Anxiety is Nature Defending Itself

This was originally written for Berliner Gazette's excellent series called Allied Grounds. It was too long. Then I realized it was actually written for The Holographic School of Social Medicine.

THE "OTHER ENERGY CRISIS"

If you are like me, we are both producing a lot of energy from a set of feelings including fear, guilt and helplessness related to the multiple overlapping social, economic and environmental crises we face and of which we are a part. For some of us, these feelings never seem to lead to any actions that could meaningfully affect the situation and let it be known that not even writing or reading this article will help.  The crises, including the ongoing global energy crisis and climate change, feel like both the cause and effect of a slow moving tidal wave coming towards us from every direction. When these apocalyptic forces fill the air, they trigger emotions and bodily experiences that change what we can and cannot do (like the ones that prevented me from writing this text until long after the deadline), and they create what I am thinking of as “the other energy crisis.”

As I experience it within myself and among my friends, this crisis haunts the nervous systems of relatively privileged intellectuals, artists, activists and other relatively caring people in relatively wealthy northern European and North American cities where life is getting relatively harder for most people. Maybe the haunting will only last until the real crises reach us and make our current way of life impossible. Until then, we feel both responsible for the colonial legacies that contribute to this mess, and immobilized by our total lack of preparation for the global crises on our doorstep. The result is a kind of ambient, unavoidable collective anxiety. However, the impacts of collective anxiety obviously do not only affect the cute bourgeoisie of rich cities, nor does it remain as individual or unique as it often feels.To give a sense of scale, "Lost productivity alone for depression and anxiety has been estimated to cost the global economy US$ 1 trillion per year and is forecast to reach $16 trillion by 2030 [2]." In so many ways, anxiety is just one part of collective human health throwing a wrench in the gears of capitalism and infinite economic growth.

While big NGOs like The World Health Organization measure anxiety and mental health in terms of a loss of GDP, our bad health also produces many other less obvious effects in relation to work and the climate. 

What if our anxiety is, in a way, nature defending itself? In their book We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself, Isa Fremeaux and Jay Jordan take up this famous slogan of ecological militants to describe the struggle for the ZAD (Zone à défendre), where activists have reclaimed an area outside of Nante that was slated to be transformed into an airport. In response to accusations that the land-defenders were interlopers, the idea that “we are ‘nature’ defending itself” suggests that human beings doing ecological defense are part of nature’s processes. 

What if ‘nature’ is a communications system that is not outside of us, but that actually speaks through us, through collective bodily and emotional signals, including persistent coughing and an epidemic of anxiety? What if the ‘nature’ of which we are a part, wants us to stop working at jobs that are (directly or indirectly) destroying the planet and to begin to cooperate in a new way? I believe even when we are not doing ecological defense, we are sometimes being ecological defense, in ways we cannot always perceive.

This article is concerned with how, in some ways, we may be misreading the message from the global communications bureau we know as nature. It seems that our era must die in which we each separately pack all our feelings and worries away so we can continue to compete to live in a death-driven economy, located on a burning planet where we pay skyrocketing rent. 

IT MUST BE SOMETHING

It happens quite frequently these days: as I sit down at my desk to try to work, my brain refuses to focus. It darts between worries, thoughts and tasks. Even after 20 years of meditation and yoga training, I can't seem to get my focus back. So much energy is coursing through me that I am shaking. My cough comes back (but did it ever leave? And where did it go?) I feel angry about everything and nothing in particular. I sweat. I know I need to run or move my body to get this feeling out of me, but I can't go outside because of an undefined fear. I can't run, because my breathing feels constricted. I check my phone repeatedly to see if something is happening somewhere that could explain this. Is it a volcano erupting, or another mass shooting? Incorrectly filed taxes? I vaguely recall that I made an agreement with a friend, that I am supposed to call them when this feeling happens so they can talk me down. I can't figure out what I would say, so I don't.

As a child living in rural Illinois who had anxiety attacks and a smoker's cough before my family had words for these afflictions, my mother was adamant that my strong waves of emotion were not just mine alone. She promised me that my feelings were and are connected to others, and that I should listen to them because they are telling me important news about the world I am in. This was my anti-anxiety medicine for years.

The Anxiety and Depression Association of America describes Generalized Anxiety Disorder as "persistent, excessive, and unrealistic worry about everyday things." This definition assumes that, if your own body isn’t directly and immediately at risk, your feelings are pathological. My mom would hate this. Even the language around anxiety denies the fact that we are living through a state of multi-layered overlapping emergencies. Our worries are far from unrealistic, although sometimes they are misdirected. But it seems that the consensus of Big Medicine is that we should systematically defang the anxiety, rather than listen to it, as if our work is to refine ourselves so much that, one day, we might be able to walk through a war zone on our way to coffee or yoga and not be distracted or upset.

