1. Do I Have the Right to Talk About Anxiety?
(0) Why Anxiety, and Why Now?
In Korean bookstores today, anxiety dominates the shelves. Most explanations for this phenomenon rely on a single, predictable frame: people are anxious because their economic and social conditions are bad, pointing to currency shocks, a weakening economy, and massive cash injections. But I do not treat emotion as a condition or a physical substance. Instead, we have been exploring how emotions like boredom, humor, and sorrow are perceived through our “World–Narrative–Body” framework.
The guiding question for this series is simple: how is anxiety actually perceived? It is a phenomenological inquiry into how we read the world. If you struggle with anxiety around your career, future, or relationships, my hope is that this analysis helps you rethink what anxiety is.
(1) Alain de Botton’s “Status Anxiety” — Valid, But Only Half-Right
In his book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton argues that anxiety arises from a fear of losing social status, economic position, affection, or competence. He links this directly to emotional deprivation, social comparison, and the relentless pressure of meritocracy. To solve this, he proposes turning to philosophy, art, political participation, bohemian communities, and religion, operating on the logic that since individuals cannot change the system, they must shift their perception instead.
While this aligns with my own conclusions, de Botton’s book fails to clearly present the underlying process. He does not explain how exactly philosophy, art, and religion are supposed to soothe status anxiety, causing his solution to degenerate into a logic of escape rather than a logic of transcendence.
Furthermore, a deeper question bothered me as I read: if the fear of status loss is the primary driver of anxiety, then why am I not anxious? By his framework, I should be absolutely drowning in it.
Consider how my reality contradicts de Botton’s assumptions. He points to the fear of losing affection, yet I live alone in a foreign country with no friends, no colleagues, no family, and no local language exchange, having not spoken Korean for over seven months. Yet, I feel no emotional anxiety.
He points to social comparison, yet while my peers work for tech and automotive giants or secure professorships, I have no car, no house, no stable job, and remain an unknown writer. I am fully aware that I am “behind” by societal standards, but I am not anxious about it.
He points to expectation and achievement anxiety, but I realized long ago that living according to the commands of others or the state does not make life any better. Expectations only rise no matter what stage you reach, and satisfaction remains purely subjective. Recognition and reward no longer dominate my emotional structure, so I feel no anxiety about failing to meet those standards.
Finally, he points to uncertainty. I have little savings, live in a foreign country on a temporary basis, and have no guaranteed future. My blog has gained no search engine traction after eight months of daily work. And yet, I sleep well.
(2) So Why Am I Not Particularly Anxious?
De Botton’s concept of anxiety focuses heavily on external conditions—economic stability, social security, cultural belonging, and middle-class order. His theory reflects stability-centric assumptions where rules, local networks, institutions, and reputation are everything.
However, the values he compresses into middle-class status are fully dependent on others and can only be obtained through them. This is fundamentally similar to how the dopaminergic system works: while you control the input, you cannot control the reward. This is precisely what makes the pursuit of status thrilling, yet inherently anxiety-inducing.
It traps people in constant, short-term calculations: What if the outcome is bad? What if others get more than I do? What if my effort does not pay off? The time-delay between effort and reward naturally breeds anxiety because this framework assumes life’s payoff exists solely in the fulfillment of dopamine. When results fail to meet expectations and that dopamine hit is denied, anxiety takes hold.
In other words, Alain de Botton failed to explicitly point out that people are anxious not because they are “middle class,” but because they rely on others for their survival. When your expectations are internal but your satisfaction is determined externally, you might trigger dopamine, but you only become more plagued by obsession. Escaping into religion or music without addressing your actual survival structure changes nothing.
But the meaning of life does not reside in dopamine alone. If you understand the endorphin-driven reward system, you can remain steady even when you have nothing outward to show for it. You achieve this by zeroing in on the raw act of enduring and pushing through the daily struggle itself.
2. Anxiety as a Fashion Object
Before we enter the main argument, we need to examine how anxiety is understood today. Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety is a classic—written in the early 2000s and widely praised. But twenty years later, anxiety is no longer just a social problem; it is now consumed like fashion.
And by “fashion,” I mean two things: (1) aestheticization, and (2) existential romanticization.
(1) The Aestheticization of Pain
I’ve criticized aestheticization of pain many times. Anxiety today is often treated like an aesthetic object—sensationalized, romanticized, turned into art. This is deeply linked to modern artistic and literary movements that portray suffering as beautiful or profound. Nietzsche, for example, elevated pain into sublimity: Dionysian beauty, eternal recurrence, amor fati—love your life even if suffering repeats forever. French and German melancholic aesthetics, and later the hippie counterculture, continued this lineage. European intellectuals built an entire cultural habitat around stylish despair. And the public followed. Sharing intimate anxieties, romanticizing sorrow, overstating emotional wounds —these became cultural habits, a trend, almost a form of social capital.
