Is Anxiety an Affliction in America or a Feature?
Friday, August 15, 2025.
Anxiety isn’t just in your head—maybe it’s also in your job description.
In the U.S., nearly one in five adults will experience an anxiety disorder this year (National Institute of Mental Health, 2024). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 30% of adults have felt anxious or depressed most or all of the time in the past two weeks.
That’s not an individual malfunction—it’s a national work order stamped “URGENT.”
We have meditation apps, employee wellness webinars, and self-help podcasts in every flavor—and still, anxiety rates climb.
Why? Because America has perfected the art of converting structural problems into personal defects, then monetizing the cure.
How Reaganomics Became Hustle Culture
In the 1980s, Reaganomics reframed unemployment as a failure of character. If you couldn’t find work, you didn’t hustle hard enough. The economy was fine—it was you that needed fixing.
That logic didn’t fade—it metastasized. Now it’s hustle culture: “be your own brand,” “never stop grinding,” “always be closing.” You’re a walking LinkedIn profile wearing a smile that says, “I’m overworked and underpaid, but at least I’m marketable.”
Anxiety as an Economic Line Item
Corporate America tracks anxiety like a manufacturing defect. Studies estimate its economic cost at over $42 billion annually, with nearly half attributed to lost productivity (Anxiety and Depression Association of America, n.d.).
The implicit message: if the economy is the patient, then you’re the replaceable part.
“Treatment” exists to get you back to producing, not to address the deeper causes of distress.
The Circular Trap
Here’s the absurd loop: the same work culture that breeds anxiety “treats” it just enough to send you back into the same grind.
We’re told to approach every meeting and “stretch goal” with Olympic-level enthusiasm.
Real motivation—rooted in personal values—gets replaced by performance on demand. The result? A predictable cycle of overdrive, crash, repeat.
Freud’s Smoke Alarm
Freud saw anxiety as a signal—your brain’s smoke alarm—not a defect (Freud, 1926/1973).
Childhood phobias illustrate this: between ages three and six, kids may fear the dark, animals, or strangers. Left alone, these fears help them reorganize their inner world. When the work is done, the fear fades. Anxiety has done its job.
Today, mental health culture tends to erase that function, treating all anxiety as a glitch to be eliminated (Spielberger & Reheiser, 2009).
The Unknown Demand
At its core, anxiety is the feeling that something is demanded of you—but you don’t know exactly what.
Lacan compared it to facing a giant praying mantis while wearing a mask you couldn’t see (Lacan, 1977). Maybe it makes you look like prey; maybe not. You can’t know, so you freeze.
Pixar’s Brave captures the same truth: Merida’s mother turns into a bear. Sometimes the bear looks like “Mom.” Sometimes like “lunch.” That not-knowing? That’s anxiety.
Why Killing Anxiety Might Be the Real Mistake
In a country where human worth is measured in quarterly earnings, anxiety may be one of the last honest signals left. It warns us when the mask we wear has slipped and we’re exposed.
Medication can help—sometimes it’s lifesaving—but if all we do is silence the alarm, we send people quietly back into the same burning building.
The real question isn’t “How do we get rid of anxiety?” but “What is anxiety trying to tell us about the way we live?”
Maybe the Age of Anxiety never ended because it’s still doing its job—reminding us that the fault isn’t just in our heads, but in the culture that keeps demanding we sprint toward the cliff.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Anxiety and Depression Association of America. (n.d.). Facts & statistics. Retrieved August 13, 2025, from https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2025, March 13). Household Pulse Survey: Mental health. National Center for Health Statistics. Retrieved August 13, 2025, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/mental-health.htm
Freud, S. (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 20, pp. 75–172). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1926)
Lacan, J. (1977). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1973)
National Institute of Mental Health. (2024, March). Anxiety disorders. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved August 13, 2025, from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/anxiety-disorders
Spielberger, C. D., & Reheiser, E. C. (2009). Assessment of emotions: Anxiety, anger, depression, and curiosity. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 1(3), 271–302. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-0854.2009.01017.x