Skip to content

The ANXIETY IS PALPABLE

2025-03-04 · letter vlog · John · 4:03 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Philosophy & meaning (also: Global development, Personal life) · mode: Personal essay · tags: timely hook, self promotion, heavy topic

Two weeks before Everything Is Tuberculosis comes out, John describes being a ball of anxiety over conscious existence, US and UK cuts to health investment, the book launch and private worries, and resists shutting down by telling himself we live in the middle of history, with cause for hope and work to do.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Anxiety as John's background emotion; the weirdness of being a conscious mammal

  • ★★ John says he hears the sound of his anxiety a lot at the moment, partly because anxiety is his background emotion. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John finds it weird and anxiety-inducing to be a conscious mammal: his thinking, loving parts are edible, he is finite yet conceives the infinite, a bacterial colony aware of itself. (playful) — 00:00:09

00:00:29 — Anxiety over US and UK pullback from health investment while promoting his TB book

  • ★★★ John is anxious because he cares about human health, which he says is entering a bad period as the US especially, and also countries like the UK, dramatically pull back health investments. — 00:00:39 · global health, United States, United Kingdom
  • ★★★ John says his new book Everything Is Tuberculosis comes out two weeks from today, and that the current catastrophe makes promoting it feel weird. — 00:00:50 · Everything Is Tuberculosis

00:00:58 — Pre-order ask, unease about self-promotion amid catastrophe, the book's hopeful story

  • ★★ John asks viewers to pre-order a signed copy of the book today, with the link in the description. — 00:00:58 · Everything Is Tuberculosis
  • ★★ John says it is a good time to talk about tuberculosis because we are needlessly creating much more of it, but he doesn't want discussing the catastrophe to look like a self-promotion strategy. — 00:01:03 · tuberculosis
  • ★★★ John says the book tries to tell a hopeful story about human health because he believes all true stories must be hopeful, and that there are reasons for hope, or at least reasons not to not feel hope. — 00:01:15 · hope, global health, Everything Is Tuberculosis

00:01:27 — The book's argument about TB and injustice; worsening health; book-launch and private stress

  • ★ John says feeling far from hope makes it anxiety-inducing to do interviews where people ask for his hopeful message. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ John says the book argues that tuberculosis has thrived through history along paths of injustice humans blazed, and traces how those forces made one particular boy sick in one place. — 00:01:37 · Everything Is Tuberculosis, tuberculosis
  • ★★★ John says that now we are laying out the red carpet on that trail for diseases of injustice like malaria, HIV and tuberculosis. — 00:01:50 · malaria, tuberculosis
  • ★★★ John says millions of lives are at risk and overall human health will get worse, which should stress us out. — 00:02:00 · global health
  • ★★ John says having a book come out is always stressful because it is the culmination of several years of his life and he wants people to like it and respond generously. — 00:02:05 · Everything Is Tuberculosis
  • ★ John says his private, personal anxieties are at the moment legion. — 00:02:15

00:02:26 — Public anxiety and private anxiety; the sentence 'I am anxious'

  • ★★ Citing his friend Kaveh Akbar on public joy with private grief and the reverse, John says that right now he mostly feels public anxiety and private anxiety. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ John says he likes that the sentence "I am anxious" captures how anxiety displaces his other identities (John, husband, father, resident of Indy), becoming an overwhelming, constant sensation. — 00:02:38 · Indianapolis
  • ★★★ John says his most convenient response to anxiety is to shut down, deciding nothing matters in the long run, but he resists it because he thinks it is neither useful nor accurate. — 00:02:50

00:02:55 — Resisting shutdown: we live now, in the middle of history, with cause for hope and work to do; sign-off

  • ★★★ John says that in the long run nothing matters, but he does not live in the long run; he lives now. — 00:03:05 · meaning of life
  • ★★★ John says it sucks to watch humanity step back from one of the main points of being here: creating safety and security for each other, with access to healthcare and education. — 00:03:12 · global health
  • ★ John says he feels scared right now because it is scary. — 00:03:26

  • ★★★ John tells himself that although he sees today as the end of the story, we live in the middle of history, not knowing the end, so we have cause for hope and work to do. — 00:03:30 · hope

    “We do not live at the end of history. We live in the middle of history.”

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: anxiety disorder · Everything Is Tuberculosis · global health · hope

Also: People: Kaveh Akbar

Concepts: consciousness · despair · HIV/AIDS · malaria · meaning of life · social determinants of health · tuberculosis

Places: Indianapolis · United Kingdom · United States

Also centred on anxiety disorder: Brotherhood 2.0: March 7, 2007: Stress · My Hairy Ball of Anxious Anxiety · I'm Having a Lot of Feelings · Working Through a Crisis with My Brother · Hank's very messy post-cancer year of mistakes, meaning… · I Still Don't Have Cancer (and I'm Still Scared)

← Previous: We Will Eradicate Measles · Next → How Social Security Fraud Actually Works