Month: June 2025

A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety by Allen Tran (University of California Press: 2023) In A Life of Worry, Allen L. Tran examines how anxiety in post-reform Vietnam is produced at the intersection of historical rupture, economic transformation, and relational obligations. Tran challenges psychiatric models that isolate anxiety as […]

Introduction Days before his death, Ernest Becker wrote with remarkable clarity on the human dishonesty around death. “The basic human predicament,” Becker submits, is “that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” All our symbolic constructs—the book projects, Instagram reels, religious convictions, and romantic gestures—serve the singular purpose of repudiating the fact of our own finitude. […]