0:03 - Introduction to Anxiety
0:56 - Understanding Anxiety's Purpose
2:44 - The Role of Winter in Anxiety
3:44 - Anxiety and Life Choices
7:16 - The Modern Slow-Moving Disaster
8:59 - Negative Influences and Personal Agency
10:41 - Acceptance and Aging
10:53 - Social Structures and Anxiety
16:15 - Free Market and Social Change
20:39 - The Importance of Choice
23:21 - Conclusion: Listening to Anxiety
In this lecture, the topic of generalized anxiety disorder is explored through a philosophical lens, drawing connections between personal experiences, evolutionary psychology, and societal dynamics. The opening question reflects a listener's deep curiosity about why some individuals become paralyzed by anxiety despite seemingly stable circumstances. The speaker conveys that anxiety can often stem from an overemphasis on the inherent risks present in life—fear of illness, loss, and the unknown. In unpacking this concept, the lecture delves into the evolutionary purpose of anxiety, likening it to an instinctive warning system designed to prompt action in response to subtle dangers.
The discussion progresses with an analysis of historical contexts, particularly how primitive survival instincts were crucial during seasonal changes or periods of scarcity. The speaker illustrates this by comparing anxiety to a survival mechanism—whereby early humans had to plan for the difficult winter months, gathering resources in anticipation of future needs. Failure to effectively manage these resources often led to dire consequences, establishing a link between anxiety and the ability to foresee potential long-term disasters.
The lecture further elaborates on the notion that anxiety is not merely a psychological issue but can be viewed as a response to slow-moving threats that an individual can act upon, such as health concerns or social dynamics. The speaker asserts that modern society requires individuals to reassess their surroundings and the corrupt structures they may find themselves entangled in. By using the metaphor of a corrupt social environment, the discussion emphasizes that individuals often find themselves trapped within family or friendship circles that perpetuate dysfunction. The speaker encourages listeners to recognize their freedom to choose their social circumstances, a stark contrast to historical constraints where individuals had little say in their social affiliations.
Moreover, the speaker reflects on the consequences of remaining in toxic environments—a cycle where choosing partners from corrupt familial backgrounds perpetuates a skewed pool of available options for love and companionship. This section of the lecture highlights the urgency of escaping negative social frameworks before establishing long-term commitments, as these choices directly impact one's happiness and future family dynamics. The exploration of these complex relationships serves to underline the importance of self-awareness and proactive decision-making in battling anxiety.
As the lecture concludes, the speaker reiterates that anxiety serves as a critical signal, prompting individuals to identify and confront slow-moving threats within their lives. Listeners are encouraged to harness the evidence of their anxiety as a tool for self-examination and action. The lecture culminates in a call to reflect and act—underscoring the notion that acknowledging anxiety is the first step toward mitigating its influence and striving for a healthier, more fulfilling life. The nuanced examination of anxiety as a manifestation of broader societal issues invites listeners to reflect on their personal circumstances and the latent opportunities for change that exist within their reach.
[0:00] All right, a question, a question.
[0:04] Dear Stefanator, I never catch the live shows live, so I can't post live questions, but I'm a long-time listener, subscriber, and donor. The work that you do is truly priceless. I'm interested in your philosophical take on generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD. Often, people with GAD have childhood trauma, etc., but often everything seems fine, yet they're still paralyzed by anxious thoughts. To me, generalized anxiety disorder seems to basically be too much focus on the inherent risks of life. My question is why? We all have the same fears slash risks of catastrophe, losing those we love, sickness, etc. Why do some people get crippled by these facts of life and most people just deal with them? I would really appreciate the 7-8 of thoughts donation coming, of course. Kind regards from NAME.
[0:56] And well, that's a very interesting question. Well, that's a very interesting question. So one of the big challenges of, and this of course is just my amateur opinion, I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, I have no capacity to diagnose anyone, this is all just my nonsense opinions for what they're worth. But anxiety is designed for what?
[1:21] Anxiety is designed to lure us or propel us into action based upon low stimulus, right? So anxiety is a subset of fight or flight.
[1:35] So, for instance, before the days of GPS, somebody would tell you, you know, turn, take the third left and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and go up here, and you'd get all these sort of written or verbal directions, and you'd be driving along, and you'd start to get this uneasy feeling. The uneasy feeling, of course, was, did I? Did I go too far? And you'd just get this sort of growing uneasy feeling, and then at some point, you probably would turn back and loop and so on, right, try and find the right thing.
