This past winter, Sarah Fader, a 37-year-old social media consultant in Brooklyn who has generalized anxiety disorder, texted a friend in Oregon about an impending visit, and when a quick response failed to materialize, she posted on Twitter to her 16,000-plus followers. \u201cI don\u2019t hear from my friend for a day \u2014 my thought, they don\u2019t want to be my friend anymore,\u201d she wrote, appending the hashtag #ThisIsWhatAnxietyFeelsLike.<\/p>\n
Thousands of people were soon offering up their own examples under the hashtag; some were retweeted more than 1,000 times. You might say Ms. Fader struck a nerve. \u201cIf you\u2019re a human being living in 2017 and you\u2019re not anxious,\u201d she said on the telephone, \u201cthere\u2019s something wrong with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was 70 years ago that the poet W.H. Auden published \u201cThe Age of Anxiety,\u201d a six-part verse framing modern humankind\u2019s condition over the course of more than 100 pages, and now it seems we are too rattled to even sit down and read something that long (or as the internet would say, tl;dr).<\/p>\n
Anxiety has become our everyday argot, our thrumming lifeblood: not just on Twitter (the ur-anxious medium, with its constant updates), but also in blogger diaries, celebrity confessionals (Et tu, Beyonc\u00e9?), a hit Broadway show (\u201cDear Evan Hansen\u201d), a magazine start-up (Anxy, a mental-health publication based in Berkeley, Calif.), buzzed-about television series (like \u201cManiac,\u201d a coming Netflix series by Cary Fukunaga, the lauded \u201cTrue Detective\u201d director) and, defying our abbreviated attention spans, on bookshelves.<\/p>\n