“The less anguish, the less spirit”, Kierkegaard

There are many of us. We are legion.

How many years we have spent, in the greatest secrecy, palpitating, hyperventilating, ruminating, trembling, biting our nails, jumping up and down, sweating, suffocating! Camouflaged and silent, as if our emotions were shameful, our sole fault and only the product of family histories. What a therapeutic via dolorosa! How many depressions have been diagnosed! How many pills ingested! So much alcohol poured on the embers of anxiety!

But anxiety is also a political affect. It says something about the world we live in today. A world of lonely individuals where happiness is measured in numbers and things. Where self-esteem is reduced to numbers and well-being to a match between a project and means. Where the subject exhausts herself for abstractions, the society, a company, an institution. A carnivorous and unequal world where toxic virility and its privileges dominate. A world of the short term whose temporality does not suit the rhythm of human and non-human beings. There is a long list of grievances to address to the patriarchal-capitalist system that irrigates our existences.

That is enough.

Worriers of all countries unite!

As there is in panic a real transforming potential. Our brains are like nuclear power plants. Let us put the fuel of anxiety at the service of empathy, sensitivity, warmth, altruism, humanity. Let us get out of the guilty isolation to share our collective and militant panic attacks. Let us be “angst-gether” and proliferate in a solidary network of worried people. Let us form a community of rebellious anxious people. There is something friendly and creative in the violence of anxiety. The tingling, the palpitations and the chest pains are the clay of powerful social and political passions.

Because the world needs us. We, the anticipators. We, the ruminants of thoughts and emotions. It needs us to give it the ingredients for survival. We, the angst cows, are the dairy future of this planet that is going to ruin. Perhaps we can prevent the coming human horror. Not by force. Pride. Obstinacy. Willpower. Overcome yourself. Overcome your fears. No. Just through kindness. Porosity to the suffering of others. Sweetness. Sweet milk. Rounded corners. A world in which our anxieties can gently bounce off each other until we forget ourselves. A world where the systemic loyalties that inhabit us and maintain inertia will have been unraveled so that we can finally say calmly:

No. Enough is enough.

(Initially published in La Revue Nouvelle under the pseudonym Derek Moss).

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