The semester just ended, and while it seems my GPA will land in a favorable place, a persistent restlessness had already taken hold of me. I was struggling in my Spanish class, and that single course cast a shadow over the entire term. As a result, the confidence I had carried from last semester unraveled, and I found myself unable to give proper attention to anything beyond my academic responsibilities.
Experiencing this angst as a philosopher led me to seek a contemporary exploration of the feeling. My local library happened to have a copy of Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide by Samir Chopra. With Chopra’s book as my guide, I reflect on how I once related to anxiety, how certain philosophers helped reframe that experience, and how I now think about anxiety in the context of modern life. What follows is not a neat solution, but a reorientation—one that makes space for anxiety without letting it rule.
In an increasingly digital world—where surveillance, performance, and overstimulation are constant—anxiety has become the default state for many. The idea of relief from that state is understandably seductive. Buddhism offers a prescription for this kind of suffering, naming it dukkha—a term that encompasses not just pain, but deep dissatisfaction and existential unease. The path begins with the recognition that life is suffering and ends, ideally, in liberation from it. While I respect the clarity of this framework, I find its promise of transcendence ultimately unattainable. To be alive is to be anxious. To shed that condition entirely would be to shed something fundamentally human.
Anxiety isn’t an obstacle to living a virtuous life—it’s a signal that we have choices, and that those choices matter. It’s the emotional weight of freedom, not a malfunction of the mind. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that “our greatest blessing, free will, comes with a burden of anxiety,” and that we should be “happy to bear it.” For Kierkegaard, Confronting this burden is how we move closer to the task of self-actualization.
Both Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche warn that life is full of distractions and roles that pull us away from the work of becoming who we truly are. For Nietzsche, anxiety emerges when we are living inauthentically—when we betray who we truly are. Kierkegaard echoes this sentiment, describing the despair of “being someone else” as the “sickness unto death.” In a world constantly nudging us toward conformity, both thinkers urge us to stand against the forces that shape us into what we are not. As Nietzsche put it, “We must accept our identities, our stations in life, our anxieties—as parts of ourselves.” For Kierkegaard, the difference is existential: neurotics retreat to safety, sacrificing freedom; healthy individuals move forward in spite of anxiety.
Another existential thinker, Paul Tillich, echoes Kierkegaard’s view—calling anxiety “a perennial companion.” But Tillich goes further: he sees courage not just as endurance, but as an act of spiritual affirmation—“our affirmation of life” in the face of anxiety. Anxiety, for Tillich, is not proof of a broken spirit—it is a sign of consciousness. “Anxiety reminds us we are alive.” For Tillich, even the simple act of living with anxiety is an expression of courage—a quiet, daily affirmation that life is still worth moving through.
While anxiety, on one hand, makes us aware of our freedom and the burden of limitless possibilities, it also arises from the external pressures society places on us—constraints that encroach upon that very freedom. Naturally, one cannot talk about the society in the United States without mentioning capitalism. In this capitalist system, we’re expected to find purpose and pride in labor—but we don’t control what we produce, how we produce it, or who benefits from it. Karl Marx saw this for what it was: alienation. He argued that the worker becomes separated not just from the product of their labor, but from their own humanity. We become alienated from our work, from others, and from ourselves. That alienation generates a deep kind of anxiety—not because we’re doing something wrong, but because the system separates us from what makes life meaningful.
To make things more confusing, society tells us to be “authentic,” while also rewarding conformity and punishing divergence. We’re supposed to be productive but also fulfilled. Unique but marketable. Self-expressive but never disruptive. These contradictions don’t just confuse us—they shape our emotional lives. When we inevitably fall short of these opposing ideals, we internalize the failure. We develop what Nietzsche might call a “bad conscience”—a moral anxiety that emerges not from actual wrongdoing, but from our inability to satisfy incoherent expectations.
These contradictions are not accidental—they’re functional. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse argued that anxiety becomes politically useful when it keeps us self-monitoring, uncertain, and passive. In a society structured around productivity and compliance, anxiety ensures that we blame ourselves for not thriving in a system that was never meant to be livable. As Marcuse put it, “A choice that is not visible is not a choice at all.” What looks like freedom is often just a preselected path disguised as agency.
Samir Chopra offers a different but complementary insight. Where Marcuse sees anxiety as a product of external control, Chopra sees it as a misinterpreted signal of internal freedom. Anxiety, he suggests, is not always a problem to be solved—it can be a marker that we are standing before possibility. But rather than seeing it as such, we often try to contain it. We label it, attach it to something concrete, or try to “solve” it with productivity or avoidance. In doing so, we limit our own freedom. The cost of this is subtle but real: we shrink our lives to feel in control. We quiet our ambitions. We flatten our emotions. We build routines not to grow, but to manage fear. Chopra insists that anxiety should invite investigation.
Earlier, the examples of anxiety were easier to grasp—maybe because they had something tangible behind them. But this next form of anxiety doesn’t have a clear cause. For Tillich, anxiety is our awareness of nonbeing—of our limits, our finitude, and the eventual return to nothingness. It’s a vulnerability that comes not from this world, but from a deeper, metaphysical awareness.
Tillich says this kind of anxiety comes in three forms:
Fate and death
This is the anxiety that comes from knowing we will die, and that our lives are subject to forces beyond our control.
