In Part 1, I exposed how fear has become the currency of control in modern society. How politicians, media, marketers, and the medical establishment weaponized fear to keep you compliant, consuming, and dependent. How they manufacture terror to modify your behavior and profit from your perpetual state of alarm.
The most lucrative and dangerous mental health lie sold to us is that fear and its byproduct “anxiety” are our enemies. That we need to eliminate it, medicate it, therapize it away. Somehow it’s a dangerous symptom. “I have anxiety” has become akin to a high fever or sore throat.
We've created a society so afraid of fear that we'll swallow any pill, buy any program, follow any guru who promises to free us from it. We're so terrified of anxiety that we've developed anxiety about our anxiety. We're so scared of panic attacks that we panic about the possibility of panicking. We've become phobic about fear itself.
Despite having more therapists, more medications, more mental health awareness than ever in human history, we're more anxious than ever. This in itself should be a clue that the entire paradigm is flawed. It’s a serious cultural problem.
We used to have different stories about fear. Every culture throughout history understood fear as the gateway to courage. The hero's journey always led through the valley of fear. Religious traditions spoke of dark nights of the soul that preceded enlightenment. Rites of passage required young people to face their fears to become adults. Our grandparents told stories of overcoming, not medicating. They knew that fear was the price of admission to a meaningful life.
But we traded those stories for diagnoses. We replaced initiation with medication. We swapped resilience for avoidance, courage for comfort, growth for symptom management. We abandoned thousands of years of wisdom about fear as teacher, fear as initiator, fear as the fire that forges character, and replaced it with fear as pathology.
The old stories taught us that fear was the dragon guarding the treasure. Today's story teaches us that fear is the dragon that needs to be slain – or better yet, sedated. But here's what happens when you kill the dragon: you never get the treasure. Because the treasure was never what the dragon was guarding. The treasure was learning how to face the dragon.
Minds as Prisons
"I haven't slept properly in three years," Jill told me, her hands wrapped around a coffee cup as if it were the only thing anchoring her to reality. Dark circles beneath her eyes revealed her exhaustion before she even spoke. "My mind won't stop. It’s like there’s a movie playing on repeat—every mistake I’ve made, every way tomorrow could go wrong, every possible catastrophe."
This is the human condition in 2025. We have become prisoners in the theater of our own minds, forced to watch horror films we are both directing and starring in. Jill wasn't describing mental illness; she was describing what happens when we become slaves to the mind’s ability to manufacture fear from thin air.
Many of us have been taught that this constant mental chatter is a brain disorder. Millions believe there is something fundamentally wrong with their brains, which can lead to feelings of helplessness and shame. The implications are profound: when we see our mental suffering as a neurological defect, we often seek quick fixes or medication, believing that changing the brain will resolve the problem. But the core issue is more fundamental.
There is a function to mental chatter and worry. It’s our desire to reduce feelings of fear and anxiety by trying to predict what might happen, to time travel in our minds to learn from the past or anticipate the future. It is a deep-seated desire for control, an attempt to protect ourselves from pain by eliminating the uncomfortable feeling of fear.
This compulsion to control and predict is the engine of our suffering. We scan for threats that don't exist, rehearse conversations that will never happen, and build elaborate defenses against futures that will never arrive. The mind becomes a prediction machine running on fear, and we become its prisoners.
We're not helpless victims of our own minds. We're active participants in our own torture. Every time we try to think our way out of anxiety, we strengthen it. Every time we attempt to control fear, we feed it. Every time we fight against our own experience, we guarantee its persistence. We are both the prisoner and the guard, the tortured and the torturer, locked in an endless battle with ourselves that nobody can win. Our ancient survival mechanism that allows us to imagine danger, learn from real threats, and anticipate future problems has been hijacked by our need to feel safe.
Jill’s insomnia wasn't caused by fear itself but by her desperate attempts to think her way out of fear. Each night, she would try to solve every problem, answer every worry, and prepare for every possible scenario. She was fighting fear with more thinking, which is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
The mind's ability to generate fear isn't the problem. It's a survival tool that kept our ancestors alive. The problem is we use it to create fear about things that can't be controlled: other people's opinions, uncertain futures, the endless "what ifs" that have no answer.
