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- [00:01]
Sean Illing
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Sean Illing
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- [00:55]
Sean Illing
We seem to be talking about anxiety more than ever. We're diagnosing it more than ever. We're treating it more than ever. And yet it's not obvious that we're handling it any better. In fact, it's not even clear that we understand what we're talking about. What is anxiety exactly? What are we supposed to do with it? Embrace it. Live with it. Conquer it. Medicate it. If we really are living in an age of anxiety, I feel like we should have better answers to these questions. I'm Sean Iling, and this is the gray area. My guest today is Sameer Chopra, a philosopher and the author of a book called A Philosophical Guide. His argument is basically that anxiety is another word to describe being human. It's something that comes with freedom, responsibility, uncertainty, and the fact that we have to make choices in a world without guarantees. This is not a book about curing anxiety or explaining it away. And it's not trying to romanticize anxiety or argue that it should never be treated. It's really just an attempt to. To understand it philosophically and explore what anxiety tells us about ourselves and the world.
- [02:21]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Sameer Chopra, welcome to the show.
- [02:24]
Sameer Chopra
Thanks very much for having me on.
- [02:25]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
I'm really glad you're here. Before we get into the book, I just kind of want to ask about your interest in the topic. I mean, how did you land on anxiety as a philosophical subject?
- [02:37]
Sameer Chopra
You know, it's sometimes said, I'm not quite sure who said it, that the only things you can really genuinely philosophize about are things that are problems. Problems for you. I was anxious. I am anxious. I'm quite an anxious person. So in that sense, writing about anxiety was a natural thing for me to do. Though I wrote this late in my academic career, it had always been a topic of great, deep personal interest to Me?
- [03:02]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Yeah. Yeah, me too. The problem with anxiety, or the term is that we use it to describe a lot of different things. Brain states, moods, disorders, existential dread. Why is there so much confusion around this term? Is there just a. A deep disagreement about what anxiety actually is?
- [03:32]
Sameer Chopra
I think there's some disagreement. I think just even in the kinds of examples you gave of the definitions that people gave of anxiety, these formal definitions where we are trying to capture a mood or an emotion, it's also the case that there is a wide range of emotions and moods and feelings at play. In fact, if you look through the literature, the term anxiety is, you know, a relatively new one. I would say it's a kind of an 18th or 19th century term that we've come to use transculturally. There are so many different names given for it. And there's also this, you know, what I would call a sort of a turf war in some ways, that different disciplines lay claim to anxiety. Philosophy does, psychology does, psychiatry does. And given its placement in our culture, given its placement in our society, it makes a difference in who gets to treat it, who gets to be authoritative about it. So there is perhaps a little bit of jockeying for position to see who gets anxiety. Right. But I'm content to let anxiety be relatively not undefined, but for there to be some imprecision in its edges. I think we can try and make a distinction between anxiety and fear. That can be fruitful and productive, and probably that's all we need in order to get started. So once we've established that, I think we can start talking about anxiety.
- [04:56]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Yeah, let's go ahead and do that. It is, especially in the world of philosophy, it's very often that you can define something most clearly by explaining what it isn't. And so let's do that here. What is the distinction between anxiety and fear? They are clearly cousins of some sort, but how do you draw a line between them?
- [05:18]
Sameer Chopra
So one line traces its origins back to Freud, who suggested that anxiety was a fear that didn't have a specific object of fear. So you were scared, right? You were fearful, but you didn't have something precisely well defined in front of you to call it fear. So one way is an example would be something like, I'm on my way to the mountains to go climbing, right? As I'm driving to the trailhead, as I wake up in the morning, I feel a pit in my stomach. It's nausea. I feel uncomfortable. I'm anxious right now. At that moment, nothing is happening that is concretely endangering me. Right. But I can anticipate some of the situations that might arise. I might get into bad weather, I might fall down, I might get lost. All these things could happen to me. None of them have taken determinate form as yet. Right. At this point, it's anxiety. When I'm actually in the mountains, when I'm climbing and I step across a chasm and. And I feel the ice slide beneath my feet, and I feel that I could fall at this moment, then that's fear, because there's a very concrete object. So I'm walking through the jungle. I am apprehensive of the presence of dangerous wildlife. That I would say is anxiety. When I have the mountain lion in front of me standing and blocking the trail, and I feel my bowels start to loosen, that's fear. Right. So anxiety lacks a determinate object. Fear has one. And I would say in later existentialist treatments, the thing that is not formed, the thing that is indeterminate is the future. Right. Because the future is as yet unrealized. It's not upon us yet, and we dread what it might bring. Right.
