The Invitation of Anxiety – Lance Kair Wants to Let You in on What is Happening
- Brainz Magazine
- Jun 6
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 9
Lance Kair is a licensed professional counselor, founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, and published philosopher integrating trauma-informed care with existential and postmodern insights. He brings depth, compassion, and decades of lived experience to the evolving landscape of mental health.
Anxiety, the first modern mental issue. Every time you might ask yourself ‘what does this mean’, ‘am I understanding this correctly’, ‘what should I do’, and so on, you are enacting a basic anxiety. Most people have no issue with it; to them, it is a regular part of life, and they don’t notice it or identify it as anxiety. For some people, though, it becomes a real problem or maybe even a disorder. In either case, though, there are two things happening, and this concerns history, what we could call social and personal history, but we are just using those words to help people understand what is happening.
You might be asking yourself, what does he mean by ‘what is happening’? This is what this is about, what mental health is about. If you don’t know what is happening, or have some questions about it, or what it could mean, then Mental Health Philosophy is for you. (Maybe you just don’t know it yet.)
The social world is the normal anxious world. We could call it or label it something else, yes, like the ‘challenging’, ‘struggling’, ‘screwed up’, or even ‘violent’ world, but why would we? When we take a moment, something somewhere is getting anxious about some problem that is being called forth in a perceived indictment of something else, so we argue that it could be something else, some other label or description. That’s all good, but this is the example of anxiety being the basis of the modern world: we avoid it at all costs and try to make it something else, something more manageable! We do this all the time; there is nothing wrong with doing that. The people who have no issue with it just call it normal, and they enact it as the normal world, the ‘way it is’, or what have you. Of course, many would say, anxiety is such a terrible thing, that it cannot be normal, but, even if comprehend in a scheme of good and bad anxiety, that is normalcy in action; it is good to think this way so we can get on with the normal activities of living our lives. Nonetheless, when there is indeed a mental health issue, this regular way of going about fixing it often leads to more problems.
The two ways, the two worlds
The typical way we think about things informs us of history as the temporal beginnings of the social phenomenon, like the beginning of human beings or the beginning of society. It doesn’t really matter if you think God created human beings ex nihilo (out of nothing) or whether you think evolutionary theory is correct; when we think about history, we are usually talking about those past things. For modern psychology, it appears that depression, what they used to call melancholia, was the first mental health issue. Ok, but we could ask: why? But it seems all too sensible when we take a moment and think about living in society. The beginnings of civilization (c. 4–5 BCE) and modern society (16th–17th centuries) marked the onset of the cessation of being a free being. The relationship with the world was no longer “free”, or perceived as free, but it is likely that the development of human consciousness is synchronous with society’s, that is, this realization that we are not free in the way we like to think and feel we are free it probably part of just being human whenever or however we frame it. It seems that even in the past most people just figured ‘that’s the way it is’ (if they even thought about it), but then others got sad in weird ways, stopped doing normal things like getting out of bed or completing their chores, or started expressing abnormal things like how terrible they thought about themselves or crying all the time. Other people noticed it, but close behind it was hysteria, the arguable precursor-term to modern anxiety; sometimes people would just go over the top a little or a lot, maybe rambling in their speech or acting nervously or frantically, or go manic, expressing ‘crazy ideas’, stepping into madness. The history of hysteria being a woman’s ailment until recently is a good example of this kind of behavior of looking to the social history of being anxious or a contextual solution, but overall and in general, at minimum, depression and anxiety, it seems, have always gone hand in hand.
If there is a difference, it is now modern civilized society presents the person to itself within an epistemological catch-22 where they are free to be limited, e.g. we look to reasons outside of us that limit us, and only by this limitation can they know what it is to be free, e.g. as though those conditions allow us to be free. When we encounter this, however, in actual experience, whether through awareness or a feeling, it can motivate all sorts of strange behaviors, ranging from absent-mindedness and passivity to being extra clean and neat, to anger, insecurity, being a workaholic, or the like. Once upon a time, none of this was a problem; now, nearly everything can be labeled as a mental issue. To face this strange emergence, 20th-century holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, and others, located responsibility at this juncture of freedom and limitation as a way to solve an existential problem.
But you might be asking, what does this have to do with anxiety? And that question is the right question, because social-historical answers have very little to do with anxiety itself, and very much to do with the societal reckoning of it, and the experience of dealing with society’s rendering. It is a difference of orientation on what is happening. Take the example of friends and clients I know who are having very serious mental and some physical distress around the terrible things that are happening in Gaza and Ukraine, if not the general political climate. They all watch the news, and frequently. They feel that it is the responsible and ethical thing to be informed. Being informed and ethical is a kind of anxiety that compels them to act accordingly, to be responsible. Yet, if you talk to them, it is as though their sense of responsibility itself is creating a problem. Often it is a vicious circle and it is difficult for them to even see, notice, and understand so as to pull themselves away from the problem so they can manage it more effectively, so it might have less impact on their mental health. Social political anxiety is to be informed, to know as much as possible about the situations, but it is the situation in Gaza or Africa or what have you that is making them have mental problems? They feel the way to deal with it is to try and fulfill its needs; it is literally as though their anxiety is creating a situation so they must feel anxious (and also depressed). So it is, when we become able to notice what is happening, we begin to notice that by being so informed, they are not resolving the issue in any way, really, but are in fact aggravating it. It is as though the airplane engine has failed and the oxygen mask has dropped, and the person gets up and begins to run around the cabin; less about not following the attendant’s instructions, they completely do not even acknowledge there is an oxygen mask, and indeed, running around the cabin is what is absolutely appropriate and the most important thing to do for that situation. The solution that every one of these people came to upon understanding the situation was to moderate or completely stop watching the news; it nearly had nothing to do with world events, but came about through a reorientation of what they understood as actually happening. Having become aware of what is happening, they all figured out what they needed to do individually for their own sanity. (they were not in any way communicating with each other, nor had I suggested a course of action for them), and they have all found that they are not so distressed or anxious, are sleeping better, and actually feel they are more informed about what is happening in general and more able to show up in the world as themselves, ethically and responsibly. There it is; in this very real analogy, anxiety is less about what to do in any particular situation than about how we are understanding what is happening. Did they have an anxiety disorder, or are they responding in a very sensible way?
