Finanxiety
The other night, I was feeling guilty about how little I had accomplished all week. Almost as if on cue, the Instagram algorithm spearfished my anxiety: An ad for an “AI assistant” appeared. It showed a woman wiping down an already-clean counter in a candlelit kitchen. She was “finally cleaning her house,” she was learning French, she was managing her money, she was baking a chocolate cake. Her life was in order, it seemed to claim, because of this one simple trick.
“‘The juice’ is how I refer to the get-up-and-go-mojo that propels me through my to-do list like a heat-seeking missile.”
I sat up a little straighter in the sweatpants I’d been wearing for three days. The “trick,” of course, was some to-do list management system that costs “just 62 cents a day.” In my moment of greasy, inferior weakness, I swiped up, filled with visions of myself in a committed relationship with an adult skincare routine and an uncanny ability to remember other people’s birthdays. In this future, not only was I crushing it professionally, but I was also bilingual, moisturized, and on top of canceling free trials before they charged my card for $9.99 plus tax.
My hope curdled when I discovered it was just an app that mapped your time-blocked tasks onto your calendar for you. My problem wasn’t a lack of time or Google Calendar mastery—it was simply a lack of the juice. “The juice” is how I refer to the get-up-and-go-mojo that propels me through my to-do list like a heat-seeking missile. It is the joie de vivre that compels me to plug my transactions into my Wealth Planner, respond to texts, take out the trash, write words for a podcast that’ll (hopefully) make you laugh and think.
It had been rainy and cloudy all week, and I, evidently running an operating system about as sophisticated as a clearance Home Depot houseplant, had been moping around—unable to photosynthesize the juice.
Reluctant to accept that I was doomed to juicelessness, I diligently tried everything to summon it: cold plunges, cardio, hydration, caffeine, weight-lifting, walks, affirmations, pointing at myself in the mirror shouting Get your shit together! I wished there were a hard reset button I could press on my brain and body to recalibrate the vibe and restore my patience with everyone around me, but short of psychedelic drugs (considered, but ultimately discarded, as too much of a wild card), I realized the juice cannot be manufactured from concentrate.
I searched high and low for motivation, but all I found was irritation and indifference. I still feel anxious, she says, between her third and fourth shots of espresso. I checked my Oura ring app to see where I was in my hormone cycle, hoping that might explain it—only to spiral further upon realizing I was in the thick of the phase when energy, clarity, and motivation are supposed to be at all-time highs. Betrayed, I had nothing left in my biohacking toolbox to throw at the psychological discomfort. We had officially reached the bargaining phase.
“I realized the juice cannot be manufactured from concentrate.”
In a particularly anxious moment, I recategorized my transactions in Copilot, an attempt at exerting control and order over something that felt consequential yet manageable. I was rewarded with a tiny drip of dopamine.
The funny thing about this state of chronic agitation and analysis paralysis, I’ve found, is how interconnected our anxieties can be. They are not discrete figurines to be moved around our lives like chess pieces. They are more like primordial soup, and *game show host voice* you’ll never guess what latent fear is going to emerge next. What’s that? Oh, it’s a video of a bridge collapsing!
As such, my anxiety about money (usually irrational) seems to crescendo when other things feel out of my control. When a trip itinerary gets scrambled or my laundry piles up and leaves me with no clean underwear or I miss a deadline at work, I find myself compulsively reaching for my banking app to quantify my security.
Recently, I received an email from a reader who had finally gotten around to rolling over her old 401(k) into an IRA. She was surprised by the way completing this simple-but-annoying task shook loose a dormant motivation: “Doing it made space in my life to pursue other financial goals. I hadn’t realized the amount of low-level anxiety that had been running in the background because of this situation. Now I have a list of financial goals I want to tackle.”
In my suboptimal state, I found her desire to tackle things enviable—but her message made me think of a browser with a bunch of tabs open, each sucking a small amount of bandwidth away from the mainframe (now’s the part of the essay where I pretend I know how computers work). After a while, you become accustomed to the cacophony of buzzing from each open tab, and the louder it gets, the harder it becomes to focus on any one thing—but the diffusion of source material makes it feel as though there’s no “one thing” you can address to quiet the volume. You’re swimming in the soup of an overdue medical bill and a backlog of reading material and an unfinished grocery list and a partially planned birthday celebration and edits for the client and… Money becomes just one of the things contributing to a generalized sense of unease. This overwhelm has a flattening effect, making prioritization feel impossible and futile.
“Money becomes just one of the things contributing to a generalized sense of unease.”
Entrepreneur and writer Chelsea Fagan shared in a recent TikTok how this two-way street flares up in a predictable way in her life: “If you were to chart my anxiety over the last decade, you could basically lay an identical chart of my external financial stress over it.” She revealed how, in an earlier phase of life plagued by a suspended driver’s license, wrecked credit, and seemingly insurmountable debt, she had been prescribed an anti-panic medication. Over the years as she gained her footing—financial and otherwise—she found her anxiety became curiously more manageable. She owns a place in New York City! She writes books! She has good credit!
But last year, her company hit a rough patch, and she had to personally loan the business money to make payroll. Suddenly, she said, she found herself doggy paddling in the same panic-inducing overwhelm that characterized her earlier adulthood. She got an emergency prescription.
Her story raises a question about our body’s natural fear responses to situations that are straightforwardly untenable. We might build up arsenals of self-optimization to help us metabolize lives that place too many “urgent,” competing, and complex demands on our brains (as I have, with my temperature-controlled mattress and biodata treasure trove), but what does it mean when our bodies begin rejecting the optimization and, by extension, the circumstances that necessitate it?
In her recent essay My Anxiety, Lauren Oyler emphasizes “emotions as shaped by power structures.” Academics first began kicking around this approach with the term “Americanitis,” describing “‘the high-strung, nervous, active temperament of the American people’ in an 1898 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.” This timing is especially notable when you consider that historian Jonathan Levy pegs 1895–1904 as the “Age of Capital’s climax,” when “industrialization [occurred] on a scale never previously imagined.” And they didn’t even have TikTok to stoke their fears about all those new bridges!!!
Of course, it’s pretty easy to disprove the thesis that money is a cure-all for mental health issues—look no further than billionaires getting into pissing matches on Twitter with other grown men using their full government names for proof that even an endless supply of money won’t save you from yourself.
“There’s only one thing that can generate escape velocity from thin air: momentum.”
But it’s obvious to me that the relationship is at least a little causal, and in both directions: Can a lack of money (and the subsequent sense of precarity) create anxiety where it didn’t formerly exist? Almost certainly. Can financial clarity and control ease feelings of powerlessness or chaos elsewhere? Again, my money’s on “yes.”
Regardless, last week I found that when the mental chatter reaches fever pitch, there’s only one thing that can generate escape velocity from thin air: momentum. Muscling your way through any “tab.” As much as I’d love to tell you disengaging entirely and rewatching the last season of Love is Blind was the answer, avoidance tends to make things worse for me.
I assure you: It will be positively miserable! Just like submerging your body in cold water or, worse, waiting on hold with your 401(k) provider’s customer service center. But the momentum from closing the first tab is the only force strong enough to launch you out of the fray. I should know—finally doing the dishes was the only thing that gave me the juice to write this.