- [07:12]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
So in that sense, is anxiety almost fear of fear or kind of like a preemptive. Very good.
- [07:22]
Sameer Chopra
Yes, yes. I sometimes call it anticipatory fear. I'm scared of being scared. Right. So I am walking, like, just to go back to the wildlife example, the mountain lion isn't upon me yet, but I can anticipate how I would feel if the mountain lion were to confront me. Or like fear of drowning. Right. I've never experienced drowning. I've come close to it a couple of times. But when I think ahead of what it would be like to drown, I feel a chill run through me because I can almost feel my lungs starting to implode, dragging the water in. So I anticipate, I imagine, I fill the space with my imagination and. And I'm fully able to feel the fear that I would feel in that situation. So I think that's a very good. That's a very good attempt to capture the sense of anxiety. It is. It is the fear of being fearful.
- [08:18]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Yeah, it does sort of the experience of it subjectively, it does feel like your mind is sort of turning on itself. You become a victim of your own imagination. And anyone who has felt that knows how awful it is and how hard it can be to get out of. I mean, I. Anxiety for me, and I guess I've sort of experienced it my whole life, but I didn't. I never really thought of it as anxiety. Maybe Because I. I don't know, didn't want to deal with that. Yeah, but it is, it is so much worse than fear because as you're saying it, it often doesn't have an identifiable cause. Which is why, like, I. I feel like when I get into an anxious place, I then start to get anxiety about my anxiety and it just sort of sp. Spirals. Fear isn't really like that for me. Right. I mean, if I run into the mountain lion, I shit my pants. But then when it leaves, hopefully without taking my arm with it, it goes away. But anxiety isn't quite like that. Is that how you experience it? Is that how most people experience it?
- [09:26]
Sameer Chopra
Yeah, I would say there's something very important going on there, which is that the fear that I have at a given moment is a response to the object in front of me. And we have resources for dealing with that. Right. So, for example, Paul Tillich, who's one of the philosophers I cover, my book on anxiety, he says this. He says when we have anxiety, rather than trying to avoid it or flee from it, we should actually turn our attention to the anxiety and try to make the anxiety into a fear. Try to think about what is it that might be causing me fear. So in some sense, to give shape to my formless anxiety, to this sort of inchoate emotion, I have to turn it into something concrete. Because if I am able to turn it into something concrete, there is something I could possibly do about it. I might be able to bring rational thought to bear upon it. There might be strategy for survival, for escape, for activism that could help me with it. But till the time that it remains formless, I'm actually quite helpless. I think this is what makes anxiety quite so disorienting, is we don't know what to attach our fear to, or it flits from object to object. So I would say that we have the. As you. As you pointed out, there's kind of a second order level to fear. Fearful of being fearful. That's anxiety. But I would also say that once we understand anxiety's relationship with our consciousness and with our conditions of existence, we can get to a state. And this is the best that philosophy can do for us, that it can teach us how to not be anxious about being anxious. I think the punchline of my book is that you are going to be anxious just because we're human beings, we're constituted in a certain way, but we don't have to have that second order anxiety about being anxious.
- [11:08]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
I guess sort of in the same way every Generation seems to feel like they're at the end of history, like the apocalypse is nigh. In the same way, it seems like every age thinks it's the Age of Anxiety for all kinds of reasons, I guess. Yeah, but there actually may be a good empirical claim that that's true of this period. I mean, I'm not looking at the data right now, but my understanding is that there has. There has been a pretty big spike in anxiety, or at least diagnoses of anxiety. How do you make sense of that?
