Former Governor Chris Christie once introduced New Jersey political insiders to the concept of anxiety.

He improbably used the choice word of existentialist diagnosticians in a 2015 state-of-the-state speech.

His frequent critics – and you could see their faces in the crowd as he stormed the Assembly Chamber – long chafed under headlines of the then-New Jersey governor’s extravagant national travels.

But the governor – with a straight face tinged with tenderness – suggested that his national tramping as chairman of the Republican Governors Association (RGA) was actually a way to better get a bead on the national pulse – in the Heartland. And while never speaking the name of then-President Barack Obama, the man he then hoped to supplant in the White House, what he came back here with was a sense, he said, of America’s “anxiety.”

Anxiety.

Now that is a word that not many North American men feel comfortable uttering, its associations unconsciously tied to a pretentious variety of French intellectualism and the likes of Camus, Sartre and even worse – Kierkegaard, that Danish forefather of those latter-day existentialists who lingered on the notion of not exactly fear or dread – but, yes, “anxiety.”

Once and future presidential candidate Christie unveiled the word carefully, as if astonished by his own use of a word that must have been new to his ears.

But here we are, eight years later, with Christie now trying to succeed President Joe Biden, and the concept has arguably intensified in the marrow of our collective being.

Or has it?

Please consider the poll below, consider the gamut of those competing maladies of our age, check the appropriate box, and forgive the omission of any especially egregious afflictions. In composing this poll, for example, so much has happened since, we neglected to include “pandemic” as an option.

Feel free to supply it yourself – or something else.