“I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as “conscious” or “spiritual,” who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity.”

—Charles Eisenstein¹

(The following is a short excerpt from my latest book, Slowing Down to Run Faster: A Sense-able Approach to Movement)

Though one could easily conclude in today’s increasingly atomized world that to show any sign of anxiety is to reveal some degree of moral weakness (and to show no signs is to indicate, therefore, moral superiority), I prefer to take a more integrated view on the matter. As I mentioned in chapter 9, notes 3 and 4, all feelings and emotions are part of what make humans human. Even though suppressing particular feelings and emotions could give off the impression of being happier, more positive, more inspired, more stoic, more agreeable, or even more suitable for a desired job opening, doing so over the long term could lead to feeling degraded, dehumanized, and perhaps more like a machine than a human.

From this perspective, both the feeling of fear, anger, anxiety, indignation, or any other “negative emotion”² and the expression of any of these could bear just as much legitimacy as the feeling and expression of “positive emotions.”³ And this means rather than rejecting that which makes us human, we might do better to acknowledge and accept it. For only by doing so do we have the opportunity to discover more benign and constructive ways of dealing with our emotions and thereby gain a deeper awareness of both ourselves and the myriad factors that affect us.⁴

1. Charles Eisenstein, “Mutiny of the Soul,” Reality Sandwich, October 7, 2008.
2. For the sake of simplicity I am conflating feelings and emotions, though from a neurophysiological standpoint, they are distinctly different. For more on the subject see, Manuela Lenzen, “Feeling Our Emotions,” Scientific American Mind, April 14–15, 2005. For an in depth study, see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Boston: Mariner Books, 2000).
3. And in an age of growing precarity (where wealth continues to be siphoned from the pockets of working people to the bank accounts of the wealthy), living with some level of anxiety, sadness, indignation, and even anger seems to me to be quite normal. A good deal of work has recently emerged regarding the legitimacy of so-called “negative emotions” and how they are a normal and very human response to a dysfunctional culture and political economy. Philosopher Charles Eisenstein states: “Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers’ Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient’s withdrawal from life. ‘The system has to be sound—after all, it validates my professional status—therefore the problem must be with you.’” See Charles Eisenstein, “Mutiny of the Soul,” Reality Sandwich, October 7, 2008. Like Eisenstein, journalist Johann Hari sheds light on how our current political economy influences and, in some cases, drives both depression and addiction. For a fascinating read, see Hari’s Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018) and Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Looking at employment in general and service-oriented forms in particular, sociologists Arlie Hochschild, Louwanda Evans, and Jennifer Pierce look at how the commodification of emotions tends to have a dehumanizing effect. For an in-depth look, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). For a quick look into the matter, see Adia Harvey Wingfield, “How ‘Service With a Smile’ Takes a Toll on Women,” The Atlantic, January 26, 2016.
4. Writing on the anniversary of the Christchurch massacre—yet another racist act of terrorism inspired in part by the same reality TV star and favored candidate of the Christian Right who, since being elected to the White House, has inspired so many other hate crimes—I feel compelled to emphasize the importance of not only searching for more benign and constructive ways to deal with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions but understanding that doing so may not be enough to rescue us from the evil in others, or that which dwells within ourselves. The obvious reason for this is because while you might be meditating, practicing yoga, getting therapy, or attending self-help seminars as a way to deal with your stress, I could be spray-painting swastikas on the walls of the local mosque or synagogue to deal with mine. Yet, even assuming you and I both choose the same culturally accepted approach to deal with our respective problems, most of those available, whether quasi-spiritual, religious, psychological, psychiatric and pharmacologic, or somatic, will tend to focus solely on the individual to the virtual exclusion of examining the sociological and political-economic strings by which that individual is tethered to society. And this means that most of the solutions offered, while providing possible succor for our respective wounds, will likely fail to address many of their direct and indirect causes. Furthermore, divorced as such from examining the organizing structures of society, this type of non-integrated approach consequently runs the risk of making us better suited to fit into society while at the same time ignoring the possibility of making a society better suited to humanistic ideals. (Obviously not a huge problem, unless, of course, our society happens to be one that tolerates, and in some cases even promotes, rising levels of inequality; rising levels of poverty; grossly unequal access to health care; rising levels of student debt; drug profiteering; war profiteering; illegal invasions of sovereign nations; mass incarceration; impending sea level rise and increases in catastrophic weather events [as the inevitable result of our failure to sufficiently address human-induced climate change]; widespread sexism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia; voter suppression; police brutality; racial profiling; persecution and exploitation of undocumented workers; widespread homelessness; summary detention [incarceration] and deportation of refugees; prosecution of people who attempt to rescue or otherwise aid refugees; mass surveillance; suspension of right to habeas corpus; state-sponsored terrorism; state-sponsored torture; corporate bailouts; global environmental degradation; and genocide.) With all of this in mind, perhaps a more integrated, humanistic, and even effective approach to dealing with the human condition would be to examine the individual within the context of society and political economy—a radical, though not necessarily popular, or even new, idea that goes at least as far back as the moment Jesus turned over the tables of the moneylenders (and actually much farther back, if you consider debt forgiveness to be an integral part of both Mosaic Law and Sumerian edict). For a fascinating account of the history of debt forgiveness going back to the third millennium BCE, see Michael Hudson, And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (Dresden, Germany: ISLET, 2018). For a brilliant and mesmerizing account on the same topic see also, David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, 2014).