Anxiety, My Friend, Come, Have A Seat.

Hello everybody.  I've got an answer for you today.  The answer is that 100% comfort provides an empty existence, and that this emptiness accumulates.  In other words, it is precisely the correct amounts of edginess and anxiety that actually provide a bit of sanity to an otherwise unanchored mind.  There's a place for anxiety, a proper place.  It tells you that something is going on, it asks you to look around in a rushed state of mind, in a way that cannot catalog everything step-by-step.  It can and is useful.  We shouldn't try to quash it.  We should instead try to live with anxiety. It is like a default setting from keeping us from getting ripped off.  If we want to maximize comfort, and I think we do, seen as pleasure, or seen as, you know, maintaining a life that doesn't require much affirmative action outward, anxiety steps in to keep us from going batshit crazy with boredom, or from letting our minds turn to mush.

I've dealt with some level of anxiety my whole life.  It could have once been external, but it comes from many places now, including maintaining an endogenous spirit.  For many years now, I thought the answer to increased anxiety was to think about a time when I'd have more of something, and when that more of something would ameliorate the source of the anxiety.  I always used to envision a life without anxiety.  I never really thought of anxiety as anxiety, of course, but knew that at times, I just had to get out of wherever I was, whether a public place, or school, or, for you budding psychologists out there, my own home.  It wasn't unidirectional, but once it grabbed hold, it held strong for some amount of time. 

The point is that I've always maintained an antagonistic relationship to my own anxiety.  But now I think that anxiety provides a certain perspective, one that might be beneficial to have so long as the anxiety itself doesn't consume everything in sight--so long as it cannot grow unabated.  Which is to say this: let's not run from anxiety and force ourselves into dark caves of whatever tonic we deem beats out the panic.  Let's realize that we've got some basic instinct that filters through in very specific biological and psychological ways that are fairly predictable and maybe, perhaps, provide levels of insight into something more fundamental.   

Okay, side point, google image search for "happy" yields some funky stuff: