“Stupidity is without anxiety” - Goethe

 “Stupidity is without anxiety” - Goethe (1749-1832). 16 August 1824. In Peter Exkerman, Conversations with Goethe, 1836-1848, tr. John Oxenford, 1850

- We have anxiety because we cannot stop thinking about what is going to happen. We go over every possible scenario in our heads and lose track of all of them, or we obsess in a single pattern, going round and round in circles. Anxiety is having an intrusive thought that just won't go away or being unable to stop worrying over some possible event. The worst thing about anxiety is how it seems to control you, how it seems to paralyze you, and how it seems to keep you up at night. When Goethe says that stupidity is without anxiety, then I understand this in one of two ways. 

In the first way, he simply means to say that anxiety is a disease of thought, a pale cast over our minds. The smarter we are, or the more aware we are of our circumstances, then the more we tend to live in our heads. A strong mind is able to create hallucinations, ignore sensations, and whip itself into a frenzy, more often, more easily, and more powerfully than a weak mind. A strong mind, a smart person, is harder to calm down, harder to distract, and has a harder time being able to stop thinking, and instead start acting. The more you can see into the future, then the more you can plan for the future, but if all you know is today, and not tomorrow or five years from now, then anxiety has less of a hold over you. It is said that ignorance is bliss, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why - so much of what we think we know is not actually knowledge, but really just educated guesses, imagined series of actions and reactions, or doubt-able beliefs. That is, we think that such-and-such is going to happen, but the more we think about it, then the more we are not sure, and this is one type of anxiety. If we choose to be 'stupid', to not try and figure out every angle, then it is easier to live in the moment. Anxiety is what happens when we are so concerned with the future that we forget the present. 

The second way I may understand this quote is to understand anxiety not in a negative sense, but in a positive one. We sometimes find that what we are anxious about, we are anxious about for good reason. Just as often as anxiety does paralyze us and damage us, it also opens up the possibility for substantial change, and far-sighted action. When our anxiety is too strong it is bad, but we can try to turn this around, to ask it in the other way - what price would we pay if we were never anxious? There are nights when I think about something over and over again in my head, unable to sleep. Those nights are painful, but they are also the nights that I write the most. Worrying about a single problem over and over again in our mind keeps us stuck on that issue, but sometimes that is what we need to get ourselves through the issue, to deal with the problem. We need the trouble we are having to always be at the forefront of our mind, so that we cannot run away from it. Just as we can find that turning to the present may allow us to relieve stress and take action, we can also find that retreating to the present may allow us to ignore the future, to pretend that what is going to come to pass will not, or to pretend that we are not worried about something which we, in fact, are worried about. How many of us go drinking to forget our troubles, or dive into mind-numbing situations so that we can avoid facing those issues? 'Stupidity' can be a blessing, or a curse, depending on what we use it for, when, and for how long. 

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