When we believe every fearful thought, when we treat anxiety as truth, when we try to control the uncontrollable, we transform a warning system into an instrument of torture.
We are not our thoughts. We are not our fears. We are the awareness that can observe both without being controlled by either.
The Escape Routes
But here's the paradox: Every attempt to control fear feeds it. Every escape route becomes a new prison. Every solution becomes the next problem.
This isn't some psychological theory. This is the iron law of fear: The harder you try to eliminate it, the stronger it grows. The more you avoid it, the more powerful it becomes. The more chemicals you throw at it, the more resistant it gets. You're not fighting fear…you're training it to be stronger.
Think about it. Every time you take a drink to calm your nerves, you're teaching your nervous system that it can't handle fear without alcohol. Every time you check the locks again to feel safe, you're confirming that the world is dangerous and only compulsive vigilance keeps catastrophe at bay. Every time you pop a Xanax to avoid panic, you're programming your brain to believe that fear is so dangerous you need chemical protection from your own emotions.
You're not reducing fear. You're proving its power over you with every pill, every drink, every ritual, every avoidance. You're building a monument to fear's dominance while believing you're defeating it.
"I just need to check one more time," Michael explained, describing his morning routine that had stretched from 10 minutes to 3 hours. "The stove, the locks, the windows. If I check them in the right order, the right number of times, I can leave the house without panicking."
Michael had discovered what millions learn: you can temporarily reduce anxiety through control rituals. The checking reduced his fear of catastrophe – for about thirty seconds. Then the doubt crept back. Did he really check the stove? Was he certain it was off? Better check again. The compulsions that promised control had become his captor. Each ritual reinforced the belief that disaster was imminent without perfect vigilance. He wasn't controlling fear anymore; fear was controlling him through the illusion of control. He lost any tolerance for the uncertainty in life and could no longer trust himself.
"I don't even enjoy it anymore," Kevin admitted, talking about the 6+ hours a day he spent between porn and gaming. "But when I'm in those worlds, I don't have to think these thoughts, feel these feelings, experience my reality of not measuring up, the failure that has become my life." Each escape into digital fantasy made the real world more frightening by comparison. Real relationships seemed impossibly complex compared to porn's scripted simplicity.
"What happens when you're not in that fantasy world?" I asked.
"Shame," he said. "Crushing shame. So I go back online to escape the shame of going online. I'm medicating the pain caused by the medication."
The look in his eyes told me he understood the trap perfectly. He just didn't know how to stop. The escape had become mandatory. Not because it brought pleasure, but because reality without it had become intolerable. He'd trained his nervous system to believe he couldn't handle his own life without digital anesthesia. And every day he proved himself right.
"Wine was medicine," Lisa explained, gripping her coffee cup to hide the morning shakes. "Just something to take the edge off social situations. Everyone drinks at parties, right?" Two years later, she couldn't face any social interaction without alcohol in her system. The fear of being caught without a drink had become worse than the original social anxiety. She'd traded one master for another, except this one came with withdrawals that made her original anxiety look like a gentle breeze.
"When I control my food, I feel powerful," Rachel explained, weighing her fourth apple of the day to make sure it was exactly 80 grams. "It's the only thing in my life I can perfectly control." But the eating disorder that promised control had stolen it completely. She couldn't eat without calculating, couldn't attend social events that involved food. Her world had shrunk to the size of a food scale. The restriction that began as an attempt to manage the fear of being unlovable had created a new tyrant. Now she feared food itself.
This is the pattern, repeated millions of times across millions of lives: Fear creates discomfort. We find something that numbs it – alcohol, drugs, rituals, restriction, digital worlds, work, perfectionism. The relief is temporary but the solution sticks. Soon we need the solution just to feel normal. The very behaviors meant to reduce fear convince our nervous system that the world is so dangerous we can't face it without our crutch.
