"I love how making a doctors appointment over the phone is scarier to me apparently than being hit by several cars".

These are two deep questions that touch on psychology, philosophy, and sociology. The short answer to both is "often, but not always."

On your first question: Is everyone a hero in their own narrative?

Many people do see themselves as fundamentally justified in their actions. Psychology suggests that we naturally create stories that make sense of our lives, emphasizing our good intentions and minimizing our faults. Even people who do terrible things often explain them to themselves as necessary, deserved, or forced upon them.

But not everyone experiences themselves as the hero. Some people see themselves as failures, villains, burdens, or victims. Depression, trauma, abuse, and shame can profoundly shape someone's self-narrative. So it's more accurate to say that everyone has a narrative, but they are not always the hero within it.

On your second question: Does everything start with bad parents who are, in turn, programmed by a bad system?

There's a meaningful sense in which our parents are our first environment. They shape:

• how safe or unsafe the world feels,
• how we relate to others,
• what emotions are acceptable,
• our expectations of ourselves.

But parents don't exist in isolation. They are influenced by:

• how they were raised,
• economic pressures,
• cultural values,
• education,
• trauma,
• political systems,
• community,
• biology and temperament.

In that sense, parents are not blank slates freely choosing everything they do. They are products of many forces themselves. This idea appears in developmental psychology, sociology, and family systems theory: patterns often pass from one generation to the next unless something interrupts them.

That said, describing people as "programmed" can be useful as a metaphor, but it's incomplete. Humans aren't computers. We have habits, conditioning, and unconscious influences, yet we also have varying capacities for reflection and change. Some people break cycles of abuse or neglect despite difficult beginnings. Others repeat them.

When you say, "this is how many are destroyed," there is truth in the observation that early environments can have lifelong consequences. Childhood adversity is strongly associated with later mental and physical health problems, relationship difficulties, and other challenges. However, "destroyed" may overstate the inevitability. Many people carry deep wounds without being defined entirely by them, and healing, while often difficult, is possible.

A balanced way to think about it is:

• We don't choose the family or society we're born into.
• Those circumstances profoundly shape us.
• The people who shape us were themselves shaped.
• Understanding those influences can foster compassion.
• Understanding them doesn't erase responsibility or make change impossible.

It's a tension between determinism (we are shaped by causes beyond our control) and agency (we retain some capacity to choose). Most psychologists and philosophers today would say both are real: our freedom is constrained, but not absent.

My brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

Styron 

Faced with the prospect of a plane trip or a speaking engagement or sometimes even a squash match or a meeting at the office, Stossel experiences full-blown panic: insomnia, sweating, vertigo, stomach pains, and loss of control of his bowels.




People describe themselves as excited, nervous, apprehensive, tense, stressed out, bugged, worried, panicky, vapor-locked, scared shitless, sick to their stomach, and feeling like they’re gonna die. Each of these moods is arguably a form of anxiety, but they are experienced as very different affective states. All sorts of events in life make us feel keyed up. The brain states may be similar, but the adrenaline rush we experience when we mount the stage to accept the Oscar for Best Actress does not seem to have much in common with a cheese phobia.





What makes the business even more confusing is that anxiety is hard to distinguish clinically from depression. We picture anxious people as hyper and overreactive, and depressed people as lethargic and indifferent. But depression, too, can be understood as a response to a perceived or imagined threat, and antidepressants like Prozac and Effexor also alleviate anxiety.




After twenty-five years, Stossel changed psychiatrists. He is now with Dr. W., who appears to be a humanist-existentialist practitioner—a school of psychiatry of which Rollo May is one of the founders. A big question in the treatment of mood disorders is how seriously to take the patient’s own reasons for feeling anxious or depressed. If the disorder is a neurochemical disturbance, then the patient’s stories about his or her problems may just be the mood talking. If you can make the mood disappear, then the problems will disappear. But those stories aren’t completely made up. Dr. W.’s assumption, as Stossel explains it, is that although cheese and vomiting are not life-threatening, there is a traumatic or psychically wounding event that underlies anxiety about them. As Stossel puts it, the theory is that anxiety arises from “failed efforts to resolve basic existential dilemmas.” The goal of therapy is to address those dilemmas by getting back to the original hurt.





