You know, any person of even average intelligence has to be feeling some anxiety about the pace of change going on, the hate going on, the abusiveness and acrimony. Robots, AI, the possibility of a truly dangerous global pandemic, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, economic downturns, etc.
But has this not always been true? Disease, to take one example, has been a constant threat for all of human history. Lifespan statistics pushed averages way down because so many children died before the age of ten. There were always the risks of war and hunger and abuse by your local despot, whoever he or she was.
Here is what I will suggest: investing your one meager Talent, the small bit left you by your master, IS scary. In non-symbolic terms, this means remaining open to this anxiety; to accepting the absolute impossibility of avoiding confusion and doubt and trepidation.
You have to try. This is the only requirement. You have to wrestle, as best you can, with the process of being human. You have to try, every day, to be present. To be here. To not give yourself over to dogma, rote habit, arrogant assumption, or the sway of the crowd.
Here is the thing: one way of avoiding anxiety is obviously giving in fully to what I would describe as psychotic certainty. This is a certainty where you have completely stopped trying to connect with observable realities and your entire “existence”–which is a non-existence–is connected with words CREATED BY OTHER PEOPLE. It is a negative hallucination, in which what is obviously there is conjured away, and you ACCEPT THIS. It is a positive hallucination, in which, for example, Joe Biden is a force for Good and we absolutely, positively have to get rid of fossil fuels, even if China and India are not, and even if the whole thing MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL AND CAUSES MASS SUFFERING.
It is a world where Trump becomes a monster by being guilty of tackiness, pettiness, and some phrases that were clearly taken out of context to form lies to make traps for fools.
God will easily forgive mistakes. You only make mistakes when you are in the arena. And when you are in the arena you cannot not learn. Every experience, with any degree of emotional openness, expands your possibilities.
In the end, failing to remain open by choosing a psychotic certainty–which is what much of Religion writ large was for a very long time–is pissing away some part of our human potential. It is selling some part of the soul for a contingent and weak sense of meaningless “safety”.
It would not be unreasonable to call staying in the ring–to feeling anxiety and doubt and confusion consciously and continuing on anyway–faith.
Dealing with negative emotions is a skill. You accept and allow them, and carry on anyway. The worst possible things you can do are to pretend they are not there, which makes you superficial and silly (and there is plenty of that going on); or conjure them away by blaming other people, which necessarily involves explaining them with lies.