, you stop playing it. ibid.
Schopenhauer: He believed that life at core was suffering, and that the more conscious you are, the more you feel it. ibid.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone. ibid.
You see the world for what it is: A dance of illusions powered by unconscious craving. ibid.
You are not broken. You are just awake. ibid.
Because their minds crave depth, muance, ideas, not gossip, repetition or emotional noise. ibid.
This sensitivity is not a super-power, it is a burden. ibid.
Solitude is not just an escape, it’s a reclamation of your mind, of your time, of your energy. ibid.
[Michel de Montaigne]: ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself.’ Psyphoria podcasts: The Art of Not Caring: When You Embrace Uncertainty, Life Becomes Easier, Youtube 2025
Have you ever stopped to think about how much of your anguish comes from your obsession with control? … Internal control: the suffocating need for certainties, to know what will happen tomorrow. ibid.
No more certainties, but a new relationship with what cannot be controlled. ibid.
Montaigne was not an ordinary philosopher … He wrote from within his own skin. ibid.
Montaigne embraced the opposite: he did not know. ibid.
In a time when everyone shouts, he whispers. ibid.
Anxiety is the fear of the unpredictable. ibid.
It’s the desire for life to be different from what it is. ibid.
[Carl Jung]: ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ Psyphoria podcasts: You Must Let Go: Who to Let Go From Someone Who Hurts You
You say that you want to forget, to move on. But tell me, why do you still think about that person every day? ibid.
You miss what you projected on to them: the illusion of love. ibid.
Often what we call love is just our shadow clinging to someone. ibid.
As long as you continue to seek outside what is missing inside, you will be enternally imprisoned by the gaze of the other. ibid.
The unconscious search for validation and the price paid for betraying oneself. ibid.
If deep down you feel like you are living a lie, you will continue to feel empty. ibid.
The role of the shadow in repeating toxic patterns. ibid.
Carl Jung defined the shadow as ‘everything you do not want to be, but are’. ibid.
Burying is not eliminating. ibid.
You will have to face everything you have avoided. ibid.
[Schopenhauer]: ‘A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.’ Psyphoria podcasts: Pretend to be Dumb: You Will Never Want to be Smart Again: Schopenhauer
There is a price to intelligence … On the contrary, they suffer more. ibid.
The truth is not something people want to hear … because the truth is unsettling. ibid.
A brilliant mind is a curse because it destroys illusions. ibid.
Intelligence brings with it an increase in sensitivity. ibid.
[Dostoyevsky]: ‘The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God.’ Psyphoria podcasts: Stop Trying: The More You Try to be Happy, The More You’ll Suffer
You are tired, aren’t you? Tired of chasing a happiness that never arrives. You wake up and feel an emptiness. You go to sleep and it’s still there. ibid.
He [Dostoyevsky] knew that this modern obssession with being happy is a disease disguised as a solution. ibid.
‘Suffering is the only source of consciousness.’ ibid. Dostoyevsky
Being happy has become an obligation. ibid.
The false promise of positive thinking. ibid.
Dostoyevsky saw suffering as a path to true freedom. ibid.
What if you stopped trying to be happy? ibid.
[Carl Jung]: ‘I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.’ Psyphoria podcasts: Stop Giving a Fuck: Nothing & Nobody Will Ever Hurt You Again: Carl Jung
Have you ever wished to be someone who is unshakable? Someone who doesn’t care about rejection, loss or betrayal? ibid.
The biggest lie that you’ve been told is that you are in control of your life. Wake up because you’re not. ibid.
But control is an illusion. ibid.
What you need is not more control but more awareness. ibid.
You have already gone through the fire. You have faced your monsters. ibid.
Nothing will shield you from external suffering. ibid.