AUTOPILOT

I find my moments of intense, embodied anxiety easiest if I have a task to do, preferably something repetitive and goal-oriented that can break me out of my state of spinning while standing still. If I can go into autopilot doing a purposeful physical task, the time passes and my body eventually becomes so tired that I can't feel anything. I can return to "normal" acceptance of and participation in this reality. For example, in the past this kind of anxiety has lent me the energy to move 2 tons of soil by hand, or to work back-to-back 10-hour shifts as a waiter for a catering service to some of the world’s richest and most confused Silicon Valley CEOs. It fueled my bike ride across the North American continent twice and, more generally, has allowed me to produce art project after art project without taking a moment to reflect for 15 years. 

And now the same anxiety will fuel me to write these charismatic words about why I feel useless on a burning planet. I can't stop working even when it isn't helping me or us. I can't stop working even if I'm coughing until I puke, and even if I already have enough money to pay rent. I wouldn't stop working even if I had all the money in the world, because nothing but work will  prove that I deserve to drink this dirty air. I can't stop working because I fear that, if I do, I won’t know who I am. I clearly need to be stopped! But stopping alone, as an individual, is not an option in this economy. Stopping alone isn't useful when you need a distraction to avoid the eerie feeling that the world is burning but that you are currently superficially protected from it.

In other words, to get rid of the surplus of energy my body generates thanks to my anxiety about the state of the world, I focus on working. But what if working is contributing to the anxiety-inducing state of the world? I don’t think that the transmutation of avoidance into productive energy is just my unique emergent strategy. I think that it is very common in the phase of the climate emergency "we" are in right now, and it helps reproduce that emergency. 

DITCHING OUR WORKAHOLIC ANCESTORS

Of course, my work as a conceptual artist and writer has relatively little impact on the atmosphere, other than perhaps when I get flown to other cities to give talks or workshops to other anxious, creative people. 

But my other work is as a steward for a mutual aid protocol and network called The Hologram. Here in Berlin, I work with a team of people to foster the Hologram and help onboard people to use it. As part of that I get to see many people describe their feelings and experiences at length. Recently I hear the word volcano a lot. "I feel like there is a volcano inside of me". What I hear in this word is that the person contains hot pressurized compressed energy that wants to escape. 

Like you (whether you know it or not), I have spent my life trying to manage these feelings, to take breaths and do exercises that help me control them so I can write articles like this, pay rent and not live the life of my unhappy factory worker ancestors. What would happen if I let the magma out? I might be unemployable. What if that’s happened already, and unemployability is a life-path and not a diversion? What are the ecological byproducts of breaking generational habits of respectability?

I remember writing down the words of David Graeber from a meeting we attended together  around 2012 that makes me feel respectable in my anxiety and my unemployability. He said something to the effect that too much work would destroy the planet and our ability to live on it. Back then, what he was saying was a bit too big for me to hold. I felt it more than I heard it, though I knew it was true. David Graeber is now a very famous fossil who took very very long baths. He was curious and frustrated why we chose to use all the energy on the planet for more work and not more play. Work as we know it relies on fossil fuels. At this rate, David's body will one day be burned up to provide the fuel to turn on the lights at the office where the AI goes to work at their Bullshit Job.

The fossil fuel industry has only existed as we know it since 1859, but without it we could not work as we currently believe we should. In six generations we have created a new world where fossil fuels supply around 80% of the world's energy and fuel the profitable illusion of 24-7 productivity. Fossils are, of course, the ancestors we burn for power. But they are also what we are becoming, and what we fear. Producing fuel from fossils for electricity, heating and transportation produces greenhouse gasses, smog and acid rain. The more fossil fuel energy we burn, the hotter the planet gets and the harder it is to breathe. According to European Environment Agency, air pollution in Europe is one of the largest health burdens and is the number one cause of premature death. 

Things change fast in terms of discourse, so now I don't have to convince you that too much human work is destroying the planet. One of the key proposals of the degrowth movement is to reduce the number of weekly hours expected of workers to slow down the economy and prevent its ecological harms, while allowing us to focus our energies on activities that serve the earth and one another. 

But how do we do more than just talk about it as we burn ourselves on the inside? Deep down we are reaching a moment when work, the thing that so many of us believe in above all else to save us, will kill off our species if we don't change the type of work we are doing, and what good work means to us. At the same time, we need a place to put all this pent up energy besides our computers and self help.

DEMONS COMING FROM THE SIDEWALK

When my eyes hurt I put my computer aside and cycle to The Holographic School of Social Medicine, a temporary, experimental space that The Hologram project set up in Neukolln to experiment with a formal place for mutual aid.

I pause at a stop light next to all the other bicyclists, boxed in by Amazon delivery trucks and black BWM station-wagons. The Deliveroo guy and the Liferando guy on their bikes look at me when I cough up a huge wad of mucus and spit it gracefully onto the road. Then they cough too. I get a feeling of solidarity because I was worried that I had pneumonia again, kickstarted by whatever COVID or post-COVID illness I had the past week. Instead it seems that I have whatever they have, and it makes me less afraid, although perhaps unlike them I travel on an American passport that got me a long-term freelancer visa and my “gig economy” of giving online lectures to other anxious creative people is relatively kinder and gentler.  We smile at each other with a sense of silly resignation. We'll probably be fine, in the short term at least.

