A Dissertation on Neurosis

I promised a friend I had coffee with today that I will write a post about neurosis and whether or not it can play a role in healthy living, so I thought maybe I could explore this now.  Neurosis in itself is an interesting concept.  It doesn't exactly denote mental illness, but perhaps a complex of coping strategies in the face of an impending mental health breakdown.  I am reminded of the joke about the difference between neurotics and psychotics.  Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them, and the psychiatrist collects the rent!
     I think of neurosis as a First World Phenomenon.  It used to be the property of the middle and upper middle classes of Europe during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries but now that the general standard of living for most people who live in First World Countries is at a par or surpasses that of the upper classes of old this has definitely become a general phenomenon, in our countries anyway. 
     I imagine there are certain qualifiers for neurosis.  First of all, there must be no immediate threat to personal or collective survival.  To do well at neurosis, one must already be leading a relatively comfortable life.  You are well housed, fed and clothed, enjoy certain social status and have a generally intact family and social network.  In fact, what makes neurosis what it is, which is to say, neurosis, the fewer external problems or deficiencies the better.
     It is my belief that we have certain primal needs and urges that relate directly to physical survival that have not died out despite the advances and comforts that we enjoy in civilized life.  If we are not preoccupied scrambling to survive, to find food for the table, ensure shelter for the night, escape bombs falling from airplanes or to survive a nuclear holocaust we have no time or spare energy for neurosis.  There is no time to obsess over relationships, or social status, or subtle details of health in our unusually robust bodies.  There is no need to make mountains out of molehills while hiding from a sniper's bullets.
     Neurosis is a buffer against boredom, or existential angst, or ennui. Or purposelessness. It is a channel for the primal energy of fear and resourcefulness that our primeval ancestors lived with as their norm for hundreds of thousands of years.  A few generations of civilized bourgeois comfort is not going to change this.  These instincts get driven underground.  This really shows in professional sports.  We no longer send our young sons off to war, at least not lately.  In our peaceful times we channel our instinct towards armed aggression onto the hockey rink or the soccer field.  Young, and no longer young, men have their masculinity revalidated while stuffing their pie holes with beer and pizza in front of the TV screen, and it has been shown too that their testosterone levels also go up while watching televised sports.  Our complex social behaviour in the workplace is also a safe channelling of these primal needs, only we are no longer hunting and killing woolly mammoths and so the way we express the primal urges also is modified and sublimated.
     Ten thousand years of civilization has done virtually nothing to really change us.  It seems the better our quality of life the more anxious and worried, which is to say, the more neurotic we become.  We are almost instinctively allergic to living in good peaceful times so instead many of us obsess over the end of the world through climate change, the end of civilization through terrorism, or the end of our lives through cancer and heart disease, not because these are real and present dangers (and after a fashion, they are real and present dangers) but because we have all this time on our hands to get worried, anxious and neurotic about catastrophes that still may never befall us.  In the words of Judy Collins, we barter our lives to make sure we are living. 
     I would propose this as an antidote to neurosis.  It involves our moving outside of and beyond ourselves, our families, social and professional circles, outside of our very comfort zones.  It could mean becoming more familiar with the lives of those who have to struggle and fight daily to survive.  I could mean working and organizing to further strengthen and improve the institutions and infrastructures that signify our advances and comforts, working for a sustainable environment, for the use of renewable energy sources, for peace and community and economic development in other parts of the world, for the welfare of refugees and victims of war and conflict or famine or natural disasters, for an eradication of homelessness and poverty in our own cities.  The best solution to neurosis is selflessness, because neurosis, which springs out of irrational fear, is always selfishly based and for this reason it is also very toxic.  No matter how good we have it, we can always improve further, we can always grow, and we can always go on learning and offering our hands to one another in help, need, friendship and love.  In love there is room for everything except fear.  And except neurosis.