Quite a lot of what people experience as existential anxiety can be intensified by the state of the country and the larger culture. Existential anxiety is ultimately about uncertainty, mortality, freedom, meaning, isolation, and the realization that much of life cannot be controlled. Political and social instability can bring those normally background concerns into the foreground.
When people perceive their country as polarized, unpredictable, economically insecure, violent, institutionally unstable, or undergoing rapid cultural change, the anxiety often becomes more than “I dislike what is happening politically.” It can become: What kind of world am I living in? Can I trust the future? Are the values I believed in disappearing? Where do I belong? What can I actually control? What does it mean to live a good life in circumstances I cannot fix?
That makes “How much of the existential anxiety you are feeling is actually about the state of the country?” an excellent therapeutic question. I might expand it into several questions:
- If the country suddenly felt stable and sane to you again, how much of your anxiety would disappear?
- What are you afraid is going to happen—not politically, but personally?
- What have current events caused you to lose faith in?
- Are you grieving a country or culture you believed existed—or believed would continue to exist?
- How much time are you spending absorbing problems over which you have virtually no control?
- What part of your anxiety belongs to your own life, and what part have you absorbed from the larger culture?
- Has paying close attention to current events increased your ability to act—or simply increased your distress?
- What remains meaningful and worth doing even if the larger culture does not change in the way you hope it will?
The last question is particularly existential. Existential work doesn’t necessarily try to convince someone that everything will be okay. Instead, it asks how a person wants to live when there are no guarantees that everything will be okay.
There can also be a kind of cultural or societal grief underneath the anxiety. A person may be mourning lost assumptions about stability, shared reality, civility, safety, community, institutions, or the future. Recognizing that as grief rather than simply labeling it “anxiety” can open up a very different therapeutic conversation.
The existential task then becomes separating the world I cannot control from the life for which I am still responsible. That distinction can be enormously powerful: Given the world as it actually is—not as I wish it were—who do I choose to be, what do I choose to value, and how do I want to spend the finite amount of life available to me?
We’re all in this together. Therapy can help.