If we stopped treating our anxiety as a personal failing, could we finally see it as a symptom of the world we live in?

When we feel overwhelmed by the state of the world, we are often told to look inward—to meditate, optimize our routines, or simply manage our stress better. But looking back at the nineteenth-century French concept of le mal du siècle, we find a different perspective: the idea that our collective malaise might be a rational response to our environment, not a personal failure. This piece explores how a generation two hundred years ago grappled with their own sense of historical displacement, offering us a vital framework for understanding our current anxieties as something shared, structural, and profoundly human.

Read at source: Aeon