Not to be inconsiderate of real, on-the-ground situations in those places, I feel this rubric holds true: do the conditions make people mentally unhealthy? I say, yes and no. From a social management standpoint, yes, but from an individual treatment standpoint, from the ‘how do we understand and deal with this’ standpoint, maybe, as I say, it depends on how one is oriented to what is happening, which is then to say, no, but sometimes by it not being about the social condition, we must begin at the social situation.
The fabric of the modern world is woven from denial
In a way, when we look at social-historical renditions of mental issues, we are but contextualizing what is already occurring, a sort of justifying for the person and their experience in a medium that really does not exist in the way that they are hoping. In effect, the person is usually hoping that if they can understand what everyone else is saying about it, what academic and scientific history and theory say about it, then somehow that information might help solve their problem. Often, though they find that the information of anxiety is interesting but doesn’t really help, often even makes the situation worse, which then oddly brings them to be more reliant upon the social institutions to solve the problem.
The catch is, if it does help, in as much as anxiety is not manageable to be gone altogether, then the issue is solved. One of the problems, though, is that in our age of social media, the person then announces “the solution” to the problem in a context where their answer is THE answer, as then The Problem is likewise how they conceive of it. If we can take the very fact that I am writing about this subject (as many, many other people likewise are writing about it) as evidence that it has not and does not often work, then we might be getting somewhere into what is really happening.
Unfortunately, often enough, we are not really prepared to discover what is really happening. So, if it wasn’t the first thing, then we look to something else, again, like science, another feature removed from our experience, to try and get a handle on anxiety. We typically never try to understand history as ourselves because we already know, or think we know, our social history —we tell it to ourselves over and over every day! We most often resort to finding out ourselves through something that is not our Self. In effect, we not only often deny ourselves by asking for help, but by asking for help, are enacting the denial of one’s Self that is the problem. How ironic is that? We ask for help and then take that help as though we are not the ones making sense of it, as though that help has a different history, as though we are not really helping ourselves but are ‘getting’ the help.
Science is very helpful in many ways, granted, but for a mental health issue, sometimes I wonder if that kind of help is not what people are really looking for. But, indeed, despite what we say, it seems more often the person just wants it gone, and hedging its bets, if I dare say, science leans into that kind of desperation, to verify it and validate it so it can be a savior, the one that ‘cure the sickness’ by arranging the conditions in which it arises; again, it is all to the good. Nonetheless, even as psychology and its kin have gotten away from overtly advocating a ‘cure’ for mental issues, it still most often frames treatment for mental issues in helping the person by fixing them, whether explicitly or not. Yes, people are asking for it, but it is this help which so often appears in the form of the contradiction, the catch-22, of trying to be free but having to believe scientific proclamations about what the problem is and how to fix it, and tends to confirm to the person that the way they should solve the problem is to look to something else besides their own experience, which is, indeed, deeply embedded in their own history as this social history is being played out right now as anxiety. Yet, see this is less a reprimand for what we are or anyone is doing wrong, than a notice that what we are doing wrong is the best and most right that is being accomplished. The issue is more about how we are oriented upon things.
The world is wrapped in anxiety
A little more social history, though. Around the same time that the science of psychology was taking shape, the seminal philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Irony and began to share with the world the experiential situation of being in this modern world as a theoretical form. Then continuing in the rejection of the experience, in the 20th century this became a subject of critique, the way experience itself is typically information avoided by modern empirical science, experiment a method of experiential avoidance. Upon gaining his master’s degree, nonetheless, Kierkegaard was deemed the Master of Irony, but I might argue equally so, he was the Master of Anxiety, as he wrote a book called The Concept of Dread, which some authors have claimed is the first work about existential anxiety.
Face it; the modern world is an anxious world. The experience is the ground of mental health, and in the last, the understanding of one’s experience is the way out of the problem because this is indeed what is happening, whether you believe it or not.
Visit my website for more info!
Read more from Lance Allan Kair
Lance Allan Kair, Licensed Professional Counselor
Lance Kair is licensed professional counselor and founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, he blends trauma-informed therapy with deep philosophical insight drawn from thinkers like Zizek Badiou, and Kierkegaard. Formerly immersed in 1990s psychedelic and rave culture, his lived experience with addiction, grief, and harm reduction drives his radically compassionate care. He's the author of multiple philosophical works, including The Moment of Decisive Significance, and is a leading voice in the emerging field of Mental Health Philosophy.