- [11:44]
Sean Illing
What is your theory about that?
- [11:46]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
I mean, is this really a uniquely anxious period of time?
- [11:51]
Sameer Chopra
Well, I do think that every age likes to appoint itself or anoint itself as the Age of Anxiety. But I do think there is something interesting about this particular time that we are living in. For example, technology and finance, two of the most important forces in the world that run the world, are actually quite opaque to most people. So the sense of being surrounded by systems and objects that are not under our control, that we don't fully understand, but which yet ironically know everything about us, which dominate our lives, which control them, which manipulate them, this sense, I think, is quite acute. I think people have been powerless before. I mean, the history of the world is the history of powerless people rising up to try and gain more power for themselves. And I think people have frequently confronted opaque, bewildering, authoritarian power. But I think now this power is greater than we have ever known. We ourselves individually are reduced to being much more at their mercy than we have been. And I think at the. And I think in a very important sense, we are. We are connected to each other. We are connected to each other's fears and insecurities. So I would say there's also greater chances for what I might call the social contagion of anxiety. You know, we've long known that anxious children are produced by anxious parents. You see your elders growing up anxious around you, you become anxious. So I think we see much more anxiety. We communicate much more anxiety. We are materially set up in such a way that we feel the impress of opaque power on us in our everyday lives in a much more pronounced fashion than people might have in the past. There are also engines of comparison around that can make us feel discontent with our life because we see other people living their lives in ways that we didn't see before. So I think there are material circumstances that might make this present moment, I think, unique in the ways in which it is able to provoke anxiety within us. And of course, let's not forget, as you pointed out very critically in your assessment of our modern anxiety. We diagnose anxiety much more readily and much more freely than we do now because we have treatments for anxiety which prop up, you know, large, large pharmaceutical companies who can make money off anxiety by by medicating us for it. So I think diagnosis of anxiety, the medication of anxiety, a public discourse about anxiety, all of these are present in our modern culture in a much greater way. And here we are on a podcast talking about anxiety, about a book about anxiety.
- [14:46]
Sean Illing
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- [16:08]
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- [17:35]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
The book is really a sort of journey through these. These major traditions of thought and how they engage with anxiety and explain it. And the first one you explore is Buddhism. I'll just ask very generally, like, what is. What does Buddhism have to teach us about anxiety? What is the great Buddhist insight?
- [18:05]
Sameer Chopra
Good question. The great Buddhist insight into anxiety can be best described by, I think, recounting the four great truths that the Buddha offered his disciples. And it's worth noting that when we hear these four great Truths, there is something simple about them. And I think that's where their power lies and in the way that the Buddha presents them. He presents them much in the manner that a doctor or a physician might offer you a cure for what ails you. So the first great truth that the Buddha offers us is that there is suffering. This is a truth about the world. The second is this suffering has a cause, right? He identifies the cause. And there are three great failures of knowledge that produce our suffering. The third great truth is that this suffering can be alleviated. There is a prognosis that he offers, right? And the fourth great truth is this is how you alleviate suffering. And this, the Buddha points out the Eightfold Path, which is how to alleviate your suffering. I would say the heart of this is the three failures of knowledge which the Buddha says produce our suffering. What are these three great failures of knowledge? The first failure of knowledge is that everything changes. Everything is perpetually changing. This world is not static. This world is not moving towards some end state. It is not frozen in some state of perfection. It is constantly evolving and changing. And everything that we see around us, this is not dynamic. This is not solid things, but this is a state of constant, perpetual flux. I might see occasionally an object for which I will give a determinate name, like this coffee mug, right? But realize that at some point, this coffee mug will decay, will decompose, will fall apart. It is not guaranteed for eternity. So our names, the things that. The names that we give to objects are just sort of placeholders. They're conveniences that we have settled upon, right? This is an important point. It seems very obvious, and yet the Buddha will point out that our failure to fully take this on board makes us unhappy. The second thing is that is the notion of interdependent arising. Everything is connected to everything else. So nothing has an existence that is independent and undetermined by the rest of. By the rest of reality in some sense, right? This plays a very important role in the Buddha suggesting universal compassion upon us because he makes it clear that our happiness cannot be an individual project. If I am happy and reduce my suffering, but there is suffering elsewhere in the world, guess what? That suffering is going to come and affect me as well. Right?
