Lockjaw.

Insights on the ritualism of worry.

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Everything is a ritual.

You are in constant worship.

I’ve never been a fan of dismissive apathy. The phrase “it’s not that deep” may be true in some respects, but it’s just as plausible that everything carries with it the weight of the world. If our tangible reality is all that we know to be sure, then by default all that we engage in becomes epochal to some degree.

Our vices and guilty pleasures are no exception. One could scroll through my gym playlist and with near certainty conclude that I must’ve hotwired a stolen car at least once in my life. To clear up that matter, I haven’t, but if I step out of a droning simulative reality for just a moment, I know perfectly well why I curated it this way.

Simply put, it makes my blood boil. It tenses my shoulders and ruffles my brow. It narrows my eyelids and fills my mind with thoughts of pseudo-motivation, in turn creating the perfect intersection of mind and matter for an effective workout. Memories of disrespect and thoughts of retribution dance to crass lyrics and ear-shredding 808s that make me feel immortal. In truth, I’m just cosplaying, or in more fitting terms, performing a ritual.

Not to get sidetracked, I figured that a personal example could help set the scene for how ritualism is understood in this work. Beyond the shut eyes and swaying heads, skyward open palms, and chanted mantras, ritualism is a vessel by which we fill all idle space. It’s an ever-expansive practice that is inescapable by evolutionary design. A system of function that requires its own field of research to even dent the surface of comprehension. It won’t be the last time I visit this topic, but maybe it’s best to start where it’s simple. For me, ritualism has never been clearer than in my relationship to worry.

We evolve.

Lockjaw.

Cold sweats and lightheadedness.

Scattered thoughts and aimless tunnel vision.

A stomach with so much to tell you, if only you spoke its language.

Worry sucks.

It goes without saying, a healthy concern for challenges we encounter in life is a necessary survival mechanism. We quite literally owe our existence to the evolutionary instinct that helps us identify danger and strategise for safety. We took our first steps as a species in a world that was unfathomably hostile to us. Every snapping twig or rustling bush told a story of death, which only our vigilance stood a chance at evading. By nurture, we have cultivated an impressive preemptive security system that helps us identify problems before they actually become problems. At a time when our only defence against beasts was a pointy stick or a smouldering fire, our capacity for precautionary concern was an indispensable strength.

Today, the world we inhabit is vastly different. The rapid development of industry and tech, medicine, and connectivity - in all fields of life - may give us the impression that we as humans have evolved at a similar rate, but this is far from true. Development and evolution are not synonymous, and the latter requires several thousand years at the least for the most minuscule of changes in our physiology to become evident. In some senses, worrying is a relic of this transformative journey. A genetic ode to a time when meeting our basic needs was beyond a privilege, it was simply not possible for the most part.

Don’t get me wrong, the world we inhabit today is far from secure. Suffering, genocide, famine, and disease underpin the human experience for a concerning portion of the globe. More so, an indisputable bias towards a disenfranchised global south displays an imbalance of epic proportions that no doubt breeds its consequences. With all that in strong consideration, what we have today is a capacity for preemptive concern that - in most cases (heavy emphasis) - outweighs the risks we encounter in our lives.

So what do we do?

We worship.

The act of worry is an esoteric compulsion of ritualism. One in which we erect a shrine for the symptom while disregarding the illness that causes it. Worry softly coaxes us to leave our agency at the door and embrace a debilitating dread in its place. It’s a self-imposed narrative, bolstered by an evolutionary bias that tells us that danger lurks at every corner and that we are one wrong step away from an agonizing death at all moments. Sounds absurd when we sound it out loud because we know it’s not true.

Everything lies in the narrative.

I’ve historically been an overthinker if it wasn't apparent thus far. It’s exhausting. More often than not I’m not even just thinking, but rather thinking about thoughts.

Having the thought.

Judging the thought.

Judging the judgment I made of the thought.

My cognitive spiral was then introduced to a palette of challenges life had thrown my way, eventually eroding me to a point of helplessness and apathy I’d never like to revisit. It’s at this rock bottom that I took it upon myself to get serious about therapy. I didn’t get along too well with my first option, but the second therapist I saw struck a chord. In a strange sense, they infuriated me in all the right ways. They made me realize how much of my apparent helplessness had very little to do with my circumstances but with my framing. It’s not that I didn’t know what I had to do, it’s that I didn’t want to do it.

I’d made a home of my worry.

I wasn’t in the business of seeking a cure.

I was worshipping the symptom.

So what now?

We cure.

I want to close with some empathy, partly because I’m not some gaslighting asshole claiming that I’m any better, but more so because I need to hear it too. I get it. The dizzying pace of human progress is nauseating. Worse off, it’s inextricably linked to spiralling environmental decline, political tension, and an ever-apparent divisiveness that leaves very little room for peace to germinate.

We live in paradoxes. We consume voraciously, yet have never been more disengaged as we wade through a permanent mosaic of ephemeral joys. This non-presence, I’ve come to observe in myself, no doubt extends far beyond digital lives and bleeds into our mundane. It’s no surprise that we worry because we hardly know what’s going on. What’s genuinely going on. In our bodies, and minds. In the air around us and the space we occupy. We may play God with the abundance of information we have access to, but we’ve never known so little.

Perhaps in this context, reframing is all we have left. The energy of intention is a strange yet powerful device that stands as a testament to how much of our experience - and I mean real emotional deduction - lays in our hands. Sure, by no means does this dilute, nor eradicate very real problems many of us face daily, but the simple act of reframing our understanding helps decode meaning from life that is conducive to growth, not helpless.

Worrying is indeed a maladaptive practice, an ancestral heirloom of human evolution, but we won’t ever eradicate it either. Nor should we try to. There are plenty of other things in life that require our attention beyond worrying about worrying. Our greatest bet for a healthy outlook lies in understanding, not eliminating. It lies in the why, not in the how.

When I first spoke of worrying, I did so on a Substack note that garnered quite a lot of attention:

A week later, I’m no closer to an answer, but I’m extremely grateful for what this blip of virality enabled. Countless conversations with people from all walks of life. Applause and jeers. Agreement and conflict, but more uniquely, conversation. It helped me change, and in turn, I wanted to reflect on the stream of reflection everyone else helped shape in me. True transformation begins with a conscious shift from passive consumption to active presence and observation.

There’s no one size fits all with this.

Just be here. Now.

That’s all you can do.