Emptiness and loss of meaning
This is the anxiety that emerges when life feels disconnected, when belief systems collapse, or when purpose slips away.
Guilt and condemnation
This is the anxiety that comes from our awareness of moral failure—or the sense that we’re falling short of who we’re meant to become.
This reminder that we will return to nothingness, for Tillich, shows up even in the most mundane moments—when you’re doing the dishes, walking alone at night, or staring at the ceiling. It’s not dramatic. It’s just the unsettling feeling that something beneath the surface is off, or missing, or about to slip away.
Kierkegaard once wrote, “If there is no object to focus on, anxiety will focus on the future.” That line captures something about Tillich’s vision too: when we can’t locate our fear, it finds something for us. It drifts forward. It latches onto what hasn’t happened yet.
Through anxiety, we are reminded of something most of us work hard to forget—that we are fragile, that nothing is promised, and that everything we love can be lost. But Tillich doesn’t offer despair. He offers courage. “Courage is our affirmation of life,” he writes—not because we overcome anxiety, but because we live honestly with it.
Martin Heidegger doesn’t treat anxiety like a breakdown—he treats it like a break in the surface. Human existence, for him, is death, nothingness, and thrownness. We’re thrown into a world we didn’t choose—into situations full of acts, responsibilities, and choices—and we’re expected to make meaning in the face of an end we can’t escape.
Most of the time, we live inside routines—roles, expectations, distractions. He calls this Das Man—the “they-self,” where we just do what people do. But anxiety cuts through that. It doesn’t just make us afraid—it makes the world feel strange. Things lose their meaning. The ground shifts. And in that shift, we see clearly.
The world sedates us. Anxiety rescues us. It asks: is this really your life? Are these choices really yours? It forces us to think in ways we’d rather avoid. Even when we try to defend ourselves—through routine, distraction, or denial—anxiety finds a way in. It breaches the citadel. And when it does, it doesn’t ruin us—it reveals us.
For Heidegger, death is not just a biological fact—it’s a future event like any other. When we accept that death can happen at any moment, we’re not paralyzed—we’re liberated. Anxiety doesn’t shrink our freedom. It’s what makes real freedom possible.
I don’t fully subscribe to Sigmund Freud’s whole framework—especially his theories around sexuality and the unconscious—but he had something important to say about anxiety. Freud believed that anxiety is often the return of something repressed: an earlier fear, a past helplessness, a memory we couldn’t handle at the time. The ego, trying to protect us, pushes these things down. But they don’t go away. They resurface—quietly, irrationally, and often without a clear reason.
Freud also thought that anxiety isn’t always tied to the present moment. It can be a flashback, not just of an event, but of a feeling—being small, being powerless, being left. I don’t know how far I take his theory, but the idea that some of our fear comes from what we’ve buried makes sense to me. There are moments where my anxiety feels way out of proportion to what’s actually happening—and in those moments, I wonder if I’m reacting to something older, something I thought I was done carrying. Maybe it traces back to one of the forms Tillich described: fear of death, the loss of meaning, or the guilt of not being who I’m supposed to be.
I used to have this deep need to feel in control of my environment. It was the only way I felt safe. For a long time, I didn’t work with my anxiety—I tried to work around it. And because I didn’t feel safe, I started to shrink. I turned myself into an introvert, even though I love yapping and connecting with people. I just didn’t feel like there was space for that part of me.
Taoism gave me one of the biggest tools I’ve ever found: wu wei—the idea of going with the flow, of not forcing things. Forcing things always led me into a pernicious cycle: I’d chase something I couldn’t control, then spiral when it didn’t go the way I wanted. I wasn’t afraid of failure—I was afraid of having wanted it and not getting it. That’s the anxiety I’m still working through now: perfectionism. I get anxious when I think that if I acknowledge what I want and don’t reach it, I’ll be crushed—not by what I failed to do, but by the version of myself I imagined and didn’t become.
Repressing all those emotions—sadness especially—cut me off from earlier versions of myself. Before this shift, I cried maybe once a year. I kept myself from getting too attached to anything or anyone. I told myself that was peace. But it was shallow. I wasn’t working through anything. I wasn’t growing—I was just holding still. And holding still started to feel like being stuck.
Now, I feel more at peace with my anxiety—not because it’s gone, but because I no longer think it’s something I need to conquer. I see it as something that pushes me to live more honestly. When I see through the illusions, it inspires me to push back against the system that feeds them—through activism, through connection, through reflection. I still feel anxious—even as I write this—but now I ask: why do I feel this way? And I follow that question to the root. Sometimes it leads to memories I hadn’t dealt with. Sometimes it leads to fears I didn’t know I was still carrying.
This process of looking inward has even led me to think more about the Buddhist idea of non-self—not because I’ve let go of identity, but because I’ve started asking what parts of me were built just to feel safe. That’s probably a post for another day.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that anxiety isn’t the enemy. It’s not a malfunction or a failure of will. It’s a signal—a push, a mirror, a companion. It shows up when something matters, when we’re at a threshold, when we’re too close to the truth to ignore it. I don’t want to conquer it anymore. I want to listen to it. I want to let it sharpen me, not shrink me.
To be anxious is to be alive. And if that’s the case, then I’d rather live anxiously and honestly than live numb. Maybe that’s not peace. But it’s closer to freedom.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mhex/p/anxious-mothers-sacrifice?r=5k5ryl&utm_medium=ios