We are living in anxious times. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans aged 18 years or older suffer from an anxiety disorder, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
While contemporary discourses regarding anxiety, depression and mental health almost always locate the problem with the individual, both in the domains of the medical and interpersonal, that does not account for the scope of America’s ever-growing mental health problem.
The epidemic of anxiety can only be fully understood by strengthening our analysis of the collective, or more specifically, the lack of a healthy, sustained collective in the lives of members of our generation. Our age of anxiety is the product of hyper-atomization, economic precarity, endless competition and unbounded surveillance of our stage of late capitalism, neoliberalism.
Neoliberal society places us in constant competition with one another. This competition isolates us from one another, mutilating attempts to build solidarity and driving us toward endless cycles of shame and unworthiness. We must always be optimizing, becoming the “best version” of ourselves to maximize production.
On social media, where we constantly police ourselves and one another, we turn our private lives and identities into “brands” defined by consumptive practices in order to gain social capital.
As we become more productive and more distrustful of our peers, job markets become more competitive to coerce more labor out of us. Competition does not improve our lives, but instead is used to reinforce our subjugation.
We are told to practice mindfulness, to meditate, to take elaborate drug cocktails pushed by pharmaceutical companies, to take care of ourselves. These are by no means wrong solutions to ease the pain of alienation. However, they are simply more individual solutions to the much larger, more daunting crisis of capitalism. We cannot begin to properly take care of ourselves until we first mend the connections severed by our socioeconomic order.
No amount of social media purges, corporate yoga sessions or meditation apps will solve the problem of wide-spread anxiety. It will require a fundamental reorganization of our socioeconomic system, one that allows us to see ourselves and others as worthy of more than the machine of endless production.
