On Living in Reality, Not in Anxiety

Lessons learned from recovering from OCD

Photo by Joice Kelly on Unsplash

It’s been nearly a year now since I wrote this article on “The Battle for What is Real,” where I riffed on a

Luke Burgis

argument that the major battle for our time is between realism and anti-realism. Since that time I’ve only become more convinced of that thesis. The explosion of AI has certainly drawn us further away from what is real. And that will only accelerate. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. I think that to live in the contemporary world is to constantly fight against the temptation to be pulled away from your senses and your reasoning and into your intuition, into a hijacked imagination, and into disordered habits. Some of these temptations are as old as time. Plato addresses them in the Allegory of the Cave in The Republic. We are shackled to our poor visions of what we think reality and the good is, when really reality and the good is much brighter and richer and more beautiful than we can imagine. But we have to get out of the cave to realize this. What I want to focus on today is the way anxiety and worry keep us stuck in that cave. This is what I’ve learned from recovering from OCD, and I believe it’s applicable to many people who suffer from worries and anxieties. When we allow our imaginations to suck us into fears, we leave reality and the here-and-now. We disassociate from our surroundings and lose touch with creation, including other people and our own bodies. Part of learning to deal with anxiety is learning to live in reality, to come out of the cave. Which is not easy, but it’s beautiful.