How effective were these trials? Stossel’s description of his life during the time he was writing the chapter on drugs can serve as a commentary: “Many nights I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness—only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety. Thoughts racing, hand shaking, I would end the evening taking a Klonopin and then perhaps a Xanax and drinking a Scotch (and then another and another) to settle down. This is not healthy.” That’s an understatement.

One way in which anxiety differs from depression is that anxious people are often not dysfunctional. William Styron wasn’t able to write “Darkness Visible” when he was clinically depressed; Andrew Solomon had to get over his depression to be able to write his marvellous book “The Noonday Demon.” Though Stossel’s disorder must have made progress painful, he does not appear to have been in remission when he wrote “My Age of Anxiety.”

Whether or not this has something to do with the beneficial aspects of anxiety—it focusses the mind and prepares the body for action (in extreme cases, by evacuating the bowels)—there are many successful people who, like Stossel, have managed to cope with serious phobias and nervous disorders. He discusses a number of them. Charles Darwin suffered from a social anxiety that frequently made it impossible for him to leave his house.





Nerves are a mystery. Some people seem to have none. We admire these people for their pluck, but, really, they are just born lucky. Other people have agoraphobia (fear of public spaces) but are courageous in battle. Most of us have minor performance and social anxieties that stop as soon as we get in front of the microphone or realize that the strangers at the party are no less uninteresting than we are. Our brain shuts off the release of cortisol (the stress hormone associated with the fight-or-flight reflex) and other chemicals that were making us feel anxious. We have evacuated our psychic bowels. We are in the present and in control. We feel good—or, at least, we no longer feel like we’d rather be dead.




In normal life, anxiety has content. It’s not merely a somatic reflex. Bill Russell’s anxiety tells us something we otherwise wouldn’t know about Bill Russell. It tells us how he felt about what he did for a living. Anxiety like Russell’s is triggered by a conscious thought about a present or future circumstance. It is scary to compete in public against talented people who would love nothing more than to make you fail, just as it’s scary to be in an airplane in a thunderstorm or to have a monster under your bed. Those things are scary because they’re dangerous—minimally, to our egos, or, maximally, to our chances of survival. Anxiety protects the organism. In the monster-under-the-bed cases, we can be helped with talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches patients mechanisms for getting control over anxiety-producing trains of thought.

What appears to happen in the brains of people with acute anxiety disorder is what Peter Kramer, the author of “Listening to Prozac,” calls the “stuck switch” problem. The brain fails to shut down the release of stress hormones, and the body keeps pumping them out. The danger is that the overproduction will eventually damage the brain, so that, as Kramer puts it, “temporary injuries become permanent.” Solomon quotes Robert Post, formerly at the National Institute of Mental Health: “If you have too many episodes, it changes your biochemistry for the bad, possibly permanently. At that point, many therapists are still looking in completely the wrong direction. If the episode now occurs on automatic, what good is it to worry about the stressor that kicked off the original process? It’s just too late for that.” Stossel says that he worries about the harm to his brain. It seems a reasonable thing to worry about.

“To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala”—the home of the fight-or-flight reflex—“is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them,” Stossel writes. He is being true to the sayings of Dr. W., and to the beliefs of many people who distrust the medicalization of mood disorders. Still, at the end of his book, Stossel makes a good case that his problem is, at bottom, genetic.

Louis Menand

I think that's a reasonable critique. The capitalism-versus-socialism framing can be useful for some questions, but it also compresses a much broader history of how humans have organized production, exchange, and governance.

For most of human history, people didn't live under anything we'd recognize as either "capitalism" or "socialism." They lived in societies characterized by combinations of:

• Kinship and reciprocal exchange.
• Gift economies.
• Common ownership of some resources alongside individual use of others.
• Tribute and taxation.
• Feudal obligations.
• Markets embedded within larger social and political institutions.

Historians and anthropologists such as Karl Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, Elinor Ostrom, and David Graeber all, in different ways, argue that modern ideological categories often obscure this diversity.

Even the term "capitalism" itself is relatively recent. While historians debate exactly when capitalism begins, most would place its mature form within the last few centuries. Likewise, "socialism" emerges as a self-conscious political movement in the nineteenth century. Against the backdrop of perhaps 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, these are indeed recent developments.

