Hi there. I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

In the years before the election of the impossible president, rent forever the very fabric of being,

the band Radiohead was busy channeling something many of us were feeling, but nobody was really talking about.

A kind of ambient, multivalent state of anxiety that seemed to characterize life in the mid to late 90s.

Listening to Radiohead was therapeutic. Your own awkward, unpresentable panic somehow dissolved into their sonic ocean,

where it was transformed into sexy, transcendent beauty.

It felt empowering.

In a New York Times op-ed last week, Ruth Whitman wrote,

After a couple of decades of constant advice to, quote, follow our passions and quote, live our dreams

for a certain type of relatively privileged modern freelancer, nothing less

than total self-actualization at work now seems enough.

But this leaves us with an angsty mismatch between personal expectation and economic reality.

Almost everyone I know now has some kind of hustle, whether job, hobby, or side or vanity

project. Share my blog post, buy my book, click on my link,

follow me on Instagram, visit my Etsy shop, donate to my Kickstarter, crowdfund my heart surgery.

It's as though we are all working in Walmart on an endless Black Friday of the soul.

Modern anxiety cuts across national borders and social classes, but in America right now,

its artisanal flavor is a blend of soaring, media-driven dreams and dwindling probabilities of making a living while pursuing them.

And nobody's more eloquent or wickedly funny about this reality than Ruth Whitman, the author of America, The Anxious.

I'm genuinely, sustainably happy that she's here

with me today. Welcome to think again, Ruth. Well, thank you so much for having me. Is it anxiety

inducing to spend so much time researching and writing about anxiety and also the pursuit of happiness?

...