Those of us who have the good fortune to live in conditions that (largely) liberate us from fear often fill that space with anxiety.
“So one line is, you know, traces its origins back to Freud, who suggested that anxiety was a fear that didn’t have a specific object of fear. So you were scared, right? You were fearful, but you didn’t have something precisely well defined in front of you to call it fear.
So one way is, an example would be something like, I’m on my way to the mountains to go climbing, right? As I’m driving to the trailhead, as I wake up in the morning, I feel a pit in my stomach. It’s nausea.
I feel uncomfortable. I’m anxious, right? Now at that moment, nothing is happening that is concretely endangering me, right?
But I can anticipate some of the situations that might arise. I might get into bad weather. I might fall down.
I might get lost. All these things could happen to me. None of them have taken determinate form as yet, right?
At this point, it’s anxiety. When I’m actually in the mountains, when I’m climbing, and I step across a chasm and I feel the ice slide beneath my feet and I feel that I could fall at this moment, then that’s fear because there’s a very concrete object.”
– Samir Chopra, author of “Anxiety, A Philosophical Guide”
From The Gray Area with Sean Illing: Of course you’re anxious, Mar 2, 2026
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Chopra explores anxiety from Buddhist and Existentialist perspectives. The upshot is that the fundamental conditions of human existence make anxiety an inevitable part of the mix. We live in the midst of fundamental uncertainty about what is out there and what might happen “to us.” There are only so many levers we can control to influence our outer (to say nothing of our inner) worlds. And yet, we have no choice but to make choices (agency) about who (connection) and what (purpose) we care about so we can then decide what we’ll do to contribute to those purposes and people. We really don’t even have a guarantee that we’ll be able to do many of these things right or that our actions will contribute to the purposes and people we have chosen.
And yet, choosing is our only path toward purpose, growth, connection, contribution and meaning.
In this sense, the anxiety of uncertainty is a natural partner of the excitement of possibility. The degree to which we learn to embrace and work with the anxiety of uncertainty largely determines the degree to which we are able to open ourselves up to and learn enough about the possibilities before us to make better choices about actions we can take to nudge some of those possibilities toward emerging as realities:)
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Agency (主体性) + Purpose (志) + Growth (成長) + Connection (繋がり) + Contribution (貢献) = Meaning (意義)
In the space between you and me awaits all that will ever be.
人と人の間に全てのもと
© Dana Cogan, 2026, all rights reserved.