I don’t know if angst is really the topic I should be
considering right now given my current state of mind about my own life, but the
word came up this week in conversations with my kids and now I am thinking
about the concept of angst.
In the context of discussing the inner turmoil of a young Peter
Parker, better know to the world as the super hero Spider Man, one of my kids
asked me to define angst. While I knew it has similar roots to anxiety, I was
pretty sure it was of a deep pull than anxiety. So I looked it up.
Angst is a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, and insecurity.
Yes, it is anxiety, but it is paired with these other words that give it a
little twist…like a feeling you just can’t shake. The first definition I read
was that offered by Google….”a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an
unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general.”
In my own life, anxiety is often tied to a specific event or person. Angst is
that all over apprehension and insecurity you just can’t quite get your finger
on and that makes it much harder to find your way out of it.
Enter some interesting history of the word. Its use in the
English language can be traced to the 19th century and psychology
(think Freud). That makes sense. The interesting part, at least to me, was that
It had much more widespread use in general society in the 1940’s and
1950’s….when the world got a lot scarier with the atomic bomb now in play and
the Cold War beginning. This is when the world was in crisis and quite scary,
but most people couldn’t really DO anything about it. Enter angst. Deep anxiety
about the world in general. Actually, sounds pretty reasonable.
I would argue that at this same time, we are faced with the
new widespread information age with many homes starting to have television.
Before this time, most people could worry about local events, but the world
beyond that we were not getting anything in real time. News had a delay. Now
all of a sudden, it is possible to have real time news in your home, but you
still can’t DO anything about it. This is the breeding ground of angst.
Now fast forward another 60 or 70 years and it isn’t just
when we go home and flip on the T.V. The news is in our very pockets. We can
get real time updates on any political event anywhere in the world. Sure, some
we can do something about, generally in a fairly slow way….send money to help
in a crisis, vote for a different candidate, try to enact a policy change. Yet
largely we are inundated with information we can’t DO anything about. On
repeat. Every day. And then as it builds up, we don’t know why we feel anxious,
our immediate lives and people are doing ok, but we have this deeper feeling of
dread about everything.
This next part is hard. Is there anything we CAN do about
this? Because living with a deeper feeling of dread is kind of poopy. I don’t
think I have the answers. I would like the answers. Well, I have a couple
things I have tried over the years that do help, but it probably isn’t the
whole answer.
To start, I honestly believe this is where prayer comes in.
We don’t have within our limited power the ability to fix every part of the
world. We are called to pray for the world. This isn’t a last resort, this
should be step one. And while we are there, we can pray for the peace that
surpasses all understanding for our hearts and mind, too. We don’t have to live
dread; we can give it to God.
My second one, is that I got a lot less angsty when I
stopped following the news multiple times a day. I am not advocating burying one’s
head in the sand here, but I don’t think we need a blow by blow of each crisis,
especially in U.S. national level politics. Read a newspaper once a week and
you will get the biggest take-a-way’s without the daily despair. Definitely
limit news you get from social media as we all know the accuracy of that! When
I was a child, a family we were close to did not have a T.V. The didn’t get the
paper. They just didn’t want a daily influx of crud dumped on them. I never
thought they were ill informed. And my guess, although I never asked, is that in
the case of September 11th they probably found out pretty quickly
without even having access to media in their home. When trouble is big enough,
word spreads fast. Don’t worry about missing something, if you need to know,
you will.
That is really all I have for my own ways of avoiding angst
in my own life. It isn’t much, but in a world where there is an onslaught of
anxiety, apprehension, and insecurity, every little step helps.
I hope you enjoyed my thoughts about a little word with a
big feeling!
