Beth Blum is a Professor of English at Harvard, a scholar of modernist and contemporary literature, and author of the 2020 book The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching For Advice in Modern Literature. She also teaches a General Education (“GenEd”) course, “The Age of Anxiety,” in which I was a student during the Fall 2025 semester.
Blum and I corresponded over email from October 29 to November 22, 2025. We also spoke once, off the record, over Zoom — a conversation which informed, but does not directly appear in, the below interview. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Growing up with two clinical psychologists for parents, “anxiety” seemed to be the default explanation for otherwise inexplicable behavior. When my father became irritable prior to a road trip, my mother would explain, conspiratorially: “He’s anxious about leaving.” When my brother stayed out late the night before freshman year of college — nearly missing the feast my father had cooked to celebrate his departure — my father generously reasoned: “He’s anxious about a big change.” (Many anxieties, I would come to understand, were about departure; every departure, my mother told me, was a reminder of the final departure that was death). And when I became irrationally sad, or arrived late to a meeting about which I’d been feeling ambivalent, or got mad at my parents, the aforementioned parents might ask me:
Maren Wong: What makes you anxious?
Beth Blum: Death. But as Kierkegaard said, “all existence makes me nervous.”
MW: Kierkegaard tells us that we experience fear in response to real threat, while anxiety is about “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” But sometimes our anxieties derive from real (or real-feeling!) threats. How do you tell the difference?
BB: This is a fascinating and vexing problem. Kierkegaard talks about the challenge of knowing the difference between intuition and imagination or superstition. These are not always easily differentiated. But I think many—in fact, most—anxieties are perfectly rational. The problem of anxiety is not that it’s irrational, it’s that it makes the individual miserable.
MW: Are we hosts for common anxieties that exist in air?
BB: That sounds like a good plot for a sci-fi novel! Certainly, you’ll often hear about the anxiety “epidemic” spreading at present. And it is true that there is an element of contagiousness so that the anxious brain is quick to latch onto any suggestion that floats its way. What I like about your question is that it de-individualizes the problem of anxiety, emphasizing its collective nature. I’m hoping our class shows that anxiety is not just a personal problem but a social and historical one as well.
MW: What’s your relationship with the future?
BB: We’re on good terms. For now.
Like many Harvard undergraduates, I tend to view GenEds as — at best — a duty to be fulfilled with mild interest and, at worst, a frustrating way to spend ⅛ of an average 32 college courses. So I was happily surprised when “The Age of Anxiety” turned out to be fun and interesting in its own right. We read texts ranging from Epictetus’ handbook to Nella Larsen’s Passing to Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength, observing how anxiety manifested in various literary movements and historical moments. Beginning in antiquity and progressing to contemporary “AI anxiety,” the course operates as a semester-long lesson in thematic close reading; anxiety is the thread we follow between texts. Themes emerge. Many texts issue the same injunction: live in the present. I’ve always understood this saying as a kind of psychobabble…but maybe it’s worth asking:
MW: Are you living in the present? What strategies do you employ to stay in the present? What makes it difficult?
BB: Funny you ask, as I don’t think I’ve divulged this in class but I’m currently writing a book about this exact topic. The book unpacks the cultural obsession with being in the moment, an idea that is thrown around quite a bit but has a deep and complicated humanist history. Actually, one of the times where I am in the present is teaching. When in front of the class, I find it very hard to focus on anything else. You might say teaching is my meditation.
MW: What brought you to self-help as an academic subject?
BB: I discovered this stodgy Victorian guide from 1859 by Samuel Smiles, which was one of the first books to use the term “self-help” in its title. I was fascinated with its form. It’s pages upon pages of lists and biographical anecdotes. It made me think that the whole industry of self-help was missing a literary perspective, that a literary scholar would have important insights to add to the conversation about this field. And that’s how my first book was conceived.
MW: What is your teaching philosophy? How, if at all, does your teaching style change in a GenEd?