[2:06] Anxiety is when the dangers are subtle and require forethought. So we would not say that someone has anxiety if they're hiking and turn around and they're being stalked by a mountain lion, right? That's not anxiety. That's fear. That's fight or flight, right? it. So anxiety is a subset of the fight or flight mechanism, and it is designed to apply negative stimuli to you until you wake up to and deal with the danger to you. That is subtle.
[2:45] So winter, of course, is the big test. Winter is the big, big, big test. So winter is, do you have enough food to last through the cold months? When your capacity for getting food is scarce, you can't rely on hunting, have you figured out or stored enough food to last through the winter? Have you domesticated the animals that you need? Are they in good health? Have you pickled and jammed and stored and breaded and whatever it is that you can do? And of course, those people who did not develop this capacity for anxiety, well, they died.
[3:28] Right? They died. And they died in horrendous ways. And they died, of course, of starvation. And they were so panicked that they would attack those around them. And this is sort of where the grasshopper and the ant comes from.
[3:45] So, anxiety is when the danger is distant, and you can do something about it, right? So, we have anxiety about death. Death is distant, at least we hope so. And we can do something about it, right? We can eat well, we can exercise, we can not smoke, not drink, we can maintain our social life and be happy and do good in the world, like all the things that make us happier and healthier and less likely to die, at least in the short run.
[4:20] So we can do something about that if we let's say if we are a woman and we are our standards are too high or we are unable to settle down because the men we want don't want us back and so on right I've always said this about the male approach in general, is to start at the very top you know when you start wanting to ask girls out you start wanting to date you start at the very top.
[4:48] And then you work your way down until you find a woman who will love you. Or, to put it another way, in my history, you start as a teenager with the shallowest of intentions and then you settle on a woman who's truly virtuous when you get older. But if you are a woman who's got, you've got a shorter runway for having kids. So if you are a woman and you want to settle down, but you're not able to settle down because you keep rejecting guys as being unfit, you will start to get anxiety. And of course, a lot of the modern world is characterized by women managing their anxiety because they keep rejecting men, right? Because they're trained to reject men by the powers that be for some pretty obvious reasons, right? So a lot of this is managing that kind of anxiety and that mental health, those mental health issues have really flowed into the mainstream, right? A man who is not getting his life moving, of course, I've had a lot of calls with people and with men about this over the last 20 years. You know, the men who are like, you know, I'm in my middle-aged 20s, I'm just not getting my life started, I'm kind of stuck, what should I do? Well, that's something you can do something about, right? You can do something about that. So, anxiety is for the slow-moving disasters that you can do something about.
[6:16] So, generalized anxiety disorders, again, in my idiot amateur humble opinion, would be where there's something in your life that is a slow-moving disaster, right? Like aging out of the gene pool, reproduction race, like not having enough for winter. And even in the shorter term, you can't wait until you're starving to go hunting. Because when you're starving, you don't have much energy, right? So you have to say, gee, you know, we're going to need some food for the tribe. So I'd better go hunting sooner rather than later. You can't go hunting right after you've eaten because you're too full, but you don't want to wait till you're starving. So, you know, you've got to balance these things out. So the slow moving disasters and And slow-moving disasters that you can do something about, in my opinion, is the source of anxiety. Not the clinical term, but just generalized modern anxiety.
[7:17] The West, of course, is going through a slow-motion disaster. It is everyone's opinion, and I'm not going to argue with this in any particular detail, but it is everyone's opinion how much can actually be done about this slow-moving disaster. Because the slower the disaster, the slower moving the disaster, the more momentum it tends to have. And so at some point you just have to accept your fate right so there's you have all spring and summer and fall to prepare enough food for the winter months right you have all of that time.
[8:01] And that's a slow that's a slow disaster right and because it's a slow disaster what that means is that it's really bad when it happens, right? And so, if it takes generations of antinatalist programming and self-hating programming to make people not want to have kids and hate themselves, well, how do you undo all that, right? There's a momentum to these kinds of things that is really, really tough. It's really tough. So, I think we're all aware that there's kind of a slow-moving disaster that's rolling along, and how much can be done about it is anyone's guess and thought, and it's not something that can really be defined from the outside, because who knows what great and powerful communicators there are in the world, who can make a difference.
[8:54] That is, for time, fate, circumstances, and choice to reveal.
[8:59] Now, there's something about the modern world that is really fascinating about anxiety. And in general, when I've talked to people who have anxiety, what's happened is I've asked them what negative influences there are in their life that they can do something about. So if you have anxiety because you dread going to work because you've got some psycho boss, well, you can do something about that, right? You can confront your boss. You can maybe try to get him fired. You can change jobs. You can become an entrepreneur. Like, there's tons of stuff that you can do with regards to all of this. And you're not passive, right? I think if you've ever been around people on their deathbeds, you know, once you know you're not getting back up again, there is a certain amount of accepting your fate thing, right? Or, you know, there's a great Seinfeld where George Costanza is talking to an older guy and the older guy says, like the George is like, you know, you're so close to death, isn't it driving you crazy? Your life is all behind you. And the older guy is like, hey man, I'm just happy for every day that I have, right?