- [21:00]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Well, that's such an interesting distinction with a lot of Western religious thinking where, you know, in these Eastern traditions, they're asking you to. To. To think of yourself as smaller and less important cosmically. Right. Whereas a lot of the Western religious traditions want you to think of yourself as, you know, you are special. You. You are. You know, there's a creator who has a plan for you, and the human race is the center of things, you know, and this is a very different attitude about our place in. In the world. So does Buddhism then ask people to take on these truths and do what with them? Accept them? And as. As a result of that acceptance, the anxiety goes away? You use the word alleviate, right? Which is not the same thing as eliminate. It's not that the anxiety goes away, but it is the goal to just sort of change your. Your perception of it or your relationship to it.
- [21:57]
Sameer Chopra
Very good. Exactly. To change our perception of it, to change our understanding of it, to change. And as a result, to change our relationship to it. Right. So there's an example I use in the book of somebody who goes to see a movie, right? And the movie ends. And when the movie ends and everybody's walking out of the theater, they're, like, bawling and wailing and crying and hanging onto their seat, and we're like, come on, dude, we gotta go. The movie's over. And he's like, no, no, I don't want this movie to end. I don't want this movie to end. You're like, dude, you don't get it. Movies are things that run for two hours. You pay 10 bucks for them. When this movie ends, we need to vacate the theater so the next show can start. If your friend doesn't get it right, we would say that his unhappiness is caused by the fact that he doesn't understand what a movie is. If you would just understand what a movie is, some of his discomfort would be alleviated. Right. Now, I would say in Buddhism, the Buddha's asking us to Take these facts about existence on board, right? Now, if we take these truths on board, if we take these truths on board and we live life in accordance with them, we have some distance from the kind of conventional reality that we have erected for ourselves in our society, where we grant ourselves selfhood. We claim things as being my phone, my mug, my pain. We feel sad about things that don't accrue to us. Like I lost out on this job offer to this other person, right? A sense of competition, a sense of comparison with other human beings. We come to realize that this kind of investment we have in ourselves is slightly misguided and misplaced.
- [23:36]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Can I ask you what the difference is between acceptance, accepting these things, the brute fact of our impermanence, and all the rest of it? What is the difference between that and resignation? Like, there are some things in life that you have to make peace with, right? Because they're unavoidable. But there are also things that make people anxious that maybe we shouldn't accept and shouldn't make peace with and should resist. Do you think it's easy to know the difference?
- [24:11]
Sameer Chopra
I don't think it's easy to know the difference. I think it's a different. I think it's a difference that becomes clearer once we try to think of what are what our attitudes might be with respect to acceptance and resignation towards a particular feature or aspect of our lives. Right. For example, I would say I am resigned at one level to certain kinds of anxiety in my life not being significantly diminished. Like, for example, I don't think parental anxiety. The parental anxiety that I suffer from will be significantly diminished. But I think accepting it places it slightly differently in my life. Now, I want to back up by saying, whenever we have some problem in our life, some problematic situation that we are confronted with, I put it to you that we only really have three attitudes that are possible towards it. Either we escape, right? I don't like this situation, so I'm going to leave, right? I'm going to leave it behind, go somewhere else, right? This is escape. Another one is activism. I don't like the situation, so I'm going to change it. I will actively act to make it different. The third is when we cannot escape. We cannot change the problem. And at that point we have to live with it, right? That means that I need to accept. I cannot escape from this thing. I cannot change this thing. This thing is a feature of my life. Now, I put it to you, when something is accepted as a feature of one's life, it's no Longer a problem in the way that a problem is, that is something demanding a solution or something demanding it be changed. Right. One of the examples I use frequently when I talk about anxiety is, let's say I'm hiking through the mountains and I come upon a hut which is going to be my only shelter for the night. And this hut has a hole in its roof. I could escape, I could leave the hut. That's not possible because there's a storm outside. I could change the hut, I could fix the hole in the roof, but I have no materials. So I have to stay here in this hut with this hole in the roof. At that point, the hole in the roof, I put it to you that my relationship to it changes somewhat. I am resigned, but I'm accepting of it and I need to see it differently. Perhaps the hole in the roof is how I see the stars in the sky, you know, when I'm lying on my back and freezing. Perhaps the hole in the roof is what allows me to see it. So at some point, that resignation changes to acceptance. Once I come to accept it as a feature of my life, that's not going to go away.
