Anxiety is the appropriate emotion when the immediate personal terror--of a volcano, an arrow, a stab in the back and other disasters, all directed against one's self--disappears. The kind of world that produces anxiety is actually a world of   safety, a world in which no one feels that he himself is facing sudden death. The anxiety exists as an uneasy state of mind, in which one has a feeling that something unspecified and indeterminable may go wrong. If the world seems to be going well, this produces anxiety--for good times may end.If the world is going badly--it may get worse. Anxiety tends to be without focus; the anxious person doesn't know whether to blame himself or other people. He isn't sure whether it is the current year of the administration or a change in climate or the atom bomb that is to blame for this undefined sense of unease. It is clear that we have developed a society which depends on having the right amount of anxiety to make it work...While we agree that too much anxiety is harmful to mental health, we have come to rely on anxiety to push us into seeing a doctor about a symptom which may indicate cancer, into checking up on that old life-insurance policy which may have out-of-date provisions in it, into having a conference with Billy's teacher even though his report card looks all right. People who are anxious enough keep their car insurance up, have the brakes checked, don't take a second drink when they have to drive. People who are too anxious either refuse to go into cars at all--and so complicate the ordinary course of life--or drive so tensely and carefully that they help cause accidents. People who aren't anxious enough take chance after chance, which increases the terrible accidents of the roads. The author holds that_.
anxiety is a good thing anxiety is a symptom of mental illness some anxiety can lead to changes for the better no anxiety is bad for society