Ground Zero of Quiet Anxiety
There’s something about living in the DMV right now that no one quite says out loud. The region feels uneasy, like it’s waiting for something to break.
Where I live, you can probably throw a stone and it’ll hit a federal worker. That’s how grounded we are in the federal government here in the DMV. For decades, that’s been DC’s superpower, the thing that made this region different from every other American city. While the rest of the country rode the waves of boom and bust, the DMV stayed steady. Almost recession-proof. The government always needs people, and those people need coffee shops and daycares and dry cleaners and bars. It was an ecosystem built on one fundamental assumption. Stability.
That assumption is cracking.
I’m a reporter here, which means I’m both documenting this moment and living through it. Some weeks I’m not sure which role is more exhausting. What I can tell you is this, DC has become ground zero for a particular kind of American instability, and it’s breeding a quiet anxiety that blankets this city like nothing I’ve witnessed before.
What DC Was
To understand what’s happening now, you need to understand what DC used to be, what it attracted, and who it drew in.
This city filled itself with a particular type of person, the altruistic public servant. I bold altruism because I truly feel like it seeps within the bones of so many people here. People who want to feel connected emotionally to meaningful work.
Getting a federal job here used to be the jackpot for people who weren’t chasing jackpots. It attracted a different kind of dreamer — not the Silicon Valley disrupter, not the Wall Street climber, but the public servant who wanted to feel tethered to something larger than themselves. You didn’t come here to be rich; you came here to build a life. A family. A mortgage. A sense of meaning. (Then of course there’s the power hungry people.)
The Shift
I won’t rehash everything that’s happened—the funding cuts, the federal worker firings, DC losing autonomy, the National Guard and ICE presence that’s become almost background noise, the clashes between Governor Wes Moore and the administration, the gutting of NIH and FDA in nearby Montgomery County. If you’re reading this, you probably already know the list. It grows every week.
But what doesn’t get enough attention is the psychological toll. And I think that is because it is harder to report on.
Anxiety looks surprisingly quiet.
People carry it. They don’t scream it. You sometimes see it in yard signs or bumper stickers. Maybe you hear it at happy hour. You feel it in the air—this sense that everyone is waiting for something else to happen, for the next shoe to drop, for everything to come crashing down.
I have a rule now: give it ten minutes. Go to any bar, any cafe, any playground in this city, strike up a conversation with someone, and within ten minutes you’ll get to the anxiety. You’ll get to the administration. You’ll get to the cuts. You’ll get to something that’s been changed, shaken, upended, something that person is carrying on their shoulders whether they want to or not.
What Quiet Anxiety Looks Like
I recently met a furloughed federal worker at a playground where my kid was playing. It was the second time I’d seen him, so we had that tentative “friendly acquaintance” thing going. But this second time we met he opened the conversation with: “Did you see the Nobel Peace Prize discussion?”
That was the thing irking him that day. Not whether he’d have a job next month. The Nobel Prize discussion. Somehow I knew, this conversation was not really about the Nobel Prize. It was about everything else he couldn’t control.
At a happy hour last week, I was talking to a woman who mentioned she’s a lawyer. About ten minutes in (there’s that rule again) she told me she’s been defending people who she believes were wrongfully arrested. Not as a one-off. As a pattern. Because of what she called “the siege that DC is under,” she’s now routinely taking on cases that she says never would have been problems before.
Living It While Covering It
There’s a heightened blanket sense of anxiety that didn’t exist here. It’s shared by the community whether you work in the federal sector or not.
I wish I could offer reassurance or a clear path forward. I can’t. What I can tell you is that we’re not through this. The system of DMV is shifting, and it’s not clear yet what it will become.
There are rumors of recessions. Rumors of a housing crisis. Rumors of mass exodus. Rumors of a lot of possible things. Some will materialize, others won’t. But all of them hang in the air, adding to that collective anxiety.
The only certainty is this, we’re living through a period of the nation’s capital’s history that will be studied, analyzed, and debated for decades. Future historians will mark this as the moment something changed.
The people here right now? They’re just trying to get through each day, each week, each month. They’re trying to figure out if the stability they were promised will ever return.
And mostly, they’re carrying this quiet anxiety, waiting to see what comes next.
Bonus
I was going to leave this heavy, but what better levity to bring than that from the legendary Diane Keaton, may she RIP.
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