What's Tony Thinking

Anxiety and Moral Values

Freya India is a blogger at Substack who writes the blog, “Girls.” She is a Brit who has an affiliation with the moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation. India is also a Gen-Z’er (those born 1997 – 2012) who questions the conventional wisdom, in particular the trading out of moral and religious language and frameworks for therapeutic ones. Here’s India:

“There’s a lot of advice out there about anxiety, especially for young people. Anxious people need to do breathwork. We need to meditate more. Repeat positive affirmations. Almost none of it works.

“I think this is because we now use the word anxiety to describe two different things. There’s the anxiety that makes young people scared to answer the phone or order in restaurants. But there’s also a deeper, ambient anxiety I see so many of us wracked with—a sort of neurotic paralysis. Not knowing which path to take in life. Not knowing what decisions to make. Not knowing who we are. It’s this constant second-guessing, examining every decision to death, agonising over the right thing to do. When young people talk about how unbearable their anxiety is, the relentlessness of it, I think this is more what they mean.

“For this anxiety, mainstream mental health advice doesn’t cut it. Maybe it helps in the moment, but the anxiety always comes back. I think that’s because it isn’t about how we feel, or what we want. It’s about how we act. The answer to this anxiety, I’ve come to believe, is living by strong moral values. (emphasis added)

“Which is not something we hear often. If we feel anxious today we are advised to analyse our past and problems and relationships, rarely our own character. We are asked what would make us happy, never what would make us honourable. We are told to love ourselves, with little care for how we conduct ourselves. We are reminded to find self-respect and self-esteem, forgetting that these things are earned. Self-development is more about ice baths and breathwork than becoming a better person. Living authentically is more about buying products. So much talk about mental health and so little about morality—how we orient our lives, our private code of conduct, whether we even have an overarching sense of good guiding us.” (EA)

Interesting . . . even bracing. One of the things implicit in India’s argument is personal agency. You are not powerless or simply at the mercy of large, impersonal forces. You have a role, the largest one, in shaping your life.

Here’s more from this post by Freya India:

“And while we’re at it . . . it’s funny to me that insecurity—”you’re just insecure!”—has become the chief insult in the modern world, rather than a fact of it.

Yes I’m insecure! There’s nothing secure in this world to hold on to! Show me some shared values, some solid ground, anything to safely attach to. It’s normal to be insecure in a situation that is not secure. Seems to me an entirely natural response to living in a morally ambiguous world, where norms and customs and commitments constantly change . . .

“So . . . as for the anxiety advice. Maybe we don’t need to relax more. Maybe we don’t need more time to ruminate. We need a framework to follow. We need moral direction.”

I agree, and I would go a step beyond her call for moral values/ framework to seat those in the Christian faith and gospel. Morality is a part of that framework, but it comes second. “Salvation is all about grace, ethics is all about gratitude,” gets it right. Or to put it in the language of Scripture, “We love because God first loved us.” Our ethics and moral values are a response to the love which loved us first.

So while I share India’s belief that strong moral values are key to a good and a grounded life, a sole emphasis on moral values is insufficient. Alone morality can morph into a works righteousness and perfectionism that can be crushing. We will, at times, fail ourselves and our values. When that happens, we need to know God’s grace is for us, that we can acknowledge our failures and begin again.

There is a resonance in what India is saying here with another piece upon which I drew recently from the NYT writer Jessica Grose titled, “Are We Happy Yet?” Here’s Grose:

“The youngest adults, who have been marinating in a positive psychology culture since they left the womb, may be the most deeply affected by the inward shift of the search for happiness. A recent survey from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education makes the case that we are, as a culture, over-focusing on the ‘psychological talk and a self-help culture’ that has ’caused many people to look inward to find meaning and vitality. Yet the self by itself is a poor source for meaning.'”

The implication of Grose’s analysis, like India’s, is that “the triumph of the therapeutic” (the title of a classic book by the sociologist, Philip Rieff) as our primary language and framework — replacing traditional moral and religious ones — leaves people without anything larger, outside their interiority, and which has been tested by time.

(Just to be clear, I am not saying “therapy” is bad. It has a place and can be very helpful. But I am saying that when psychological and therapeutic language are asked to do double-duty as our primary moral framework, it falls short.)