The story goes like this
Anxiety is the writer’s block of life. People with crippling anxiety don’t know how to be author of their own life’s story: it’s like they’re trying to start an essay but can’t pick a first sentence. When you’re anxious, you can’t decide where to begin—because each decision feels overloaded with implications about what will come after, and all paths seem to lead invariably to a dead end. Luckily, in life, we don’t write the story alone: every shared experience, every sort of common ground, is a way of writing our stories together.
Stories are how we give meaning to our lives. At a higher level, they’re how we organize as a society. But sometimes we lose our collective ability to make goals and interpret events. When that happens, we get writer’s block at the societal level.
For example, around the end of WWII, in the aftermath of Adolf’s Reich and faced with the role of mass media...