Anxiety, Change, & Habituation
Wednesday Wisdoms for July 3, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living by presenting three quotes, three observations, and three questions.
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Anxiety
🤨 Quote
“While anxiety and fear are emotions that most of us would prefer to live without, they serve as anchors to social and moral norms.”
Sam Harris
Source: The Moral Landscape
Observation 🧐
Lack of control often leads to anxiety. We don’t like being told what to do. We don’t like not being the authors of our own existence.
And yet we are required to give up some autonomy in life, whether voluntarily to live in society or involuntarily due to life’s nature.
So the question becomes how can we live, morally, in a world where we do not always have full control?
Don’t ignore the anxiety. Feel the walls closing in from the lack of control. Sit with it and notice it, remind it that you do in fact see and feel it, that even though you’d rather not feel it, you do, and you will manage through it.
Acceptance of the feeling is the first step on the path to recontrolling the often uncontrollable nature of anxiety.
🤔 Question
When you feel the walls of anxiety closing in, what is the first thing you do to help control the emotion?
Change
🤨 Quote
“The puzzling fact about human beings is that our capacity for change, both in our own lives and through history, is the most distinctive and unchanging thing about us.”
Alison Gopnik
Source: The Philosophical Baby
Observation 🧐
Change is scary, it means letting go of stability, letting go of what we know, and weathering the unknown, the unpredictable, the ambiguous.
Societal fears come about during massive times of change. The faster the change, the more fear, and the more people begin to fight back against the changes.
We’re living in a time of monstrous upheaval:
Massive wealth disparity
Technological disruption
The loneliness crisis
Climate change
Potential downfall of democracies across the globe
Drug crisis
Higher cancer rates
And yet change is the one constant for humans. “More than any other creature, human beings are able to change,” writes Gopnik. “We change the world around us, other people, and ourselves.”
There is no just ‘get over it’. There is no ‘don’t be afraid’ and just lose the fear of change.
Instead, learning that change happens daily, and learning tk accept that, to be uncomfortable in the uncomfortable, this is how we start to take back control of something that seems out of control.
Our fears are our realities until we conquer the fear and show ourselves it was just a perspective.
🤔 Question
When the world seems like it is out of control, like you have no say in what is going on, do you fight the current by grabbing things for control or do you learn to sway with the waves of change?
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We explore the wisdom of Fyodor Dostoevsky on our relationship with habituation for our final Wednesday Wisdom this week.