I’m a relatively young professional, but I’ve been the new coach to several new gyms in my day. Additionally when I travel, I thoroughly enjoy visiting new facilities. For the better part of most of my personal exercise, I workout barefoot. You can only imagine the unsolicited attention this must get. Just imagine a large, long-haired, tattooed meathead throwing weight around the gym, grunting all the way. By far, the most frequent commentary I receive is “aren’t you worried that you’ll drop a weight on your bare toes?”

Anxiety is an interesting thing. It’s generally categorized as an emotion, and I would agree with that. However, it’s also been labeled as a medical condition. In lieu of this, the weak in character and psychologically-manipulative in our population have weaponized the powerful hold that anxiety can take for their own personal gain. This manifests in the world through the normalization of the over-expression of emotional discomfort, victimizing everything and everyone who isn’t a beautiful billionaire, and placing trigger warnings on everything. You must tiptoe around these people and the sheep who have bought into their game… if you want to remain in their good graces. If you don’t want to be cancelled. If you want to be politically correct. If you want to be an “ally.” It’s truly an unfortunate state of affairs and it has transformed public discourse into an obstacle course. Even moreso, considering that in this day and age, we have more public discourse than ever before.

Regardless of if that spiel pissed you off or invoked an “amen,” the fact still remains that anxiety is simply an emotion. I can’t think of another emotion that we’ve overblown to this extent. Emotions come and go, everyone knows that. To treat an emotion like it’s a disease is to give it the power to become a disease. We’ve given anxiety that power. Our safety standards and our cultural pasteurization and our silly invented words to appease the SJW’s. The most mind-blowing thing about anxiety is that the subject of the emotion is not part of reality. Think about the last time you had overwhelming anxiety about something. Next month’s rent you don’t know how you’ll pay for, a test coming up that you’re not prepared for, premonitions of a significant other acting unfaithfully. All of those things, along with all things we experience anxiety about, are either in the future, part of an unknown reality we’ve conjured up in our head, or both. Anxiety invokes the most destructive and malicious conclusions we can imagine. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s meant to drive us to action, to do something about our potential problems. Instead, we treat the symptom. We try to feel less. We sit on it. We bottle it up. We hope it goes away. Anxiety is fear of the unknown future. It is quite literally the opposite of faith.

The inquiries about dropping weights on my bare feet used to confuse me, but I didn’t realize why, so I would just dismiss them with a chuckle. The more it happened, the more I thought about it, and one day while fielding yet another one of those silly questions it came to me. I replied, “well, when was the last time you dropped a weight on your foot while wearing shoes?”