"The Xanax helped at first," Amy recalled. "I could finally fly without panic. I could sleep without the racing thoughts." Six months later, she needed Xanax just to leave the house. The rebound anxiety between doses was worse than her original panic. The medication designed to reduce fear had created a chemical dependency that generated more fear than she'd ever experienced naturally. The psychiatrist's solution? Add an SSRI. When that caused side effects and no longer “worked”, add Wellbutrin. Five medications later, Amy couldn't tell which symptoms were her original anxiety and which were medication side effects.
Fear is the enemy. You can't handle it. You need protection from your own emotions.
But fear isn't the enemy. It never was. It's energy trying to move through you, wisdom trying to reach you, life force trying to mobilize you. When you block it, numb it, control it, or run from it, you don't eliminate it. You trap it in your body where it turns toxic, generating the very suffering you were trying to avoid.
The escape routes don't lead out of fear. They lead deeper into it. The solutions become the problems. The medicine becomes the poison. And the entire medical-industrial complex looks at this wreckage and says, "You need more treatment."
This isn't healing. This is a con game where everyone loses except those profiting from our desperate attempts to escape the very thing that's trying to protect us.
When Fear Becomes Depression
Much of what we call "depression" is simply the exhaustion of living at war with yourself. You're simultaneously trapped in the mind's horror stories about who you are, what you're capable of, what terrible futures await you, while desperately trying to escape the emotions these stories generate. It's a double bind: you believe the thoughts that create fear, then exhaust yourself trying not to feel the fear you've created.
Think about it: You wake up already defeated by thoughts of inadequacy. You spend the day dodging emotions those thoughts trigger. You avoid situations that might confirm your worst beliefs about yourself. You construct elaborate control systems to prevent the pain your own mind is manufacturing. Of course you're exhausted. You're using all your life force to fight a war on two fronts: against the stories in your head and against the feelings in your body.
The mind says "I'm not good enough," and instead of questioning the thought, you believe it. Then when that belief generates shame and fear, instead of feeling those emotions and letting them pass through, instead of using that energy as fuel for needed change in your life, you drink, distract, or medicate them away. You're identified with the very thoughts that torture you while simultaneously running from the emotions they create. The emotions that could actually motivate transformation become the enemy to be defeated. This isn't living. It's existing in a state of constant internal conflict.
Can people experience symptoms like depressed mood, loss of motivation, and fatigue from other medical issues or lifestyle factors? Absolutely. Thyroid dysfunction, metabolic illness, vitamin D deficiency, sedentary lifestyle, chronic inflammation, disrupted sleep. These are real, addressable causes of real suffering. If you're exhausted because your thyroid is failing or your B12 is depleted, that's not what we used to call a “psychiatric” or “psychological” problem. That's a medical problem that needs medical solutions. Psychiatrists will drug those very presenting problems today.
When we traditionally speak of depression, true melancholia, the disease of despair, we're talking about something entirely different. We're talking about a disorder of the psyche, the mental world, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what's possible. This is the depression that emerges not from broken biochemistry but from a broken relationship with life itself.
This psychological depression, the kind that no amount of vitamin D or exercise fully resolves, is the predictable collapse that comes from chronic avoidance of fear. It's what can happen when you've built your entire existence around not feeling, not facing, not risking. Your world shrinks to the size of your comfort zone, which gets smaller every year. Eventually, you're living in a prison so small you can barely breathe, and you wonder why you feel dead inside.
You've attached so completely to the mind's narrative about who you are, what you're capable of, what dangers lurk in every opportunity, that you've forgotten you're the author of these stories.
The mind says "I can't handle rejection," and you believe it. The mind says "Failure would destroy me," and you live accordingly. The mind says "People will judge me," and you hide. The. mind says “you don’t deserve any better” and you stay in a situation that fuels misery.
Each belief becomes a bar in your cage. Each fear-based decision becomes another brick in the wall between you and actual living. Then one day you wake up and realize: You haven't been living. You've been managing fear. And the exhaustion of that management, the bone-deep fatigue of constantly running from your own shadow, that's what creates true depression.
Manufacturing Patients
The mental health system that's supposed to be helping you is making you worse. Not accidentally. Systematically.