But the more you depict suffering as something beautiful or sublime, the more it becomes a mere abstraction. It blinds us to the reality of pain. Because real pain is undeniably filthy, exhausting, and just plain shitty. Anxiety is the same. Romanticizing the feeling and huddling together for mutual comfort doesn’t solve a thing. It never actually resolves the reality of anxiety. It produces emptiness without action. It blinds people to real suffering. And it rewards performative vulnerability instead of honest experience.
(2) Anxiety as the Last Humanistic Symbol in the AI Age
Since the industrial revolution, capitalism has pursued functional perfection: faster, lighter, cheaper. Now, the age of AI is accelerating functional perfection even further. Many objects are indistinguishable from human-made ones. In some domains, AI is outperforming humans. So human uniqueness retreats into the body and emotion. And the most commonly expressed emotional marker today—is anxiety. Once, expressing mental fragility was seen as weakness or pathology. Now, anxiety signals honesty, sincerity, humanity. People say: “I am anxious.”, “I feel fragile.”, “I’m struggling.”—this creates recognition and solidarity. Anxiety is becoming an existential credential.
But this doesn’t mean people enjoy anxiety itself. People enjoy expressing it—sharing, bonding—not experiencing it. Therefore, even though anxiety expression is trending, there is still a need to analyze its fundamental structure.
(3) The Shallow Explanation of Anxiety: You’re anxious because you have too much to lose
Popular self-help books often argue: “The more you possess, the more anxious you become. Therefore, live simply.” According to this view, status, reputation, wealth, health— anything you value becomes part of your identity. The possibility of losing it threatens existence. Therefore: anxiety. This aligns with dopamine logic: prove achievement, build capital, maintain image, endlessly perform survival.
Some ascetics preach letting go of possessions and suppressing desire, claiming it leads to satisfaction in the smallest things. But let’s be real: this is just another form of hedonism in disguise. Even if you choose an ascetic life, the world won’t leave you alone. In the end, you will return to pursuing pleasure and become anxious because you cannot have it. Asceticism is merely a forced endurance of pain. And that is meaningless. My philosophy is different: it’s about proactively embracing that 1% of pain to uncover life’s meaning. To actively take on suffering is to maintain a sovereign stance toward the world.
3. The Phenomenological Structure of Anxiety
Starting with de Botton’s classic, we looked at how anxiety is currently treated culturally. Now, we enter the core question: What is the phenomenological structure of anxiety?
(1) My Experience: Anxiety Does Not Come from Status Loss — It Comes from Dependence
To explore anxiety phenomenologically, you must suspend value judgments and strip away clichés. In my own life, anxiety did not arise from a collapse in status, competition, or a fear of failure. Instead, it emerged the moment my survival became dependent on others. Having to ask for financial help, borrowing money, or relying on someone else created a physical discomfort.(My chest feels tight, and I can’t breathe.)
This was not due to simple humiliation or pride, but because dependence threatened my control over my own life. If I owe someone, I must pay them back. If I rely on others, I lose my agency. And if I lose my agency, I lose my body, my narrative, and my meaning—which, in practical terms, equals the collapse of survival itself. That felt experience is what anxiety is.
During the pandemic, as I sensed rent failure approaching, I used card loans to delay the disaster, but my liquidity eventually dried up. The banks refused further loans without collateral. Even then, I was not anxious about losing my social status. I was anxious about the prospect of becoming dependent. Asking family or friends for help creates a deep personal debt, and that debt threatens my sovereignty.
The chain reaction of anxiety is remarkably simple: when you rely on the external world—whether it is the state, a bank, family, or friends—for your physical survival, you perceive a heavy burden of debt. This debt leads to a loss of control over your body, your narrative, and your meaning, which ultimately threatens your entire survival structure. Anxiety, therefore, is not about status. It is the sensation of dependency.
(2) Japanese Anxiety: Dependence = Debt = Identity Erosion
My perspective aligns with Japanese culture. Japan deeply fears meiwaku—causing trouble to others. Japanese people are anxious not because of status loss, but because dependence creates relational debt which erodes identity.
Ruth Benedict described the “恩 (on)” and “恩返し (on-gaeshi)” structure: Receiving help demands inevitable repayment— not just financially, but through loyalty, labor, and emotion. Even after repayment, the relational debt remains. In Japan, reputation isn’t kept by repaying money on time. It is kept by honoring those who once helped you—even across generations. So dependence becomes existential. It is a eternal loan of social capital.
Therefore, we reach this conclusion: “What happens if you cannot repay that favor?” In that case, the person becomes a ‘meiwaku’, permanently dependent on the favor of others. From the perspective of society as a whole, he become an untrustworthy person who fails to fulfill own duty. Becoming a ‘meiwaku’ who cannot repay a favor is an anxiety that threatens one’s very existence. Given that, it is better not to depend on others from the very beginning.