[10:14] And there are great consolations and benefits to getting older. Life is not so cruel that the advantages only accrue to the young. I mean, aesthetically, I understand that young people look better in general. But there are great benefits to getting older. Some, I wouldn't try it, for sure. So, when you are in your deathbed, then there's really nothing you can do about it, right?
[10:41] There's really nothing you can do about it. So you just accept your fate to some degree. I mean, some people will rage against the dying of the light as the old poem goes, but some people will accept their fate.
[10:53] But in the modern world, there's something that's really quite fascinating, which has to do with anxiety.
[10:59] So we evolved, of course, in small tribes that we could not escape. We could not leave. We really had no choice. You think of some Inuit tribe up in the frozen tundra of the far north. They could not change their social environment.
[11:16] They could not move and go to the city hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Some Scottish clan up in the Falklands, sorry, up in the Hebrides, Outer Hebrides, Falklands, sorry, quite a different place. Some tribe up in the Outer Hebrides, they could not change their options. This is one of the things that I was writing about in Just Poor, is do we have a choice in our social circumstances throughout most of human history? And of course, the answer is we did not have a choice in our social circumstances for 99.9999% of human history. We were born into a tribe, but we were stuck with the tribe, which, you know, is not all negative, right? There's a certain amount of predictability and comfort in all of that. So we did not have the choice to change our social circumstances. Now, in the modern world, we do have the choice to change our social circumstances. And that is mind-blowing. That is something which we are not evolved for, but we are alert to. Like we're not evolved to use tablets or screens or whatever, but we do.
[12:32] So we are constantly scanning for slow-moving disasters that we can do something about.
[12:42] Constantly scanning for slow-moving disasters we can do something about and if you've ever talked to people who are caught in these slow-moving disasters and i've talked to people over the years it they sort of say it's like getting caught in this industrial machinery that takes five years to kill you or whatever. Like, it's really terrible. We are constantly scanning for slow-moving disasters we can do something about. And in general, if we can't do anything about it, then the anxiety level tends to diminish. If we can't do anything about it. If we think we can do something about it, but we can't, then that's a failure to adjust to reality. So we can do something about the quality of our aging, but we cannot do anything about aging. I mean, other than die, right? So, we can't stop the passage of time, but we can work reasonably well and hard to ensure that our happiness or comfort level over the course of sailing through time is as positive as possible. So, if somebody is tortured by aging as a whole, like they're just tortured and upset by aging as a whole, that would be not mental health, right? Because you can't do anything about the fact that you're aging.
[14:03] But somebody who's tortured about feeling weak and infirm in their old age, who doesn't eat well and exercise, well, there's something they can do. You can do something about being unwell in your old age, which is eat well, exercise, you know, do all of the various health practices that can help ensure that your aging is as positive as possible, right? So with regards to social life, if you are embedded in a corrupt familial social friendship circle, and these things are all combined, right? If you have a corrupt and immoral family of origin, then moral people will not want to be in that environment. And so your friends and your social circle as a whole will conform like, you know, the old salmon in the swift current, they're all swimming in the same line because that's the corruption that is occurring in your life. And so everybody in your environment will be corrupt.
[15:09] Now, of course, through almost all of human history, and certainly what we have adapted to, you couldn't change that. You couldn't change that. So, because you couldn't change it, you just kind of rolled with it. It was mentally healthy, or at least more mentally healthy than the alternative to just accept that, right? This is who these people are. I'll learn to love it, or at least not hate it, because I have no alternative. I can't swap out to some other tribe. I can't change my circumstances, social environment, whatever, right?
[15:41] However, in the modern world, and you can start this whenever you like, of course, a big example would be fleeing Europe for America, right? So you could change your whole social environment. And this arose with the free market, that you could rely on your productivity rather than mere blood ties in order to make a living. You didn't have to work the family farm. You didn't have to work the family contacts. You could go to America with the capacity for hard work and make a go of it on your own.
[16:16] So the free market freed us from corrupt social and familial situations. So the slow-moving disaster is, for a lot of people, if you have a corrupt family of origin, which means that your entire social circle is corrupt to some degree, because non-corrupt people won't want to hang out in that situation. The slow-moving disaster is you don't escape when you can, right? You don't escape when you can. So again, it's important to know the difference. Can you change it, right? I can't change aging. I can change the quality of my aging.
