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In an op-ed piece in the New York Times Sunday Review, “The Feel-Good Gene” (March 6, 2015), Richard A. Friedman wrote about the discovery that some people have a genetic variation that tends to immunize them from anxious feelings.1 The genetic variation leads to the production of a higher than average level of a certain neurotransmitter with the Pinchonesque name of anandamide (ananda being the Sanskrit word for bliss). The “bliss chemical” is a natural and endogenous relative of cannabis, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. When our bodies produce this chemical we are more blissful and less anxious, and some people are genetically predisposed to produce it more frequently than others.
Friedman suggests that since this genetic variation allows a certain subset of the population to be less anxious, anxiety itself should be considered primarily a chemically mediated event, that is, “a mental state that has no psychological origin or meaning” (Friedman, 2015). If anxiety is the relative lack of the bliss factor, then why look for subjective causes? As Friedman put it, “some people are prone to be less anxious simply because they won the genetic sweepstakes and randomly got a genetic mutation that has nothing at all to