(3) The Three Axes of Anxiety
So far, we’ve reached a clearer framework: Anxiety does not fundamentally arise from status, money, or reputation. It emerges from dependency. More precisely, anxiety has three axes:
- Fear of Losing Bodily Control: When the body fails—through illness, fatigue, chronic pain—we become physically dependent on others. This perceived dependence becomes anxiety.
- Fear of Narrative Disorientation: If you cannot interpret your world—what you’re doing, where you’re going, why you exist— you must rely on others for meaning and direction. Dependency → anxiety.
- Fear of Losing Meaning-Making Autonomy: In societies where dependence = debt, failure to “repay” that debt erodes identity: Your life becomes obligated to someone else’s terms. Meaning dissolves into relational obligation → anxiety.
(4) Why I Am Not as Anxious as I Should Be
According to conventional psychology, I am someone who should be extremely anxious. I have no stable income, no institutional safety net, and I live alone abroad with an uncertain future. Yet, I am not. This is because my life is anchored by a self-directed routine that aggressively minimizes external dependence.
A routine is not some motivational self-help gimmick. It is a concrete structure of agency. Through it, I control my body’s schedule—my writing, exercise, and cooking—along with my daily rhythm and the meaning I derive from my own work archive.
Living in Gori with a very low cost of living drastically reduces my dependency risk. I rarely need to ask anyone for favors, and I owe no one any debt, either financially or socially. As long as my daily life remains internally manageable, social comparison, jealousy, humiliation, and online hostility fail to produce anxiety.
Furthermore, even if a serious illness strikes, I know I can return to Korea and rely on world-class medical care and insurance protections. Knowing that safety net exists lowers the anxiety of physical vulnerability.
From this framework, a common paradox becomes solvable: why are some wealthy people chronically anxious, while some poorer people remain calm? The answer is not money itself, but the underlying structure of dependency.
Modern capitalism teaches that money solves everything. It suggests that pain can be cured with therapy, fear with medication, and alienation with vacations, parties, and shopping. That is true. Having a lot of money can solve almost all the problems of daily life. However, if you have to depend on others to make big money and cover high fixed costs, your anxiety paradoxically increases. In other words, The more money people earn, the more their lives inevitably depend on investors, customers, staff, algorithms, media, state regulations, and brand identity. Scaling a business does not happen through internal cashflow discipline; it requires leverage, debt, networking, and external capital. Therefore, the very act of building wealth often increases dependence.
4. Case Study: Ohtani vs. Sam Altman vs. Zhuangzi
Consider Shohei Ohtani. His survival rests almost entirely on his own physical form: internal skill, internal control, and internal meaning. He sleeps ten to twelve hours a day, removes distractions, maintains a strict routine, and depends on almost no one. Because his fortune is embodied, his anxiety remains low. As long as his physical body lasts, his narrative is stable.
Now consider Sam Altman. He is incredibly wealthy, influential, and admired, yet profoundly vulnerable. His position depends on billionaires, geopolitical actors, investors, legal structures, media ecosystems, boards, and the unpredictable public mood. His fate is entangled with massive forces he cannot control.
In a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Altman admitted to preparing for survival with guns, gold, antibiotics, batteries, and land in Big Sur. Later, after his sudden removal as OpenAI CEO, he confessed to feeling painfully human, noting that betrayal and panic hit him hard, leaving him unable to sleep or eat.
Sam Altman’s anxiety partly comes from OpenAI’s heavy reliance on external partners and its complex supply chain. His company is financially unsustainable without promoting a doomsday, apocalyptic vision of AI. Historically, tech apostles who leveraged such narratives have always been plagued by deficits and the anxiety of external reliance. They merely project their own insecurity onto the end and rebirth of the world to narratively justify it. OpenAI owns virtually none of its physical infrastructure. The company is chronically dependent on Nvidia and AMD for GPUs, Broadcom and Samsung for custom silicon, Microsoft and Oracle for cloud servers, Foxconn for manufacturing, and SoftBank for liquidity leverage. There is not a single operational routine that Altman entirely integrates or controls internally.
When the macroeconomic cycle inevitably turns, this fragile network of dependency will trigger a restructuring. This is why Altman, despite his billions, is bound to anxiety, only feeling safe when hidden inside a bunker.
| Quadrant | State | Example | Identity Explanation | Root Anxiety Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ① High Status × High Anxiety | Powerful but unstable | Sam Altman | Status comes from external networks | External dependency (investors, politics, media, boards) |
| ② Low Status × High Anxiety | Struggling & dependent | Debt-ridden worker / leveraged homeowner | Survival depends on banks, rent, wages | External dependency (credit, housing, bosses) |
| ③ Low Status × Low Anxiety | Free despite “failure” | Saltnfire | Daily routine creates self-agency | Internal control + minimal dependency |
| ④ High Status × Low Anxiety | Mastery-based stability | Shohei Ohtani | Wealth rooted in embodied skill | Internal control + embodied competence |
5. Thought Experiment: What if We Became Fully Self-sufficient? (Zhuangzi’s Two Story)
(1) The Pure Self-Sufficiency of the Mud-Dragging Turtle
We’ve argued that anxiety originates from dependence. This raises a natural question: if a human became completely self-sufficient, would anxiety disappear entirely?