[17:01] So, the slow-moving disaster, I think, for a lot of people in the modern world, in the West in particular, and this is outside of the sort of economic, moral, political, and generalized social slow-moving disasters, but in terms of the personal life, if you could get out, if you can get out of a corrupt environment. But you don't. That is the biggest, most dangerous, slow-moving disaster that you can do the most about. So if you are embedded in a corrupt, immoral, or, you know, openly sadistic, or even worse, subtly sadistic family structure.
[17:42] Slow-moving disaster is that you have friends in that environment, you date in that environment, and you are shielded from quality people, and therefore you are shielded from virtue, love, integrity, all of that kind of good stuff, right? And the slow-moving disaster is you end up marrying and having children in this corrupt environment, and you never escape, and you can. This is one of the big controversial things that occurred very quickly after I started doing what I do, which is to remind people that they have the choice, they can change their social, familial, friendship, dating environments, they can change it, which is, you know, kind of a deep shock. Corruption always maintains itself through monopoly. Corruption always maintains itself through monopoly. Teachers in schools, in government schools, teachers teach what parents really don't want the kids to learn, but because the teachers have a monopoly on the tax dollars and often on the minds of the students as a whole, because of that, the teachers can do whatever they want.
[18:57] Monopolies don't have to provide good services. Monopolies can skim off the top. So corruption always maintains itself through monopoly, and the free market punishes corruption because corruption is economically inefficient. As long as it maintains a monopoly, corruption is efficient, right? But when corruption is subjected to the free market, it is no longer efficient, right? So, in families, it's the same thing. Parents who are abusive harm their children because they perceive a monopoly. They perceive that they have a monopoly over their children. And of course, when the children were children, the parents did have a monopoly. But the question is, when the children become adults, do the children have a choice over who they see? And this is one of the themes really that I have been hammering is to bring the free market to the family, right? Because statism rises from the monopoly. If you have a perceived monopoly in authority in the family, then you will have a monopoly with perceived authority in society. Of course, right? This is a, the state is the shadow cast by the coercive monopoly in so many families. So reminding people that they have a choice is important.
[20:18] Think that people have anxiety at the moment because they are not trapped within the family and social structures and friendship structures and extended family structures that they're born into. They're not trapped in those. They're not. You can go anywhere. You can do anything, right? You know, there's this meme, like, you can just do things.
[20:39] You can just do things. You can just move and you can change your entire social and familiar structure, if you want.
[20:47] And think the slow-moving disaster is if you don't want to spend the rest of your life, you know having as miserable time as miserable a time as you had as a kid if you did then you have to change and you don't have a lot of time for that because if you want to have a wife and kids you want to have a husband and kids then you have to sort all of that stuff out before or you get married, but your parents condition the available pool of potential marriage partners. Your parents condition and define that. This is something I've been saying for a long time, and I'll talk about it more this Wednesday, but your parents define the pool of available partners for marriage and children. If your parents are corrupt, quality people will not be around them, which means that you can only choose from a pool of corrupt people or broken people to marry. Your parents are the gatekeepers of who you get to marry. And if you want to marry, let's say you want to marry a woman very different from your mother, if you want to marry a woman very different from your mother you will not be able to if your mother is still significantly embedded in your life.
[22:16] A woman who is very different from your mother, if your mother is corrupt and you want a virtuous woman, a virtuous woman will not want to spend the next 50 years around your mother and have your mother influential in the raising of her children.
[22:29] So one anxiety can be well if i keep hanging around with an unreformed and corrupt family of origin then i'm going to end up dating somebody who's corrupt and both my life and my children's life will be significantly harmed if not outright ruined so there's i mean can you do something about this corrupt environment that you happen to be born in throughout most of human history? No. In the modern world, yes. And having made the leap myself, I have nothing to do with anyone from my former life. And it has been, gosh, well, yes, almost 20 years, right? And while I do have some occasional nostalgia, I do look back with great relief at the choices that I have made. And I want that for you as well.
[23:21] So just to sum up, anxiety is about slow-moving disasters that we can do something about, whether it's winter, ill health, or the corruption in our social circle, you've got to listen to your anxiety, and it's trying to tell you something. It's trying to tell you that there's a very slow-moving danger that you can do something about, and you've got to scan your life to find out what it is, identify it, and then by God, act.
[23:50] Freedomain.com slash donate. Hey, there's an action you can take, freedomain.com slash donate. really appreciate it your support is most most treasured and appreciated have yourselves a wonderful day I'll talk to you soon bye.
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