Big Ideas 2019: The antidote to an anxious age

NORMANDY, FRANCE – About two-thirds of the way through writing Big Ideas 2019, my vast project of the past few weeks, I emailed a few colleagues: “Help. My article is so dark. Do you know anyone hopeful I can interview?” My article stayed mostly dark.

We live in an anxious age; there is no writing around it. It’s been hard even for me, as glass-half-full as they come, to not succumb to the tide. An unevenly shared economic recovery has done little to assuage the fury and despair that comes from knowing hard work isn’t enough. Business feels harsher than ever and AI is coming for our jobs. Politics, the process by which we come together to administer our shared destiny, is dividing us instead. We once disagreed on objectives and methods; we now tear into one another’s motives, even our very right to exist. We battle for the power we’re losing and the power we’ve been denied. We are outraged and tired of our outrage. We distrust most institutions, from our governments to our press and the tech companies woven into our daily lives. We retreat into our phones and desert the places that once connected us. And all of that seems insignificant next to climate change, a crisis we built of our own hands yet feel powerless to stop.

And so we’re exhausted. When the problems seem so much larger than our power to solve them, tuning out becomes a means of self-preservation. Let us tend our gardens, as Voltaire’s Candide said, and let the world go quiet. For a while I, professional journalist and lifelong news junkie, switched my alarm clock to the sounds of birds chirping because the endless drone of BBC Radio 4’s Today show – Brexit, Brexit, Brexit – guaranteed I woke up every day with a panic attack. But white noise only covers the tumult, it does not end it. The temptation to bow out of public discourse, to hunker down into the private sphere where you are safe and understood while the winds rage outside, is as real as it is dangerous. I suspect those who feel the greatest strain are those we most need in the public sphere – people with enough care and empathy to burn out in the first place. What then is a responsible citizen of the world to do?

They should do, precisely. Anger bottled up leads to anxiety, argues feminist author Rebecca Traister in Good and Mad (an imperfect book but if nothing else, read the conclusion). But harnessed as fuel for action, it is a remedy, she adds. The problems I described are not new to 2018 – I first drafted this column three years ago – and we won’t fix them all in 2019. “That it should take a long time shouldn’t scare us. It should fortify us,” Traister writes. There is solace in doing, with a healthy detachment from ends we may never see. I remember the motto handed down by my idol in this profession, French journalist Bernard Guetta, who borrowed it from Jean Monnet, one of the founders of the European Union: “I am not optimistic, I am determined.” The tempest will rage on outside and all we can do is what is right. The fight is only lost when we give it up. But where do we find the strength not to?

The holidays we celebrate this time of year offer an answer. The British, bless them, do Christmas right. Celebrations start as early as November in an endless whirl of occasions: there’s Christmas with friends at the pub and Christmas with colleagues at the pub. The big office party and the smaller team lunch. The school nativity play with the kids and the PTA dinner with the parents. I was caught out without Christmas cards my first year in London, before I learned that the English trade them by the dozen with every friend, colleague, neighbor or vendor who has touched their lives. By the time December 25th rolls around, your liver has already given out but your heart is full. They see you, all those people say, and they’ve got your back.

The small communities we’re reconnecting with right now – families of every shape, childhood friends, tight-knit teams – are the perfect antidote to this anxious age. The private sphere, if you don’t hide there too long, can be a salutary retreat, a springboard from which you return to public action, a charging station for the year ahead. From community comes solace, and the strength to continue to engage.

Go ahead, tend your gardens then. The enigmatic last sentence of Candide has had as many interpretations as readers. It is not, to me, a call to selfish escapism. It is an injunction to cultivate our talents and calmly and resolutely do what we can, at our level, to better ourselves and the world. So I’ll see you in January, I’m off to tend my garden.