Dealing With Anxiety #048

Hello and welcome again to Every Dawn!

We're talking about Bertrand Russell's "Conquest of Happiness," a book in which he tries to find out why we are unhappy. If you missed the previous episodes, feel free to go back and listen to them. Russell diagnoses various reasons why we are unhappy: that we are unable to deal with boredom, that we have too much excitement in our lives, competition in society, and one more thing about which we want to talk today is the more general sense of anxiety or fatigue, as he calls it.

Now, his book was written in the 1930s. The vocabulary was different; they didn't talk of anxiety then, and the examples he gives are different. They didn't have social media, obviously; they didn't have mobile phones; they didn't have the internet. So, what Russell says is true for us in its principle, I believe, but it is not expressed in a way that uses today's examples. And so, this is what I'm doing here. I'm translating him a little. I'm not giving you Russell as it's written down, but I'm trying to interpret it according to what we see in our world today.

And so, he's talking about anxiety; he calls it fatigue, but this is the same thing, and this anxiety is just fear of the future. And he says one of the main reasons why we are unhappy is that we are afraid of the future. And again, I think many of us know this, especially today. You know, the world is not particularly welcoming or safe, whether you live, you know, in Israel or in the Palestinian lands or in Ukraine or in Russia or, you know, in dozens and dozens of places on the Earth where something is going wrong. Even very wealthy places, even in the United States, you might have anxiety about the upcoming elections and their outcome, or all of us are anxious about the environmental problems we face: microplastics and um, global warming, and whatever other pollution problems we have, extinction of species.

So, there's no limit to the problems we have that can cause us anxiety, but we cannot just stop there. We cannot just be anxious, and that's it. We need to somehow overcome this, and we need to proceed with our lives.

And this is what Russell is saying, of course. You have a reason for anxiety um, you may be poor, you may lose your money, you may end up on the streets, but the point is, and here is where he gives his advice, to think, what is the worst that could happen in your life, and then to try to see, how would you overcome this? And if you do this honestly, and if you really try to picture the worst outcome as vividly as you can, and then try to see how you would overcome this, from then on, you will be much more relaxed because you will know if the worst happens, you can still be kind of okay because everything is, in the end, survivable.

Then a German book of a woman, I forget now the name, but I read it when I was young, and I found it very impressive. She left her family, her husband, who was I don't remember exactly, some it was some kind of bad domestic situation, and she left the husband, and she was thinking, I am afraid, you know, of going out into the world alone. I used to have this family life which at least was, you know, materially sorted, and now I'm alone. But the way she overcame this was to think, what is the worst thing that can happen? And she said, the worst thing that can happen is, I end up on the streets, I don't have any money. So, what would I do? I would go and clean toilets. That's the worst thing that I can imagine for myself. And then she went and did just that. She found a job cleaning toilets, and after a while, she noticed it's not so bad, you know. Thousands of people are cleaning toilets; they are all fine. They have families; they're happy, and I can also do that. And so, she did that, and after a while, it was fine. She got used to it; she does it; it's okay; it's her everyday job, and she lost this fear, this anxiety, for the rest of her life. And then later, she found better jobs, and she went out of the situation.

But the point was to confront your worst fears and then, perhaps, actually, to do what you are fearing most in order to overcome is fear. And for many of us, financially, this will be something like, you know, cleaning toilets or some other job that pays the bills that is, you know, hard and unpleasant, but we can do it. Many, many people are doing these jobs, and they are also surviving, and so there's no reason why I could not do that.

With the environment, what's the worst thing that can happen? The worst thing is that the pollution might get worse. What can I do? My life specifically, my life, I'm now 60; I don't have more than 15 years. So, within 15 years, the, you know, sea levels are not going to rise to some extent that will be unbearable to me, so my own anxiety is not justified. In 15 years, the world will be more or less like it is. Now, my children, if you're 20, perhaps you have a little more reason to be anxious, but still, I mean, even if you're 20, you have another 50, 60 years of life. It's unlikely that the environment will completely collapse within 50 or 60 years.

I'm not saying this because I say we shouldn't do anything. It's quite the opposite. You know, perhaps, that I am very much in favor of all sorts of environmental activism, and I promote wherever I can the idea that we should protect nature, and we should act against global warming; we should not drive cars and so on, but just from an anxiety perspective, it is not really necessary to have these irrational anxieties about nature. We should have a rational plan to do something to improve the situation.

Anxiety, in the end, doesn't help, and this is another point of Russell's: anxiety does not change anything. If you are rational and calm, then you can go and change things. Anxiety just causes you to close your eyes and stick your head in the sand and just wait for it to be over, which does not improve the situation.

I will read you again a little bit on just this point. Russell says,

"Worrying does not accomplish anything. Even if you worry 20 times more, it will not change the situation in the world. In fact, your anxiety will only make things worse. Even though things are not as we would like, we can still be content knowing we are trying our best and will continue to do so. … When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that after all, it would be no such very terrible disaster. Such reasons always exist, since at the worst, nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance. When you have looked for some time steadily at the worst possibility and have said to yourself with real conviction, 'Well, after all, that would not matter very much,' you will find that your worry diminishes to a quite extraordinary extent."

And that's it for today. Try to see where your anxieties and your worries are coming from, and perhaps use this trick to experiment with it, and perhaps you can get a better perspective on reality by following Russell's advice.

Thank you, and see you again next time!