ABSTRACT
The author talks to Patrik, who is so lost in his own thoughts that he never quite feels present with his children. Patrik sometimes realises that he should be happy – when his child learns to walk, for example. But he isn’t. Instead, he worries. How did Patrik end up here? And how could the famous mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel – hailed as a genius by Einstein – go so far astray in his inability to manage risk that he ultimately starved himself to death in order to avoid being poisoned? There is nothing to say that anyone should be this anxious. New York's ironworkers, many of whom have a Mohawk background, live with the very real (and daily) risk of falling from one of the beams they have to balance on while constructing skyscrapers. Is there another form of intelligence other than the rational, calculating kind? One that teaches us to live with risk rather than minimise it? In this chapter, the reader learns about how anxiety varies both between individuals and between regions. According to WHO data, the proportion of a population that will, during their lifetime, meet the criteria for generalised anxiety disorder varies, according to WHO data, from 0.1 percent in Nigeria to 8 percent in Australia. What explains this type of differences? Are some cultures more alert to the risk of being “lost in thought”? The Shona people in Zimbabwe talk about kufungisisa rather than anxiety or depression. The literal meaning of the word is “thinking too much”. Around the world, there are several equivalent concepts, but this is something that Western medicine lacks. Why do we identify so strongly with our anxious thoughts in this part of the world? Have we lost touch with a more accepting approach to uncertainty whose remnants we can still glimpse from time to time? That is the subject of Part II.