- [26:48]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
I just want to touch as much of these as we can, as much of these schools as we can, because they all have something different to offer. And it's very complimentary when you kind of step back and, you know, the second school is the existentialist, of whom I am a great admirer, as anybody who listens to the show knows. And they have a different approach to anxiety than Buddhism. How would you describe the existentialist spin on anxiety?
- [27:16]
Sameer Chopra
The primary difference, or I would say the primary starting point for existentialism is the notion that we are not born into this world with a predetermined essence within us as human beings, that our world, that our life is simply going to see realized, Right? There's no. There's no determinate or fixed way that I'm supposed to be. There's no determinate or fixed way that the world is to be. So I am born into this world which has a history to it, right? It has a history which has brought me here, dropped me at this particular point. But my life, such as it is, lacks an essence. But I'm to bring it into being through my own choices, through my actions, through the choices I make. And of course, these actions and these choices don't just determine my life. They don't just determine who I am. They also make a difference to the world I'm living in. Right? So the existentialist sees a world that has been created by the actions and choices of all those human beings who preceded me. When I am born into this world, I am born into it at a particular historical location, at a particular contingent point in space, time and history. But from that point onwards, I might have been born into a language or I might have been born into a language and a culture. But what I make of that language and culture, those tools that are being provided to me, is a question of my choices, a function of my choices. So anxiety comes about because the future is as yet formless. It is unshapen. My life is unshapen and unformed. But I realize I will bring these into being through my choices, right? And realizing this is of course occasion for anxiety because now I am the one responsible for this. I am the one who's making this happen to me and to the world.
- [29:08]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
I also just think there's just a certain amount of anxiety that comes with being a self conscious creature. You know, it's getting into Heidegger a little bit, I guess. But you know, it's hard to imagine a beetle or an alligator experiencing anxiety because I don't think beetles and alligators are asking themselves who they are or what their purpose is. They just are. I don't think they're wondering what happens after they die. They just are, right? I don't know, Am I, am I oversimplifying that? Maybe, maybe my imagination is, is, is, is lacking. Maybe beetles are asking themselves those questions.
- [29:46]
Sameer Chopra
I mean, you know, neither you and I are well equipped to speak authoritatively about the phenomenology of insects. But I would say, given our fair, given the conditions of our existence, right? As you pointed out, and I would say there are these existential parameters, we live in time. This time is finite. I'm conscious that this time is finite. For example, I could be a creature like an animal that lived in finite time but didn't know this time was finite. But I would say there are two more aspects of this. One is we know this time is finite and we are concerned about the future. We are curious. I think this is a very important thing that makes us anxious. We're curious creatures, but we're not omniscient and neither are we all powerful. So we want to know, but we cannot know, right? If you were simply like, you know, finite time, I'm good, I don't need to know what happens in the future, then again, we'd be fine. The problem is we are curious. We want to know. This is where I suggest in the book that philosophy and anxiety go together because we are very used to thinking about philosophy as arising from wonder, right? Ah, beauty, awe, wonder and curiosity. But beauty, awe and wonder go side by side with fear and terror. When I say, what's that beautiful light in the sky, man? What is that hot big ball of fire up in the sky? That feeling of awe is mixed up with fear and terror as well, right?