I arrive at The Holographic School of Social Medicine, where a group of artists and activists are trying to figure out what a public space for non institutional care could look like in Berlin, and I'm not the only one coughing. Two activists visit to report from a research trip to Ecuador to present the care projects taking place there during an ongoing war between drug gangs and the police. Firearms have just been legalized there and one of our presenters is afraid for her mother and for all the leftists who are not sure if they should take up arms. Her mother goes out for groceries as usual, because she doesn't know what else to do. My coughing feels uncontrollable. We have a powerful discussion. I go home and sleep for 11 hours. I know that our coughing, the unequal gig economy and the war in Ecuador are not unrelated, though they seem as if they exist in different dimensions.

DOUBLE LIFE

Sometimes I feel like I live a double life, between two dimensions. In Dimension #1, which takes place in Berlin, I drink flat whites and do vigorous exercise to overcome my anxiety so that I can get my work done, and things are kind of fine. I adapt to my conditions like everyone does, but the conditions are somewhat stable, or I look away (rent goes up, more people are on the street, we are more afraid to read or discuss the news) so I can maintain my daily mental stability. I live a life where I am valued for my small contributions of chaos and honesty to places where capitalism usually wouldn't let such things live. I get sick every three weeks, but I tend to forget about that halfway through the first healthy week. I am always coughing. I call this the Flat White Dimension (FWD).

I can only sense Dimension #2 when I first wake up or when I am forced to slow down, often when I get very sick (as I was when I wrote this paragraph). But Dimension #2 is always underneath everything. It's a place where the old demons are coming up out of the sidewalk. I call this the The Demons Coming Out of the Sidewalk Dimension (DCOSD).

It is a place of huge existential dread, where pipelines are being attacked in the ocean as acts of war, where whole countries are flooded and washed away, where thousands of people are currently in the Mediterranean on ships that are denied the right to land, where places I have loved to live are being swallowed by wildfires. There is no silver lining, and nowhere to turn, and no amount of individual work of any kind will help.

These two dimensions feel like they can be drawn as vertically stacked horizontal lines on a line graph, moving closer together over linear time (left ot right). The FWD lowers as the DCOSD grows, until they fatefully intersect. In my imagination, when these two lines cross, some time in the near future, shit gets real. The skills that I have for surviving in the FWD won't help and I may be useless. I don't know what to do until that intersection happens, but I don't know what it would mean to be prepared for it. #staybusy

SOCIAL MEDICINE

When I wrote the closing to this article the first three times, I outlined what might happen if I let my anxiety take me off the rails laid by capitalism. I described how my shaky bodymind might keep me from working or paying rent, and how eventually I may be forgotten by the internet and the FWD. I imagined what would happen to many of us if we let anxiety derail us until we were forced to live a different way. It was existential, romantic, and a bit of an unsatisfying conclusion. The problem with that narrative is that I do not believe that our reality will produce a very useful end to that story line. So far, when people are destroyed by this civilization, we see them as human sacrifices, not as signals that we need to organize our world differently.

When I was sitting in a sauna today, trying to sweat out a new closing to this essay and trying not to alarm people with my coughing, I remembered that two years ago I was sitting in a different small hot little room, in a hand-made tent on Anishinaabe Land in so-called Canada. It was filled with the spirits of Grandmothers. I was sitting between Indigenous Elders, artists, filmmakers, and activists and some non-Indigenous guests (like me) in a ritual of recovery and transformation. We had spent years battling a colonial government together.  Coming into the ritual, I felt helpless, guilty and ashamed for being a white person who was given too much privilege while living on Indigenous Land, and I didn't trust myself to be brave enough to use my "gifts (bestowed on me as part of the colonial racial hierarchy) in the way they were most needed.  After the ritual, one of the Elders told us all to consider the fact that we are, ourselves, medicine. She looked right at me with big eyes as me and my other little guilty friends cried.

I feel helpless anyway. Except on Thursdays, when I go to the back of a bar in Neukolln where we are building a better closing to this article. Here, at the Holographic School of Social Medicine, a group of people are learning how to do mutual aid together. Not only that, we are forcefully engaged in the question of how organizing care could be the key to revolutionary ecological justice. We are trying to practice a form of cooperation that is not work. We are trying to recognize our anxiety as nature defending itself.

But to start, when someone has a bad cough, we notice and we get them an appointment at the right doctor. We don't feel guilty or helpless when we are there even though we don't know what we will do when the lines of the two dimensions cross in Berlin. We know that for some people we meet, the lines already have. Our simple wish is to be able to offer a tiny bit of social medicine where no one expects it. Deep down, I think we are creating a place where we can listen to the collective anxiety, and try to hear what it is saying. 

The Holographic School of Social Medicine