1) We have no social safety net. It's not just that Something Might Happen, it's that if Something Happens, it's likely to lead into a death spiral of also losing your job, losing your house, and bankruptcy.

2) Most people in the States have the nagging feeling that everyone else is doing better than they are. You have two co-workers, Suzy and Bob, who were hired at the same time with roughly the same backgrounds/experience. How did Suzy buy that Birkin bag? How did Bob buy a condo? You're still renting, and your bag came from Target, and you can't afford anything else. What you don't know is that Suzy has $20K in credit card debt, and Bob has a trust fund. Even if you don't care about either of those things (bags or owning a home), everyone wants to be financially secure. Everyone has things they'd do with money, if they had it.

The story at the beginning of this article was very familiar, only I'm always on the other side of it since I have people in my life with serious anxiety. Their demands that I constantly reassure them that things are okay, and that I call to assure them that I'm not dead, can be suffocating. I feel like their anxiety leads them to try to control me -- I have to assure them of this or that, and I have to inform them of my movements or they will worry themselves to death and it will be all my fault.

I hate picking up the phone to hear a furious voice telling me that I am responsible for someone else's anxiety attack because I did not call back right away. I guess the anxiety can lead to a kind of desperation where some people feel like they cannot feel okay unless they guilt other people into giving them the constant reassurance that they (irrationally) need.

Anyway, it's nice to hear about it from the anxious person's perspective, because on my best days I am more sympathetic and understanding -- willing to provide assurance on demand, because it's a small irritation that makes a big difference to the person with anxiety. It helps to think of it as something that the anxious person really can't control... but I still find it hard to understand because while I worry about some things, my instinct is to assume that my loved ones are safe unless I hear otherwise. I guess serious anxiety is something you can't truly understand until you have experienced it.

I mean, c'mon...she makes a living writing about her own anxiety.

It's absurd to think that there was some magical time in earth's history when people weren't filled with anxiety, or some Xanadu today where everyone is completely chill.

As the writer pointed out, anxiety serves a good purpose evolutionarily, and has been with us from the beginning.

How did people deal with it? Probably by turning to religion and paranoid folk beliefs. Baby acting crazy? Must be a changeling--cast it out and say some prayers. Hasn't rained in 3 months? Blame it on the neighboring village's curses and attack.

As to the low rates of anxiety and depression in Mexico, the writer is confusing reporting rates with occurrence. There are plenty of depressed and anxious people in MX, but they're just not whining about it and reporting it. In the US it has become OK to do so in recent decades and people are doing it in droves. (BTW I spent 3 months in MX interviewing farmers who were quite depressed and anxious about their lot in life).

If you think that simply having more 'community' and family involvement will solve this, then you are sorely deluded. It seems like many of the people who believe that live far from their own families and really can't stand to spend more than a few holidays a year with them. The often have never known anyone from a country where extreme family focus is the norm, who has had to give up all of their individual dreams and aspirations for the sake of family.

More likely these deluded individuals moved across the country to live somewhere hip or for a job or grad school (or a combination of all 3). They spend their time fretting about EVERYTHING, including how they have no community or family and try to form a semblance of these things with 'like-minded individuals'. This invariably backfires, since everyone is so transient and selfish and they move on.

In the end the community seekers probably should have just stayed put closer to home, learned to love their existing families for both the good and the bad, and mellowed out a little.

It is unsurprising that this writer is often anxious. Like many of us, she seems to conflate the little voice in her head with "who she is," "how things really are," or whatever else the voice seems to be telling her, apparently not seeing through the illusion of the past and the future, of her individual ego and the world of mere form.

Many religions, philosophies and poets--Buddhism, Vedanta or Blake among others--urge us to see through the fiction of (not get rid of) these "mind-forged manacles" and attend better to what actually is, namely this present moment and the indivisable whole that is life.

Peace isn't to be achieved at some imagined future date, it is only realized...now!

After reading this piece about anxiety I registered as a Salon letter writer just to point out that as the author went through all her solutions to anxiety, she never came up with what I was expecting her to discover: Ah, yoga and meditation straightened me out. That’s the ending I always find in the stuff I read about anxiety, but the stuff I read is always in the yoga column of my personal culture.

Then, before I registered to write about how the author should take up yoga, I was sitting on my front porch (it is morning here in Virginia) and a squirrel ran across the grass and suddenly jumped three feet in the air for no reason. I just broke out laughing. And then I laughed at laughing, and then I laughed at the absurdity of the squirrel, anxiety and the fear that holds and caresses every thought in our modern minds. Then I knew that you don’t need yoga or any therapist, or any path to be free from anxiety.

I think we just love our anxiety because when a mind, our little self, is anxious, it knows it exists. Even suffering is better than non-existence. We are defining our identity in the sand of being with lines of anxiety. Fear is our mind and we think we are its shadow. And when our identity is a head traced in the sand, every event is a wave.

So here is the best solution to anxiety: Just stop it! Just look directly at the absurdity of it all. Just watch the squirrel leap in the air for no reason and laugh. The world, the universe, is just perfect as it is. Accept it. Be free.