Heidegger - Anxiety

Jasmine Dahilig

Dr. Brad Stone

HNRS 120:02

November 5, 2010

Keys

She sat staring at the blank screen. “Writer’s Block”, she called it, but it was really “work-anxiety”, that way in which she would wrap herself up in possibility of failure until she was so preoccupied with all the various ways she could screw up her next essay – and there were so many – that she couldn’t even think to see the screen anymore, or feel the keys beneath her fingers. She typed two words, “I can’t.”

_______

Very little is ever said about the keys on a computer keyboard.

The only historical tech-lore she knew about the Qwerty keyboard is that it was originally designed to slow people down so they wouldn’t jam the typewriter, but since the invention of the computer (along with the backspace button and CTRL-Z) she knew that avoiding typewriter jams was no longer necessary, making the Qwerty keyboard obsolete. Why keep these keys if all they ever do is slow her down? Even after numerous typing games and training she had done (75 words per minute was her average), this infernal Qwerty keyboard was still slowing her down bit by bit everyday. According to TypingTest.org, she saved 5 hours each week by typing faster, but just imagine how much time she could have saved if the keys on this keyboard were arranged in a way that wasn’t hindering her potential – if she even knew what her potential was, anyways. This keys in that Qwerty keyboard were not missing at all, and they were not broken. They were just obstinate. Obstinately preventing her from typing faster and saving time. Obstinately preventing her from being the best typist she could be. Obstinately standing in her way as if to say that they knew she would never touch them because they were slowing her production which was in some weird way one step closer to failure. Any excuse to avoid writing, or rather, working.

Failing.

_______

The keys on her keyboard, the ones she so scarcely touched in her anxiety, were ironically her keys to success. She could have used these keys everyday as an extension of her fingers, as an extension of her ability to produce printed word, and as an extension of her ability to learn by accessing the Net – if she just would. This last extension of her potential ability was a peculiar case, however. Accessing the Net was the one way in which she felt connected to every other human being on the planet, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted that. Being with other people meant realizing that she was a human being, but a human being that was not-as-good. Every time she went on Facebook and took interest in someone else’s world, she read about a classmate’s A+ on an essay, and then she remembered how the only time she could ever get an A+ was when she did not sleep for two days and consequently contracted pink-eye from not sleeping. Going on Facebook, or even just accessing the Net and reading about fantastically successful people like Steve Jobs or Terrence Tao, released all of her anxieties. She was anxious that the only way she could get another A+ on her essay was through similar circumstances, or worse, that even if she repeated the events and obsessed over the next assignment for two days without sleep that she would still fail. What was truly unfortunate, was that she did. Obsess and lose sleep, that is. And fail.

So her solution was to delete Facebook, begin her escape from the Net, and deny that there were other people who were infinitely better than her. If she didn’t take interest in other people’s worlds then it was like they didn’t exist anymore and she was in total isolation, and thus ignorant of how “good” or “bad” she was doing in comparison to peers. The only problem was that a fundamental part of her existence was the fact that she coexisted with other people, and she could not deny that. She could only pretend that she was in isolation, but she was really just being with other people in a different way: the only reason she could be alone was because other people existed elsewhere.

Ultimately, there was nothing she could do to avoid it. Not even smashing her keyboard against the wall and destroying her internet connection could change the fact that there were other people who were smarter than her. However, the real issue was not the other people. It was her. To her, there were so many possible ways in which she could succeed and so many possible ways in which she could fail, but she was so wrapped up in possibility of failure that she let her anxiety get in the way of her success. For every second that she stared at the blank screen without typing she destroyed a possible version of herself that could have gotten an A+. Her anxiety of possible failure became real fear when she had experienced failure and lost sleep before, but she knew, even then while staring at the blank screen, that she could not let her anxiety nor her fear prevent her from succeeding in life.

Resolute, she put her fingers to the keys and began to type.