To explore this, we can turn to a famous fable in the Autumn Floods chapter of the Zhuangzi. While Zhuangzi was fishing, two ministers arrived with a royal offer from the king, wishing to appoint him to govern the state. Without even turning around, Zhuangzi replied, “In your kingdom, there is a sacred turtle, dead for three thousand years, wrapped in silk and placed in a shrine. Do you think that turtle preferred to die and be honored, or to be alive, dragging its tail in the mud?” The ministers naturally answered that it would prefer to be alive in the mud, to which Zhuangzi responded, “Then leave me alone. I too will drag my tail through the mud.”
Zhuangzi’s mud-dragging turtle is the ultimate embodiment of an endorphin-driven system. It flatly refuses the dopamine trap of royal status, prestige, and institutional rewards. Instead, it finds supreme satisfaction in the raw, friction-filled act of pushing through the mud on its own terms—the very definition of independent survival.
(2) The Deformed Sovereign: Finding Meaning in Mutual Vulnerability
But modern readers instantly feel that something is missing here. We cannot actually turn into turtles, nor can we simply throw away society to live as hermits. The word for human in East Asia is In-gan (人間)—literally meaning a being existing between people. Human life inherently requires others. To be human is to depend, connect, exchange, communicate, and belong. This leads us directly to the paradox at the heart of anxiety: while dependence breeds anxiety, removing all dependence destroys human meaning. A life with absolutely zero anxiety is possible, but it is no longer a recognizably human existence. It is merely survival.
This is why we need the counterweight to the turtle story. In a lesser-known passage, Zhuangzi introduces us to Jiriso, a man with severe deformities. His jaw was sunk below his navel, his shoulders rose above his skull, his bones were twisted, and his legs were fused to his ribs.
Yet, Jiriso lived a complete life. He earned wages through sewing and washing, supported ten people by casting divinations, and was naturally exempt from military conscription and forced labor. When the state distributed grain during famines, he was always among the recipients. Regarding him, Zhuangzi writes that if a man with a deformed body can still nurture himself and complete his natural lifespan, how much more so can a man who deforms his social status.
The meaning of Jiriso’s condition is clear: he represents the choice of uselessness to avoid societal exploitation. By becoming useless to the state, he secured his safety, and this safety freed him from anxiety.
However, the narrative goes further. Jiriso was no hermit. He did not merely hide like a turtle in the mud; he actively fed, advised, and supported ten people, embodying a meaningful existence. Through Jiriso, Zhuangzi suggests that while personal freedom comes from refusing to be used by the state, true human meaning comes from being useful to others.
Ultimately, this resolves the paradox of our existence. While enforced dependence breeds anxiety, it is voluntary mutual dependence that gives a human life its ultimate meaning.
6. Key Insight: Anxiety and Meaning Are the Same Structure
From all four sections, we arrive at the central thesis: Anxiety arises when your survival depends on others. Meaning of life arises when someone else’s survival depends on you.
| State | Description | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Dependence forced on you | Others control your survival | Anxiety |
| Dependence flowing from you | You help others survive | Meaning |
The turtle says: “Reject the world and be free.” Jiriso says: “Remain in the world and be meaningful.” Zhuangzi’s answer is: Do both.
7 Conclusion
In this article, I explored the structure of anxiety through personal experience and philosophical analysis:
- Anxiety is not a status problem. It is a survival structure.
- Dependence → Anxiety. If survival sits outside the body—banks, bosses, investors, approval—anxiety emerges.
- Self-sufficient routine kills anxiety. Routine = bodily control + narrative direction + meaning autonomy.
My present life in Gori resembles Jiriso’s existence. With low needs, minimal dependence on others, a reliable healthcare safety net, and nothing to lose, my anxiety remains low. I am currently in the stage of the turtle dragging its tail in the mud, content in my isolation.
However, I do not intend to remain a turtle forever. Writing—this article and these ideas—is my version of Jiriso’s divination. If these words can reduce someone else’s anxiety or strengthen their structure for survival, then true meaning arises, and the loop of my existence closes.
This is the ultimate antidote to anxiety: we must become self-sufficient enough to eliminate fear, and then become helpful enough to create meaning. When we simply need the world, we invite anxiety; but when we feed the world, we discover meaning.
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