Anxious? Depressed? CLiuAnon here to help

with some unsolicited advice from your local User Friendly Super Ego

Anxiety is caused by repressed anger: afraid that there is no ‘safe’ way of expressing your anger about your situation, your student loan debt, your authoritarian boss, your random job rejections, a careless professor, a condescending friend, the fake language of self care you hear from your HR department, you feel anxious, but I’m going guess that your anxiety that comes from your healthy reaction of outrage and skepticism. There are endless tiny papercuts of the white collar world, a world in which reason should be our Queen, but irrationality is imposed on us as the price of fitting in. You feel angry, but you repress it almost immediately because you are afraid of being punished for being angry. Anxiety and depression also come from guilt. You feel guilty about being angry, but you also feel guilty about not being able to be angry. The superego is a terrible agency. Depression comes from attacks of the superego on the ego and while vicious, the attacks are meant to stave off the sadness of an objective situation.

People talk about the aggression and entitlement in young people today and their willingness to cancel the olds. What I’ve remarked about my students in recent years is actually their excessive kindness in situations where institutions and authorities fail them over and over again. This kindness maybe prophylactic, but it’s real. I appreciate it even as I worry about them because one way to deal with a world out of control is to shut down, to deaden oneself, inside and out, with TikTok videos, hard workouts and asocial behavior in general.

My advice to those of you caught in work/family/academic situations where something feels off, ask yourself if the social interaction is being used as a stage to perform for the other’s “virtuous” nature. This is a bit of inside baseball here, but for students, and young academics, if people at a meeting, conference, etc. are using bizarre words like “collaboratory” “art and healing” “center” and “decolonialize,” “thing theory” or “the agency of the non-living” “to complicate” (used in a positive way), they don’t want to “dialogue”: they are using professional venues for their performances of intelligence, goodness or “coolness.” It’s OK not to be cool. It’s OK to care about language and arguments. Feel free to be angry, to ask them hard questions, but also feel free to leave the venue. User friendly Super Ego gives you a hall pass. You need a Super Ego to fight your superego.