Anxiety: a Sickness or a Call for Growth?

“Just as a physician might say that there is very likely not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say there is not one single living human being who does not…secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself…an anxiety he cannot explain.”
(Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling)

Have you ever dealt with anxiety?

I will assume that you have at least on some level, like every other human.

Let’s start with the bad news. I am not writing this to give you 5 or 10 steps on how to overcome anxiety. I believe those thinkers who thought that anxiety is an integral part of life and cannot be completely eliminated from our lives. It’s not something that you get cured of.

At this point it’s important to mention something since “anxiety” has become a widely used term in psychology and mental health space. The anxiety that I will be talking about here, the anxiety that those thinkers I will be referencing have talked about, is also known as “existential anxiety,” or, as some Existentialists called it, “angst.” It is a type of anxiety that every human experiences at some point in their lives.

Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about the good news.

The good news is that, even though we may not be able to “cure” this type of anxiety that is inherent to the human condition, we shouldn’t even want to do that.

Most people view anxiety as a solely negative state which offers no value to us. They look at it only as an obstacle to a healthy and “normal” life. However, many great thinkers who dedicated time to exploring anxiety concluded that its role in our lives is much greater than that of an obstacle. In fact, they believed that anxiety can be of tremendous importance to the development of an individual.

One of those thinkers was Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism and the first philosopher to write about anxiety. What makes his writings relatable is that he was not just theoreticizing. Kierkegaard wrote from experience, having spent his life confronting the deepest and most unsettling questions about human existence. As he writes in one journal entry:

“All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable, I most of all; to me all existence is infected, I most of all. My distress is enormous, boundless; no one knows it except God in heaven, and he will not console me….”