" How to Exist OK " is a column that attempts to figure out how to exist OK. In it, writer, artist, and existential Humpty Dumpty Gideon Jacobs sits down with a sage of some sort—monks, ministers, theologians, psychologists, philosophers, bartenders, centenarians, and more—and asks them how to survive being human, how to navigate the world while lugging around three squishy pounds of consciousness in a rapidly decaying bag of skin.

VICE: Do you think the premise of this column is, well, good? Is OK-ness a decent bar for us to be setting, or is it too high or low? Jamieson Webster: Freud in Civilization and its Discontents attacks the question of happiness, which is really apt today because I think people expect to be happy. And they expect that all of the trappings of modern life were created in order to make them happy, and when they don't make them happy, they blame themselves.

It might be worth noting that while we chatted, I was seated in an armchair and Jamieson was lying on a couch. I had texted her the day before, saying it might be funny for me to interview her as if I was her patient, but she quickly responded, “I WANT TO BE THE ONE ON THE COUCH!” I relented. Doctor’s orders.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster in front of an audience at NeueHouse in New York for an event we decided to call “How to Exist OK (LIVE).” Jamieson was fresh off publishing Conversion Disorder , her new book from Columbia University Press that masterfully integrates some pretty heavy psych theory into a surprisingly personal framework. Intellectually dense but definitively accessible, the book illustrates what it is that makes Jamieson unique: She’s a Lacanian scholar who, unlike other Lacanian scholars I’ve met, can hold a totally normal conversation.

A lot of these more material aspects of life have been solved, and yet the uneasiness is still there. I think that's interesting: With modern medicine, we can expect to live much longer, but we can’t expect a whole lot more than that.

One of the things that I often say to patients is that if you read the great literature of the world, if you go back to like, the ancient Greek tragedies, people were having a really hard time. And life then was always beset by war and poverty and illness. Women died in childbirth all the time.

But I do think that something about our expectations might be changing. I can't know that for sure, but I do see the way in which contemporary life feeds into the expectations that you're not supposed to feel unwell. Whereas I don't see what in this world provides you anything more than uneasiness. I think it's very uneasy to be a human being.

Well, then my question is, in a country where one out of six people is on psychotropic meds, are we less OK than ever? I have to imagine that everyone's always been sick. I think that it would be sick to imagine that people were doing a lot better a long time ago, in a kind of “Make America Great Again” nostalgia.

This is part of my book—we don’t just feel sick in our bodies, but we also feel guilty for feeling sick in our bodies, especially in a world that says our bodies are supposed to work really well, and that we're supposed to get up and be productive and look great and be fit and have great orgasms. Who can do all of that? I think "OK," then, is really nice.

What are some of the main obstacles you encounter with your patients? What stands between them and existing OK?

There is this amazing letter by Freud to Princess Marie Bonaparte. He was talking to her about depression and he said, “I think the problem with the depressed is that they simply have too high of an expectation for life. They think life is supposed to have more meaning than it does.”

For Freud, to ask about the meaning of life, essentially, is to already be neurotic. One of the things that I find with patients is this need to find meaning, and a lot of what a psychoanalyst can do is to work at stopping this machine that is constantly processing information and thinking that there's something you need to get, to solve, to make sense of in order to feel better.

I also think this is why meditation apps are making a million, billion, million dollars. It's because you have to stop your brain.

In your book, you call our “collective anxiety” our “new religion.” A key word in your title, “conversion," is, after all, a religious word. Conversion implies a before and after. The patient is pre-analysis and then post-analysis; the Buddhist is the unenlightened and then the enlightened; the Christian is lost and then found. In a way, therapy, like religion, sometimes promises salvation, right?

I don't want to promise salvation. I was really interested in the fact that conversion in psychiatry meant a radical energetic change. If you read someone like William James, who got really interested in religious conversion experiences, he says that something has to turn so radically that where you were before and where you are after are markedly different.