Why Your Anxiety Isn't Personal (It's Political)
You've tried therapy. Meditation. The apps. The supplements. What if the problem was never just yours to fix?
Anxiety in young adults has increased dramatically over the past two decades. Economic precarity, climate crisis, housing impossibility, political instability, and constant digital connectivity create a baseline of chronic stress that previous generations didn't face at this scale. Understanding your anxiety as contextual rather than personal changes how you respond to it.
the personal failure story
You're anxious. All the time, it seems. A low hum underneath everything.
So you do what you've been told. Therapy. Meditation. Breathing exercises. You try the apps, the supplements, the morning routines. You wonder what's wrong with you that you can't seem to fix this.
You watch yourself for triggers. Journal about your childhood. Work on calming yourself down. And still—the anxiety remains. Maybe smaller sometimes. But always there.
You start to believe you're broken in some fundamental way. That everyone else has figured out how to be calm and you're the one who can't get it together.
What if the problem was never yours to fix?
the context you're living in
You graduated into an economy where a degree doesn't guarantee a living wage and a living wage doesn't guarantee housing. You're supposed to save for retirement while paying rent that takes half your income in a market where buying is a fantasy.
The planet is warming and the people in power are arguing about whether it's real. You've watched ice caps melt and forests burn and species disappear while being told to use paper straws and take shorter showers.
You carry a device that streams global suffering directly into your body. Wars, shootings, injustice—delivered in real time between ads and influencers and friends' vacation photos.
The political ground keeps shifting. Rights you thought were settled get revoked. Institutions you were taught to trust reveal themselves as fragile or corrupt.
You're told to build a future while the future feels increasingly uncertain. Plan your career while industries collapse and emerge overnight. Find stability in systems designed for a world that no longer exists.
And then you're asked why you're so anxious.
a reasonable response
Your anxiety is telling you something.
You're not anxious because you're weak or broken or haven't found the right meditation app. You're anxious because you're paying attention. Because your body is responding accurately to conditions of genuine uncertainty and threat.
Anxiety is supposed to signal danger. You're living in a time of real danger—economic, ecological, political, social. Your body isn't wrong. The signal is correct.
Individual wellness strategies can't solve systemic problems. You can regulate yourself all day, but you can't breathe your way out of an unaffordable housing market. You can't journal your way to climate stability. You can't meditate away political instability.
what this changes
Understanding your anxiety as contextual doesn't make it disappear. But it changes your relationship to it.
You stop treating your anxiety as evidence of personal failure. Stop wondering why you can't fix what was never yours to fix alone.
You still take care of yourself—because living in hard conditions requires tending. Sleep matters more when the baseline is stress. Rest matters more when the systems are relentless. Boundaries matter more when everything wants your attention.
But you stop believing the lie that if you just optimized enough, found the right routine, did the inner work correctly—you'd finally be calm. That story serves systems that benefit from you blaming yourself instead of seeing clearly.
the permission
You're allowed to be anxious.
As an honest response to the conditions you're actually living in.
You're not too sensitive. You're not failing at being a functional adult. You're a person with a working body living in genuinely destabilizing times.
You're not broken. You're awake.
Your anxiety might be telling you something is wrong—with the context you're being asked to thrive in. That's political.
still, the tending
None of this means you stop caring for yourself. It means you reframe why.
You rest because these conditions are depleting. You build community because isolation makes everything harder and humans need each other. You limit your news intake because your body isn't designed for infinite global information.
You find what steadies you. You tend yourself for living in a hard time.
And you stop apologizing for your anxiety like it's a character flaw. It's attention. It's signal. It's a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions.
The problem was never you.
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