BB: In some more literature-based courses, we read literature in order to learn more about literature. This is valuable specialized knowledge but does risk becoming a bit tautological. In GenEd, we teach literature to learn about bigger, pressing problems, and this is my natural inclination anyway, so I think my method fits well with the program’s orientation. And I love getting exposed to students from all different parts of the university and hearing what they have to bring to the subject at hand.
MW: Classes you’ve loved teaching? Classes you want to teach in the future?
BB: Choosing a favorite class feels a bit like choosing a favorite child. I am designing a course on “inspiration” at the moment which will have the same broad historical sweep as our anxiety class, but addressing different theories of artistic inspiration over time, from Plato to Woolf to Kerouac, so I’m currently excited about that.
MW: What do you hope students will learn from the course?
BB: I’m trying to offer students an introduction to the major phases and periods of literary history. And also to provide them with some therapeutic literacy, so that they understand the prehistory and intellectual complexity of many of the tropes used by contemporary therapeutic culture, so that they can say—oh that meme comes from Stoicism, and that technique draws on existentialism or Buddhism. Hopefully it’s both enriching on a human level and also provides students with the tools to be savvier, more informed consumers of this whole therapeutic and mindfulness industry.
The in-class assignment was patently goofy: Ask ChatGPT for advice on how to help your friend Nicanor overcome his fear of the flute girl. (Nicanor is a character from the Hippocratic Corpus, known for the debilitating panic attacks that struck him upon hearing a girl play the flute). I wondered what ChatGPT thought was happening when dozens of people within a fifty-foot radius asked the same question about Nicanor and the flute girl. Could the processing that ChatGPT did even be called thought? If so, maybe ChatGPT assumed that Nicanor was in the room with us right now. Or perhaps ChatGPT somehow understood that this was a class exercise?
These are the kinds of questions that I hate thinking about, and that Blum loves to probe. I lean toward the apprehensive, avoidant end of the spectrum when it comes to attitudes about AI; I reluctantly made a ChatGPT account for the purposes of this GenEd. Blum, evidently, is ready to employ new technologies in class. It seems to me that this is both a concession to technological change and a gutsy embrace of the same. Not a bad response to anxiety, as responses go! But with that plague of all twenty-somethings, nostalgia for an unlived past, I wonder:
MW: What was college like when you were a student? What anxieties and hopes did you have?
BB: College was great. We would stay up all night reading; we were very passionate and inspired. Even though I was sort of scraping by during my studies, I was not preoccupied with the question of career. I think my lack of worry about career gave me a freedom to take risks that would have been stifled if I had been thinking, in more practical terms, about my professional future.
MW: What are your thoughts on AI writing? What makes you anxious about AI—as a human, as a writer, as an educator, as a mother? What makes you hopeful about AI?
BB: I’m neither anxious nor hopeful about AI. I think my ideal vision for it would be that it dispenses with a lot of the useless bureaucratic writing we have to do—pro forma reports and such—so that we have more time for the meaningful stuff. Though I am concerned about the environmental costs of the AI industry, especially for my children, who remind me frequently of this fact.
MW: What do you think and worry about college being like for your kids?
BB: Will all of their classes be taught by robots? Will everything be turned into a trade devoid of any philosophical or ethical foundation? Will giant positronic brains perhaps even select what their job/task should be, in accordance with those who own and control such technology? Or will there be time for the pendulum swing back and to recalibrate both our sense of happiness and how we treat our planet. I have no idea.
Blum has a kind, open face and a head of curly blond hair. I’d like to ask for her curl routine but, keeping it arts-and-literature-focused, I inquire:
Her Canon: “If I could only reread Proust for the rest of my life, that wouldn’t be too shabby.”
Favorite Artists: Ramblin Jack Eliott, Patsy Cline, Otis Redding, Leonard Cohen, Carole King, Johnny Cash.
Advice for Aspiring Writers: “If you find an author you like and want to emulate or feel a kinship with across time and space, try to read everything they have read and loved.”
2026