How to Survive the End of the World

📇 Index §

Highlights §

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Panic attacks. They are the human equivalent of your computer freezing because you asked it to do too many things at once. An overload of information has caused the whole system to go into meltdown. Now it’s just doing the circle of doom, where the mouse doesn’t work, you can’t close any applications and some awful music (something really annoying, probably involving a sousaphone) plays in three-second loops in the background.

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This is just how my brain is wired. I can’t take it back under warranty and ask for a new one, or take it to a Genius Bar and ask for a replacement part. The most I can do is try to understand why my brain programmed itself this way.

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When your brain is your worst enemy, you spend a lot of time wanting to be alone, being alone and absolutely hating being alone.

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I had my first ever panic attack after I dropped a mug in the kitchen. → This feels familiar.

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The fight or flight response is what makes us human. Do we deal with the situation at hand or do we get ourselves out of this as quickly as we can and make sure we never do it ever, ever again?

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‘Anxiety is being trapped in the present by the fear of the future.’

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Kierkegaard attributed anxiety to the unpredictability of the future: if we all knew what was going to happen in every moment of our lives then we would have nothing to be anxious about.