A Note for Living in a Post-COVID World

Anxiety following a pandemic is normal; living with it is not

The walls are closing in. Heart pounding like a freight train. Sweat dripping down the brow like a busted faucet. This is not some cosmic joke, nor a quaint quirk of the human condition. No, it’s the scourge of our generation, the cancer of modern civilization: anxiety. A seething, pulsating monster gnawing at the mind like a swarm of locusts.

You’d be a fool to think this is new. Anxiety has been with us since we crawled out of the primordial muck, hunted by predators with teeth bigger than our faces. But back then, the anxiety was justified. You saw a saber-toothed tiger skulking in the distance, you ran. End of story. Today, though, the beasts are invisible and everywhere—lurking in emails, social media posts, the pressure to succeed, the pressure to be a goddamn human. And running won’t save you from this. No, this is an internal war.

For most of my life, any anxiety I felt somehow was transformed into anger and thus a catalyst for doing something stupid and destructive. Certainly this alchemy is present in spades in today's headlines. As I've grown into an oldster, the rage has diminished and the chemical change has likewise been muted. Now, I'm just left with the sinking feeling that things are wrong and there isn't a goddamned thing I can do about except binge-watch reality TV and binge-eat cheese. Also some booze and smokes. The anxiety I tend to indulge in has more to do with the circumstances I find myself in at a certain age plus a decade or so of the insistence that there is something concretely wrong with me (thanks third ex-wife). In the soup within which we all swim, the anxiety is both about that narcissistic gaze internal and a societally approved dread of monsters beyond our control.

We’ve built an entire society that thrives on anxiety. It’s our economy’s life-blood, fueling everything from pharmaceuticals to self-help gurus, all promising to fix what’s broken. But, let’s be clear, it’s a racket. A monumental con job. They’re selling snake oil to fix a wound they created. But you’re not going to find salvation in a bottle of Xanax, and all the mindfulness apps in the world won’t give you back your sanity if the world is still burning around you.

If that was the best we can do—distractions to mask the ennui—we might as well just go find an American middle school, cop a squat in the cafeteria, and wait until the next disaffected kid with a parent who gave him a gun designed to kill enemy combatants strolls in and starts raining bullets.

“Excuse me, sir. This is a middle school. You can’t just sit here.”

“It’s OK. Give it another few hours. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as the incel shows up.”

But we can make a stand.