A Guide to the Basic Anxiety of Life

Underlying much of what we do is an uncertainty, an anxiety, a fear, doubts, dissatisfaction … And we react to these anxieties, dissatisfaction and uncertainty in so many unhelpful ways: we seek distraction, we eat unhealthy food, we procrastinate, we get caught in a cycle of anxiety and unhappiness, we lash out at others, we dwell in our loneliness, and then we get in denial about it all. If we could learn to deal with the basic anxiety of life, we would have much more ease and less struggle.

There Needs to be a Big Wall

I don’t speak the language of the people there, and few of them spoke English. Literally hundreds of people had the opportunity to attack me, rob me, or kill me. None did. That did not surprise me. Several of them gave me food and other stuff, in exchange for pieces of paper. Words were not needed for that to happen. Mutual respect and courtesy abounded, as did mutually beneficial interaction.

Authority and Morality

The decisions people make and the directions that people go in may in the end not serve them or lead to the kind of results that they want, but that is for each person to discover on their own. Advice can be given, suggestions can be made, but ultimately each person must walk their own path themselves. To try to play games of authority is to attempt to ignore all of this.

Predatory States are Predatory

The state only deals with people by hurting, killing, caging, and robbing them. It wraps these actions up in hundreds of thousands of pages of demands, orders, mandates, regulations, prohibitions, licenses, and certificates; but the bureaucratic maze which supposedly allows individuals to escape unscathed is an illusion.