Projecting Anxiety

Men of old did not live inside stories. They lived under orders. And this makes all the difference.

“What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.” Ecc. 1:15

The Modern Optimization of Fear

Order comes first. Meaning follows.

Once upon a time, a man woke up because the light changed, the animals stirred, the field needed attention, the forge needed heat, the nets needed mending. His day was not justified by identity; it was compelled by reality. The question was never “Who am I becoming?” It was “What is required before dark?”

Identity was fidelity to need.

This is what we have lost.

Modern man wakes up inside abstraction. Despite the alarm clock and the commute, the day does not demand us. We demand something of the day.

That inversion is exhausting. It forces every action to justify itself symbolically: income means status; work means calling; choice is destiny.

Men of old were spared this endless soul struggle by necessity. Dignity came from endurance rather than outcome. A farmer who lost a crop did not lose himself. A blacksmith who broke a tool did not spiral into doubt. Failure was real, but it was in bounds. It did not metastasize into identity collapse because it did not stand on a single load-bearing narrative. Rather, it rested in the physical convergence of reality.

Of old we were embedded in thick proximity. Kin, neighbors, rivals, elders, children, animals, land. You could not disappear, nor could you be endlessly evaluated. Reputation mattered, but it was slow, and it was local. There was no global audience, no permanent record, no constant comparison. Shame existed, but it had sharp edges.

The Collapse of Distance

Today, shame is ambient and infinite. Everyone watches themselves being watched by imagined judges in a constant stream. This forces selfhood into project status. Instead of a presence, our witness is disembodied and temporaneously infinite.

Once upon a time, a man’s work was not a story he told about himself. It was a craft he submitted to. It resisted him. Corrected him. Did not flatter him. In time, he and his work took shape, but not by pursuit of “meaning” for its own sake. Rather, meaning condensed out of repetition.

Now, we live in a place where purpose must be aspirational. The future is declarative. Your value is a tale that must be immediately legible to others. No wonder everything feels so anemic. It’s not a lack of purpose. It’s a fact of condensation overridden by performance. It’s a habit of persistence underwritten by optimization.

Optimization is brutal. It demands constant re-evaluation: Is this the best use of time? Is this the right path? Is this my destiny?

Persistence requires only one question:

Does This Need Doing?

Ancient men were not free in the modern sense. They were constrained by land, season, duty, oath, and body. But within those constraints, they were oriented. Freedom without maturity feels like vertigo.

What you are doing right now—reading, sitting, conversing, running errands, driving in the rain, getting ready to eat—these are not “slaveries.” But neither are they aspirations to destiny.

If we stop narrating for a moment, most days look like:

A man completes the work required of him. He maintains his tools. He speaks with other men of experience. He learns something of struggle and endurance. He travels despite discomfort. He remains himself.

That is not nothing. That is life at human scale.

The fear that freedom may end is not the threat of losing these things. It is the notion that, without a totalizing story about you, your life in this age will dissolve. But men of old did not dissolve without constant stories about tomorrow. Rather, they settled into life by rhythm.

Morning. Work. Midday. Repair. Evening. Talk. Rest.

Irreversibility

When a flood came, it came. When a wife died, she died. When land was lost, it was lost. When a son went to war, he might not return. There was grief. Sometimes immense grief. But there was very little existential rumination. There was little time devoted to, “If only I had…” or “It shouldn’t be this way.”

Why? Because irreversibility was normal. Contrast that with today, where we live in a world that sells reversibility in every vector: relationships can be fixed if you try hard enough; careers can pivot infinitely; identity can be reinvented; damage can be undone with insight.

That implication is poison when something truly breaks beyond repair. Suffering intensifies whenever your core belief is that it should be reversible.

Some things break and do not come back. That knowledge didn’t make life cruel. It made men sober. Sobriety is not hopelessness. Sobriety is rejecting the fantasy that reality owes you repair.

Success

This is critical.

A man can fail at a harvest and still be a man. He can lose a trade and still be a man. He can be shamed publicly and still be a man.

Why? Because manhood is not proven by winning. It is proven by remaining: present, functional, true, capable of what comes next.

A nervous system that keeps asking:

“If this doesn’t work out, what does that say about me?”

will always be plagued by anxiety. Ask instead:

“What remains for me to do?”

and the shift from existential load to present living redeems even irreversible suffering.

Grief

Grief does not pause. It may slow the moment, but it does not stop the plow, the forge, the nets. This is not about suppressing emotion. It is about integrating it.

Grief walks with you. Sleeps with you. Eats with you. But it does not and should not run the village.

Modern therapy demands that grief must be processed, resolved, healed, or transformed. That only creates urgency and pressure: more shame. But grief ends when it ends. It cannot be hurried. Until it is done, it can only be borne.

Not Purpose but Burden

Purpose is modern talk. Burden is ancient fact. Rather than asking, “What am I meant to do?” Ask, “What has fallen to me?”

Children. Land. A dying parent. A broken fence. It’s not romantic. It’s your lot.

A mind that keeps searching for a purpose big enough to replace what collapse will always have to replace burden with story. But what you need whenever your roof caves in is not story but capacity. Capacity doesn’t feel like purpose. It doesn’t feel like anything. It just is.

Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man. Ecc. 12:13

Repetition

Insight feels good. It feels clean. It feels like progress. Repetition feels dull, slow, and unremarkable. But repetition is what teaches the body that life continues.

There are seasons where a man’s life narrows dramatically. Not to punish him. Not to erase him. But to strip away excess narrative. That can feel like death to a people groomed to believe expansion equals life. But narrowing is how strength is conserved. Repetition is how narrowing builds capacity over time. Seeds survive winter by shrinking, not by growing.

Not productivity. Not ambition. Not submission. Not even patience.

Remaining.

That is not a failure of purpose. That is how men survive.

Stationary Grace

Ancient man did not ask work to heal him. He did not expect vocation to resolve grief, loneliness, shame, or fear. Today we demand that work redeem us. When it can’t, we feel annihilated. That is not Christianity. That is Stoic-Protestant moral capitalism baptized in Christian language.

In the New Testament, the dominant verbs are not complete, optimize, or arrive. They are: abide, remain, walk, endure, watch, be faithful.

None of those verbs terminate.

There is no grand arc. There is no montage. No synthesis. Only standing.

If your life has started to feel like a project that will never end, that is because you have been trained to believe that meaning is something you produce. We’ve been taught by churches, by culture, by ideals, that your life should add up. That if it doesn’t, something was wrong. That belief replaces trust in Christ with trust in coherence, and modern coherence is a factory where meaning is just another commodity someone else has tagged for resale.

This is why the project mentality is not only exhausting, but spiritually corrosive. It trains you to evaluate yourself constantly, to ask whether today advanced the story, to feel guilt when it didn’t. Over time, faith becomes indistinguishable from performance anxiety.

Christianity does not culminate in self-understanding. Christ does not save you by making your life make sense. He saves you by keeping you faithful when it doesn’t. He culminates His reign in trust without control. He does not demand that you “finish” your life. He grants you to live it under mercy, whatever that “means.”

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Ecc. 1:9