Wealth & Money Quote by John Jay Chapman

Anxiety, Chapman suggests, isn’t a response to danger so much as a lifestyle with its own muscle memory. The joke is that rescue doesn’t end worry; it merely gives worry new material. Even on a sunlit bank, wrapped in comfort-food clichés (hot chocolate, muffins), the mind trained in dread scans for the next catastrophe: a chill, a cough, an omen. The line lands because it frames worry as maladaptive vigilance that survives its original purpose, like a fire alarm that keeps shrieking after the smoke clears.

Chapman, a poet-essayist writing in an America accelerating into modernity, is poking at a late-19th/early-20th century temperament: increasing comforts paired with increasing nervousness. Public health campaigns, industrial accidents, urban crowding, and a new culture of “experts” all widened the menu of things to fear. His image compresses that cultural shift into a single slapstick tableau: salvation as a setup for fresh self-surveillance.

The subtext isn’t simply “relax.” It’s sharper: worry becomes identity, even virtue. If you stop worrying, what are you for? Chapman implies that some people would rather distrust happiness than risk being surprised by pain. The hyper-specific coziness of muffins and cocoa is crucial; it’s almost infantilizing, which makes the continued paranoia look less noble and more compulsive. Underneath the humor sits a moral critique: the habit of worry can be a refusal to accept grace, the inability to inhabit safety without suspecting it’s a trick.