by Kim Pederson…….

Apparently if you were to ask most Americans today “What, You Worry?” the answer would be yes. In his New York Times article “Fifty States of Anxiety,” economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (SD) tells us that, based on the Internet search count for various types of anxiety, Americans are 150 percent more worried today than they were in 2004. Some of the subjects of these anxieties are what you would expect: travel, separation, work, school, home, driving to name more than several. Some are related to when anxiety comes upon one, as in “anxiety in the morning” or “anxiety at night.” Searches for the latter, SD notes, have risen tenfold over the last decade.

A more highfalutin word for anxiety is “angst,” a term often associated with the companion term “existential,” which seems redundant given the seeming impossibility of nonexistential (i.e., nonexistent) angst. A better phrase might be “free-floating angst” because it seems to come out of nowhere (nondirectional and unmotivated are the psych terms), descending upon us unbidden. (If you need a visual for this, think of the Rover, the “sinister balloon-like device” that also popped up out of nowhere and then relentlessly pursued and captured or killed anyone trying to escape the Village in the British television series The Prisoner.) Or maybe existential angst comes from the act of existing being a generally worrisome thing in and of itself because the alternative to existing is, well, not existing.

But enough of this frivolosophizing. As SD describes at length in his article, Americans have enough concrete angst, i.e., directional and well-motivated, to bury any abstruse concerns wafting hither and yon, willy and nilly just for the heck of it. We have Zika-laden mosquitoes, heat waves, forest fires, flaming or leaded tapwater, floods, cancer, cable news, concealed carry permits, and much more to keep us awake at night (hence the surging “anxiety at night” searches, no doubt).

SD also notes that different types of anxiety appear greatest in different locations. In general, the anxiety search numbers, he writes, tend to be “in places with lower levels of education, lower median incomes, and a larger portion of the population living in rural areas.” More specifically, searches for panic attacks concentrate in Appalachia and the South. Searches on death are highest in Kentucky. The most anxious place in the country, according to this criterion, is Presque Isle, Maine, where the search numbers are twenty-one percent above the US average. The two most prevalent causes for anxiety apparently are the possibility of another recession and, from out of left field, opiate withdrawal.

Finally, SD relates how there are two things you would expect to raise anxiety, again measured by the number of Google searches on them, but did not in any noticeable way. The first was terrorism. The second was Donald Trump or, more specifically, his fear-mongering campaign and/or the possibility of him becoming president.

As people have quoted over and over since Franklin Roosevelt first said these words in 1933, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FD meant those words to reassure and inspire everyone to keep on keeping on in a country mired deep in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Today it seems more of an instruction. Given the amount of angst running amuck in our country, we should now, it seems, be very afraid for that reason alone. Perhaps in his next study SD will look to see how many people are googling “anxiety about anxiety.” If he does, I bet it will be off the charts.

As for me, well, I think I have some of mother’s little helpers around here somewhere. I’m not sure where they are, but fortunately I have trained Maine coon cats who will find them immediately once I give the command “Get help!” This has worked on one occasion before. I took the tranquilizer they obediently brought me and calmed down immediately. I also learned something interesting at that moment. Diazepam tastes remarkably like Meow Mix. I didn’t know that. Did you?

* Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1983. Public Domain.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.