The overwhelming majority of mental health professionals have zero fucking clue how to help you move through fear. They've been trained to help you manage “symptoms”, not transform them. To help you cope with your diagnosis, not transcend it. Week after week, you sit there rehearsing your dysfunction until it becomes your identity. "Tell me more about your anxiety," they say, as if talking about fear for the thousandth time will somehow dissolve it.
By session three: "Have you considered medication?"
They have no idea what these drugs actually do. They don't know that SSRIs blunt the very emotions you need to feel to heal. They don't know that benzodiazepines create a dependency that makes your original anxiety look like paradise. They don't know that the "off-label" antipsychotic for sleep will alter your brain structure. They know the marketing pitch. They know the diagnostic codes. They know nothing about what they're actually doing to you.
Every psychiatric drug is emotional avoidance in pill form. Every prescription teaches your nervous system that you can't handle your own experience. The very recommendation of medication, before you've even tried to develop a different relationship with fear, undermines any real work that needs to be done.
You come in afraid. They confirm you should be afraid of your own emotions. You come in believing you're broken. They give you a diagnosis that proves it. You come in wanting to transform. They teach you to manage. You come in seeking freedom. They hand you chemical handcuffs.
They believe they're helping. That's the tragedy. They can't see that their "treatments" create chronic patients, that their medications cause the very symptoms they claim to treat, that viewing human suffering as pathology to be eliminated rather than energy to be transformed is the problem.
The mental health industrial complex doesn't want you to discover that fear is just energy. That you can discharge it through your body, transform it into action, alchemize it into power. Because a person who can move through fear doesn't need weekly therapy forever. A person who understands emotions as energy rather than symptoms doesn't need medication. A person who transforms suffering into strength doesn't need them at all.
The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed: creating lifetime customers, not healing people. Manufacturing chronic mental illness, not mental health. Teaching you to fear your own fear, to pathologize your own protection, to medicate your own messenger.
Your fear isn't too much. Your sensitivity isn't a disorder. You've been conscripted into a system that profits from convincing you otherwise. A system that needs you sick, scared, and dependent on solutions that aren't solutions at all.
They know how to diagnose, medicate, and bill insurance. They don't know how to help you become free.
If there's one truth to carry forward from this article: You're not broken for feeling fear, and fear isn't what's breaking you. What's destroying your life is the exhausting, impossible, endless attempt to control, escape, and medicate the very energy that's trying to save you.
The Alchemy of Fear
If you've made it this far, you're probably feeling the weight of recognition. Good. You're finally seeing the matrix: the prison you've built from your own attempts to escape fear.
But Part 3 holds secrets that should not be secrets.
Ancient wisdom about fear that's been buried under psychiatric propaganda. Practical strategies and daily practices for transforming fear energy that's been trapped in your body for decades. The hidden connection between your capacity for fear and your capacity for ecstasy. How to decode fear's messages before they become chronic illness. Why the most sensitive people aren't broken but have untapped super powers.
Because here's what's coming: Everyone who has ever done anything meaningful has learned this secret. Not the absence of fear, but the alchemy of it. The transformation of raw fear into pure life force.
Your fear isn't too much. You've just been taught to relate to it in exactly the wrong way by a culture that profits from your terror. Remember Part 1: Politicians need you afraid to stay in power. Media needs you afraid to keep watching. Pharma needs you afraid of your own emotions to keep prescribing. The entire control system depends on you believing that fear is your enemy rather than recognizing it as the energy of transformation they don't want you to access.
Because when you transform fear into power, you become ungovernable. When you alchemize anxiety into action, you stop being a reliable consumer. When you understand fear as life force rather than disease, you exit the entire economy of control.
The revolution begins when you learn what fear actually is and what to do with it.
Stay tuned for Part 3: The Alchemy of Fear.
I try to keep RADICALLY GENUINE as free as I can, but it takes quite a lot of work. If you find some value in my writing and podcast I very much appreciate the paid subscription. It really helps me continue putting time aside for these pieces. Thank you.
Holy sh*t. This is the best thing I have ever read.
By the way, I often read your articles out loud to my family.
As someone else said, this is one of the best things I have read in a long time and it couldn't have come at a better time. Thank you for your dedication to this cause. I am grateful to you!