Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.
Seth Godin
There is this sense that the world is about to fall apart with major crises (war, pandemic, climate change), and smaller ones that might creep up on us. It all sounds much like “The Emergency” in the Mysterious Benedict Society; where they characterised this sense that “there’s no one at the wheel”.
We are all bombarded by the negativity and sensational materials in the news typically designed to arouse us. And since it is easier to arouse us with fear and anxiety, that is what they do in order to keep us paying attention. The problem with attention becoming a currency in the modern economy is that a large part of the workforce have their attention taken away from more productive pursuits towards the superficial and trivial.
Do we want to continue to behave like this and allow our anxieties to indeed manifest as failures in reality? Or do we want to leverage that anxiety to drive us forward, away from freezing, towards a common goal of a future that we all want to be in?