Where the framing does make sense is when the question is narrowly about modern industrial economies. If you're asking:

• Should healthcare be publicly or privately financed?
• How should prices be determined?
• What role should the state play in industry?

then comparing capitalist and socialist traditions is natural because those are the ideologies that have dominated debates over industrial economies since the nineteenth century.

Where it becomes limiting is when it gets treated as if those are the only conceivable ways to organize economic life. That overlooks a vast range of arrangements, including:

• Ostrom's polycentric governance of commons.
• Cooperative enterprises.
• Mutual aid networks.
• Indigenous systems of land stewardship.
• Mixed economies (which virtually every country today has).
• Historical merchant republics, guild systems, and other hybrid institutions.

Language models often reproduce the capitalism/socialism dichotomy because it is extraordinarily common in textbooks, journalism, political commentary, and online debate. They're responding to the distribution of ideas in their training data, not necessarily making the philosophical claim that these are the only meaningful categories.

One subtle point is that economists often use "markets" and "capitalism" almost interchangeably in casual discussion, even though they are distinct concepts. Markets predate capitalism by millennia. Likewise, states, planning, and commons management predate socialism by millennia. Conflating these concepts can make debates seem more binary than they really are.

So I think there's a legitimate criticism here: many discussions jump too quickly from "how should scarce resources be allocated?" to "capitalism or socialism?" without considering the much larger design space of institutions that humans have developed across history.

'Scarcity has both biophysical and institutional dimensions. Physical limits exist, but institutions shape how scarcity is experienced and distributed. Ostrom's work demonstrates that communities can govern scarce commons without relying exclusively on markets or centralized planning, while Sahlins argued that scarcity itself depends partly on culturally defined wants. These perspectives suggest that the question is not simply whether capitalism or central planning is "correct," but which institutional arrangements best match particular resources and social contexts'.

Yes. In My Age of Anxiety and related interviews, Scott Stossel is unusually candid about the breadth of his anxiety. Some of these are clinically recognized phobias; others are persistent anxiety themes or obsessive worries rather than formal phobias.

Specific phobias he has explicitly described

• Claustrophobia — fear of enclosed spaces.
• Acrophobia — fear of heights.
• Asthenophobia — fear of fainting.
• Agoraphobic fears — especially being trapped or far from home where escape would be difficult.
• Bacillophobia (germ phobia) — fear of germs and contamination.
• Turophobia — fear of cheese (one of his most unusual and widely discussed phobias).
• Social anxiety / public speaking anxiety — fear of speaking before groups.
• Aerophobia — fear of flying.
• Emetophobia — fear of vomiting.
• Aeronausiphobia — fear of vomiting while flying, which combines two of his strongest fears.

Lifelong anxiety themes

He also describes chronic anxieties that don't fit neatly into a single phobia:

• Separation anxiety beginning in early childhood.
• Persistent worry that his parents had died or abandoned him.
• Health anxiety (about his own health).
• Anxiety about family members' health.
• Financial worries.
• Work and performance anxiety.
• Fear of aging.
• Fear of death.
• Generalized worry about everyday problems ("everything and nothing," as he puts it).

Physical manifestations

Stossel emphasizes that his anxiety is intensely physical as well as psychological. He reports episodes of:

• severe nausea
• shaking
• profuse sweating
• panic attacks
• shortness of breath
• difficulty swallowing
• difficulty walking
• dizziness and vertigo

He notes that these symptoms can themselves become the focus of obsessive fear, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.

Treatments he says he has tried

Over several decades, he reports trying:

• psychotherapy
• cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
• rational emotive therapy (RET)
• acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)
• exposure therapies
• EMDR
• hypnosis
• meditation
• yoga
• acupuncture
• massage
• Stoic philosophy
• prayer
• multiple medications

His conclusion is not that any one treatment is a universal cure, but that anxiety is a complex interaction of genetics, temperament, biology, psychology, and environment, often requiring a combination of approaches.

One of the striking aspects of Stossel's memoir is that despite experiencing this extensive constellation of fears from early childhood, he maintained a successful career as a magazine editor, writer, husband, and father. His book is as much an exploration of how someone can function alongside severe anxiety as it is a catalog of the anxieties themselves.