- [31:17]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Well, once you start asking questions and seeking truth, you might not like the answers.
- [31:21]
Sameer Chopra
You might not like the answers. Exactly. Yeah. So I would say anxiety and inquiry, or anxiety and philosophy in some sense go together. They. They're very fundamental, right? So you're absolutely right. It's a very fundamental emotion to us.
- [31:43]
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- [32:45]
Esther Hernton
Hey everybody. Astette Hernton here. I wanted to let you know that Vox Media is returning to south by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcast. Join us from March 13 through March 15 for live tapings of Pivot Teffy Talks, Professor G's Markets. Where should we begin With Esther Perel and the special live taping of today explained, hosted by yours truly. The Vox Media podcast. Stage one will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marcus Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu, Robin Arzon, and more. Visit voxmedia.comsouthbysouthwest to pre register and get a special discount on your south by Southwest innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com south by Southwest. Hope to see you there.
- [33:52]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
We're really slingshotting through this, but, yeah, we're just gonna do it because I want to. The great psychoanalytic tradition, which is another school in the book, Freud being the most famous psychoanalyst, what do you think they understood about anxiety? That maybe the. The Buddhist or the existentialists didn't, you know, what. What do they add to our picture of anxiety?
- [34:21]
Sameer Chopra
There's two really important, I think, advances, or shall we say, differences in Freudian thought. One is that I think Freud implicates the social quite strongly that we are anxious because we live in societies with other human beings. The other thing that I would say that Freud offers us, and this is a formulation of anxiety that he arrived at over a long period of time, which is that when we are born, when we are growing up, we have certain objects that are valuable and near and dear to us. And part of growing up is growing away from those objects, right? The most famous one, of course, being the maternal object. Now, as I grow away from this, I experience a certain kind of trauma, right, Because a certain kind of love is taken away from me. So there is a very deep and powerful insight in Freud, which is, I think that for him, anxiety is the fear of the loss of love. I lost love once of a particular kind. And now when I'm living, when I encounter situations that make me feel like I could lose something important in this, that older fear gets triggered and gets replayed in the theater of my mind. So one glib way of saying this is that if I'm anxious about social acceptance, if I am anxious about fame or social attainment, I'm nervous among my peer groups in romantic relationships. For Freud, what's underwriting this kind of deep and fundamental form of anxiety is that I'm experiencing emotions that I've experienced before and which I found to be traumatic and unpleasant.
- [35:56]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
So are they seeing anxiety basically as a signal? A signal of something going on?
- [36:01]
Sameer Chopra
Yes, that's right.
- [36:01]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Beneath the circumstances that.
- [36:03]
Sameer Chopra
That's right.
- [36:03]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
That maybe your mind doesn't want you to see.
- [36:06]
Sameer Chopra
Yeah, so that's exactly the term that Freud used. He called a signal anxiety. When my friend sends me a text message and I rush to reply to them, thinking that if I don't reply to them, within 30 seconds, they will take me off their, you know, their IT list of friends. What I'm experiencing at that time is that I am coming close to a feeling that I'm about to lose something which I've experienced before, and I don't want to go near it again. But I would say Freud says, quite importantly, that part of growing up is coming to understand that the world is not going to give us the kind of love we had when we were children and that we need to let go of this quote, unquote childish hope, right? That I will feel comforted, taken care of, secure. Not everybody's had this right in their childhood. But those of us who are lucky enough to have had loving parents have experienced something which it would be mistaken to expect from the world when we grew up. So part of growing up for Freud is very much letting go of certain kinds of illusions that we had about what the world held in store for us.
- [37:17]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Or you can become neurotic and project all your bullshit on other people.
- [37:21]
Sameer Chopra
That's always an option. Always an option.
- [37:25]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Samir, what do you think philosophy can really do to help people deal with anxiety? What can it do for us? And maybe just as importantly, what can philosophy not do for us?
