The privatisation of anxiety

Wellness, self-help and the resilience doctrine

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  • Published 20210504
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-59-7
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

AT THE LAST moment, I had stuffed K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher into my carry-on case. At 817 pages and weighing in at over a kilo, Fisher almost cost me an excess luggage charge. Better to have packed my local bookshop’s most pilfered title, Fisher’s pocket-sized Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Having landed at Alice Springs, I hired a car and headed west to a motel. Every afternoon, after driving out to explore, I had stationed myself outside my room on a plastic chair, sticky with sweat, sweltering in the heat with Fisher and squadrons of tiny flies.

A year after my trip to the desert, I was under lockdown, my days rotating between reading, walking within a five-kilometre radius and Zooming out to other parts of the world.

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About the author

Angela Smith

Angela Smith’s essays and poetry have been published widely in Australian journals and anthologies. She is a three-time winner of the New Philosopher Writers’...

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