Ambient Anxiety

I’m trying to figure out why a low level anxiety has been creeping into my consciousness more and more recently.  I’m used to being pretty happy and content most of the time. But I’ve found myself less at ease for longer periods of time than my historical norm.  There are a few anxiety-inducing constants in my life so I’m ruling them out for the most part…

1. I work in a volatile industry where the average time spent at a company is about 2 years.  This is in part due to the frequent closures and layoffs. 

2. Heather has degenerative diseases that are slowly taking away more and more of the pleasures in her life and causing her to suffer in new and terrible ways.

3. Ever since I was a kid, the physical sustainability of the modern world seemed dubious at best.  The amount of resources we casually use and discard simply doesn’t make sense.  And as we burn through these resources we’re going to feel a lot of pain. That’s been a Sword of Damocles hanging over me as long as I can remember.  But it’s in the future (mostly) so I can usually not fret about it. (though I do all sorts of annoying, time consuming habits to minimize my material usage, and feel guilty about how much waste my art produces) Anyway, the point is that even without the conflict and wars that climate change and drought are bringing, I have this suspicion that the ‘free ride’ I’ve had making art with physical materials will be ending soon.

I’m used to those things pinging the back of my brain every once in a while, dampening my mood briefly, but then I generally recover and I’m back to my normal happy self that’s excited for what I’m working on and what I can be doing in the future. This is where I usually derive my joy.  

So what are the new things that overturn my happiness applecart?

1. AI.  This one sure came out of nowhere. The general consensus before last year was that AI would be taking care of the grunt work and jobs people didn’t want, leaving us all free to do the creative stuff so many of us WISH we could do if we were freed from the shackles of needing to work. Turns out AI is a lot closer to being the inversion of that dream. More in depth thoughts here: http://joshuaforeman.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-sudden-emergence-of-ai-art.html

2. The rise of fascism.  I hope this one is just a projection of my left leaning tendencies. I hope I’m jumping at shadows and misinterpreting the increasingly aggressive rhetoric I’m hearing from politicians all over the world, and in my own country.  I understand the angry backlash is due to a profound and VERY rapid (by historical standards) cultural shift that put the traditionalists in the minority.  Any group that’s used to being the majority and having most of the power is going to get very defensive when they lose that status.  The question is: does this lead to war?

3. Which segways to this next point.  Before a war comes the division.  Brother against brother, parents against children.  As I’ve moved left, that’s alienated me from my parents. Not drastically.  But the trajectory is concerning. I don’t like feeling like an ‘other’ in each other's eyes.  But how does one navigate a relationship of love when one is convinced the other is actually negatively impacting the world in harmful ways?  So far we try to focus on our common values, which I believe are still fundamentally shared. I’m sure we all hold nuanced enough views of each other to feel that at least our impact on the world is a mixed bag, not purely harmful or purely good.  I also don’t doubt their motives and I don’t think they doubt mine.  And maybe that’s enough to last.

4. That’s one new-ish family stress, and now we’re adding another with in-laws moving into our home soon. There’s one dimension to this that’s rough, which is Heather’s dad’s advanced Parkinsons.  There’s really not much to say about that besides… rough. But the other dimension is Heather’s relationship with her mom. They certainly love each other, and enjoy talking to each other.  For a certain amount of time. Then her mom’s bad faith interpretation of Heather’s tone or wording sets them at odds.  The frustration subsides after a couple hours, but I don’t know how this dynamic is going to work when we’re not just visiting for a couple days.

5. A very weird job/personal creative issue is that I’ve got videogame related stuff I want to put on my YouTube channel, but because the game I work on has NFTs in it, anything I put out that raises my profile in the gaming community has a big risk of blowback.  NFTs are currently associated with scams and ponzi schemes, and most of the social world I ‘live’ in is on a hair trigger about this topic.  They assume every possible use of NFTs is evil and that everyone associated with them are evil. (I’m personally agnostic on the topic until we see how the tech evolves. I have zero passion for NFTs, I just happen to really need this job that gives health insurance to my disabled wife and allows me to work from home so I can be flexible when I need to drive her to dr. appointments.) So even though the videogame stuff I want to talk about has nothing to do with them, the second one person digs into my career they’re going to trumpet the fact that I’m associated with NFTs, and then the actual topic of my stuff will be drowned out by it. Not to mention I’ll become a pariah among my industry peers. 

6. And finally, this isn’t a new vector for anxiety, but it’s certainly one that grows with time. My age is reminding me that my Big Dream is less and less possible. So far my predictions about the ability for small teams to make super high quality TV have been proving out. (Unless AI eclipses the whole thing and makes it pointless to do so) But even in the best case scenario where our first book trilogy becomes a surprise hit after we start advertising it, and I can start serious production on the TV series full time when I’m 50 (2 years from now) that still only gives me a handful of projects I can do. Every big project I’ve worked on professionally has been around 5 years of development, and the stuff I want to do is unprecedented in a couple ways, meaning that lots of mistakes will be made and do-overs necessary.

7. Also, why did my tinnitus suddenly get louder? 

Most of these concerns do not rise to the level of feeling like they are inevitable or impending.  But I think because there are enough of them, it feels like likelihood at least one has a good chance to mess up my life -or the lives of those I care about.

So there you have it.  This is why I’m 20% less happy-go-lucky than I feel like I used to be. I hope this is a document I can look back one in a couple decades and say, “Whew! Glad that stuff wasn’t as bad as I thought!”   

And, as is always my impulse, I try to balance things out with gratitude. 

1. My wife is absolutely incredible and I sincerely love her more every day. She brings so much peace and joy to my life. 

2. My health is pretty good. I’m a little pudgier than I’d like, but other than that… and tinnitus, I got no complaints. 

3. My job not only gave us the resources to finally be able to buy a home, but one big enough to house my son, brother and in-laws.  (It’s gonna be tight, but I think still manageable) Working from home is such a massive blessing for both my mental health and Heather’s physical health. AND the game I’m working on is legitimately fun. 

4. I’m so very close to having cleared my art backlog so I can focus all my (not job) creative energies on my Big Dream. Because of the NFT thing mentioned above, I was emotionally able to cut a year of my life that would have gone into the Cutscene Subversion Project that I started around 2008.  

5. My mom/creative partner is such a huge blessing in how much energy she put into helping me launch my Big Dream, and continues to collaborate with me. 

6. My oldest son seems to back on speaking terms with me.

7. My youngest son has a remarkably great job for this early in his life, learning about stuff he actually cares about and getting him out in the world experiencing all sorts of things. And I sincerely love his music!