Lucid Thoughts on an Anxious Evening

Tina Chong
1 min readApr 11, 2022

For most of my life I have seen anxiety as the enemy. It needed to be controlled, oppressed, depleted, compartmentalized — like a poison or a rodent needing to be caged.

I shared this with a friend awhile back, and he mentioned that he addressed it by trying to fix the cause of it.

“What if it’s too meta? Or completely out of my control?”

I explained that once I came to that conclusion, I blessed it off into the ether, and focused on what I could change within my orbit.

“But what if 1,000 other anxious people dedicated their life to resolving ~1% of it? Then collectively we’d be able to actually change the course of existence.” He was explaining why he decided to leave a high paying engineering job at Google to do a startup focused on climate change.

I thought about this for weeks, and over time decided to change my relationship with my anxiety. It used to confuse me, drive me into analytical paralysis, and had me constantly playing devils advocate for the opposing narrative.

I’m here now at the other end of it, and am realizing how powerful this approach is — an existentialist engine driving your life’s ontology — driving your “why”. Now, it imbues pristine clarity; I feel strong, focused, and hungry.

So, it’s time to find the other 999.

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Tina Chong

AI/ML for national security at DIU | ex Facebook and Jet.com | Army Aviator 🚁& Veteran. I write about the things I don’t understand.