- [37:38]
Sameer Chopra
Good. I would let me just start with the latter. I don't think philosophy is going to give us a cure for anxiety, right? But I think philosophy can help us understand anxiety better. It can help us understand our own conditions for existence. It can bring about a greater understanding of our relationship with anxiety. And I think in doing that, like I said, the punchline of the book is you're not going to stop being anxious. But philosophy can help you realize that you don't have to be anxious about being anxious. Once you understand who we are, the kinds of creatures we are, and the kinds of conditions that existence places upon us, we are better placed, I think, in some ways to understand our role within the world and to not make ourselves pointlessly unhappy. I think being unhappy is one thing, but being pointlessly unhappy is worse. I think Nietzsche said it in so many different ways. You can't get away from suffering. What you can get away from is moralizing your suffering, right? Like, suffering is fine, pointless suffering is not. Right? So I think once we understand why I suffer from anxiety and that I'm going to be suffering from it for the rest of my life in some shape or form, I think I have a better grip on it.
- [38:56]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
I am duty bound, as we wrap up here, to ask what other practical advice you might have for People listening who are struggling with anxiety.
- [39:11]
Sameer Chopra
I would say this is something that has come to me as I wrote the book and now as I talk about it, that the single most important thing that human beings can do to live with the presence of anxiety in their lives and to alleviate it in some measure, is to cultivate their personal relationships. To think about the kinds of human connections we have, the kinds of social, human connections we have, to cherish the love we have in our lives, because I think it's the single most important good that the world can send our way. So to cherish the love, we have to work on it, to maintain and treasure human connections. I've come to feel that the fear of death is just really the fear of the loss of love. So I think this is the single most important thing we can do. You know, there are other measures. You know, people will say things like, I think, meditation, keeping oneself physically active. We are embodied beings, right? We need to move and relate to the world, to spend time in the outdoors, to put ourselves in positions where we can contemplate, look at, observe things greater, beautiful and more timeless than us. Because I think it places us in existence, in probably a far healthier relationship that we might have. So I would say cultivate love and get outdoors.
- [40:36]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
It really does seem like the trick is, is to find ways to be immersed in the moment, you know, to. To seek out activities that. That take our minds off ourselves and our obsessions, you know, mindful activities. Yeah, it's all that. That message is cliche at this point. I know, but that doesn't make it untrue.
- [40:55]
Sameer Chopra
No, not at all. Not at all. And I think there's a convergence along so many different cultures, so many systems of thought staying in the moment, which takes us out of the flux of time for a second. This is in theories of the sublime that when we look at a piece of art, I'm suspended. I'm not in the future, I'm not in the past. I'm in the moment of observation, mystical experiences, the moment of love. Right? When I'm in. When I'm with my lover, time goes away, right? In each of these instances, what we find pleasant and beautiful about them is that they fix us in the moment. They keep us there on this object. I'm not thinking about myself, remember, in all of these. All of these things, I'm not thinking about myself, thinking about the object that I'm in that relationship with, right? Whether it's love, music, drugs, a beautiful view of a mountain, whatever it might be at that moment. There's just these two things.
- [41:54]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
I'm going to leave it right there. Once again, the book is called the book is called Anxiety A Philosophical Guide. It was a great read. It was a really wonderful kind of tour through some of my favorite writers and books. So thank you for that. And, and thank you for this conversation. It was a real pleasure.
- [42:16]
Sameer Chopra
Thanks very much for having me on. I, I loved having this conversation with you. Thank you.
- [42:27]
Sean Illing
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm sure you can tell that I did. But as always, we we want to
- [42:34]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
know what you think.
- [42:35]
Sean Illing
So drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're done with that, please go ahead. Rate review.
- [42:47]
Interviewer (possibly Sean Illing or co-host)
Subscribe to the show.
- [42:48]
Sean Illing
It helps us reach more people. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Thor Neuer, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact Check by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overinton wrote our theme music. Episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays. Listen and subscribe. You can now watch Episodes of the gray area@YouTube.com vox. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.com members to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.