YOLO is the antidote to FOMO. They are the two guiding principles of our time, the time after God’s death. Drunk on the idea that we are free and rational individuals—God caught his robe in a spinning jenny some time during the industrial revolution and lies mangled among the cogs and gears—we know that our destinies are up to us. And we only live once, because we don’t believe in heaven, so we must ensure that we do not miss out. YOLO and FOMO: our Castor and Pollux.

None of that is true. We love historical explanations for inexplicable feelings, and the above is a good example of a story defining an emotion according to its place in culture. This story, Francis O’Gorman explains, suggests that worry is a specially modern feeling, specially ours, because people in largely secular societies have to take full responsibility for their choices. As Austen’s heroines swooned because their corsets were too tight and bad weather enraged the underclass of eighteenth-century France, we are worried because we are too free.

In his highly anxious but very valuable new book Worrying: a Literary and Cultural History (Bloomsbury 2015), Francis O’Gorman, Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, seeks to pin down worry as an idea and to record the stories we tell ourselves about it; he sets worrying in both its recent and its deeper cultural history, and he also contemplates the various ways writers and artists have dealt with worry as a category of experience. The “whole cultural myth of the ‘birth of reason,’ of the fantasized change from faith to thought as the guiding power of human lives,” he writes, is the most important and boring of these metanarratives. But the book leads us to stranger and more puzzling places, too.

To clarify, that specific place is the UK. God isn’t dead in the U.S., I don’t think, and in this country, clinical anxiety in the internet age would probably have become O’Gorman’s subject. The American public understands anxiety much more broadly, as it’s become a widely diagnosed and medicated category of illness over the last thirty years. Indeed, he refuses to name worry a pathology, and in so doing writes himself into the difficult position of having to dance between different models of history. Worrying isn’t quite the medical humanities, or quite psychohistory, or even, really, literary criticism:

What am I doing? I have daunting questions about how the category of “mental health” relates to worry; how worry relates to any new and fuller understanding of what we, in the modern world, should understand by “mental health” or “mental unhealth.”

Scott Stossel had a much easier time of it in his memoir My Age of Anxiety (2014): he recalled his struggles with a clearly defined mental illness. O’Gorman, on the other hand, is simply talking about a feeling which is clearly, to him, normal. O’Gorman’s “worry” is neither illness nor oeuvre but a feeling that he can only really define with reference to his own interiority: