Has anybody else that has the luxury of home and hearth in these times experienced increased instances of anxiety? The feeling that every new day will bring a new disaster and a new unforeseen event, the contours of which could neither have been predicted nor controlled? Open the newspaper any given day of the week or listen to your favourite news anchor screaming their heads off at yet another hapless invitee, depending on your poison, and you will probably have more fodder to fuel such a feeling.
WebMD tells me that anxiety is a normal emotion. And that it’s a way of alerting the brain to potential danger and a standard reaction to stress. But when all that I consume every day is meant to create the feeling of potential danger, is it a wonder that I am permanently anxious?
Online threat
The Social Dilemma on Netflix makes the compelling argument that online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are meant to nurture this addiction to anxiety and affect my mental health. A recent debate organised by NDTV and Roli Books argued the motion, ‘In a democracy, social media does more harm than good.’ Proponents for the motion cited the rise of hatred, bigotry, fake news, and violence of both the online and offline kind. Those against argued for the role of social media in the amplification of dissent, resistance and the voices of the marginalised in society.
Sociologist and Marxist writer Richard Seymour’s book The Twittering Machine suggests instead that it would be easier to ask as to what is wrong with us rather than what is wrong with these systems.
And he makes the perhaps controversial argument that compulsive participation in social media, whether as participant, spectator or addict to the dopamine loops of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ is not due to a need for pleasure but a symptom of the death drive, a giving in to the chronophage or the “monster that eats time.”
In other words, we stay online to pass time, for real time in the real world is fraught and cannot be passed so easily.
When I was a child, I was in thrall to that allay-er of all anxieties, the institution of the bedtime story. Through familiar parables of good and evil, offered in turn by my maternal grandfather, my father and my mother, I was offered the possibility of a world in which one could thrive, but of course, only if one followed the rules.
Bedtime fiction
Today my phone and social media keep me company before bedtime. Whatsapp forwards and Twitter and Facebook propel me into the fiction that both the good and the bad are constantly elsewhere; somebody else is always happier, better-looking, and travelling to nicer places and somebody else is constantly cruel, inhuman, illiberal, and brutal.
At the same time, they also contrarily inform me that all happiness is within my reach whether through re-invention of self, new hobbies, Instagram-influencing, or follower-gathering. So then, in this moment and this space, I ask again, is it a wonder that we are all permanently anxious?
But maybe there is a way to elide this Manichean back and forth of social media by focusing on anxiety as a symptom to revisit the question of what may be wrong with us.
Philosopher Renata Salecl in her beautiful exploration ‘On Anxiety’ is wary of the popular account that anxiety is an obstacle to well-being and prevents us from functioning in the world or engaging with others. Instead, she says that a world without anxiety would be a scary place for it would give truth to the lie that happiness is freely available, and that we are not in an age of cruelty, misery and danger.
Perhaps we are all anxious because no matter how hard we scroll, how incessantly we post, and how intently we binge-watch, we do not have the capacity to deny the state of the world. To rephrase anthropologist Clifford Geertz, we are unable to believe the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. Anxiety in this case can be a powerful space to stay in and to ask about the stories we no longer tell, and perhaps even to find newer, better and kinder stories of the world.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.
