---
title: "079-kierkegaard-anxiety"
aliases: 
tags: 
- podcast/philosophizethis
---

"anxiety is the dizziness of freedom"


the biggest danger in this life is the loss of yourself. you might not realise you are in this situation.

most people are lost
- lost in finite
- lost in infinite

truly being a self required the realisation that you must make a choice

when we are stuck between the two we experience "dizziness". we start catasrophizing.

essense of anxiety - fear of some future outcome that we may have no control over

"Anxiety may be compared with dizziness he, whose eye happends to look down into the awning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

anxiety is the reaction we have to the sheer number of possibilites. What if i make a mistake?

this makes us uncomfortable, imbues a sense of *dread*. most peolple to avoid this. the road to becoming a self is tough. 

after dread becomes despair. most people spend their life here. comes from the attempt to rid yourself of yourself. Despair is a sickness of the spirit. A disease affecting your emotional state. Its not always clear that you are in this state, you can be in despair and still seem like a happy person.

"most men are subjective toward themselves, and objective towards all others. Fightfully objective sometimes. but the task is precisely to be objective towards oneself, and subjective towards all others."

many types of despair. e.g., sickness of despair over something earthly. conflating identity with something external to yourself. 

Using something to distract yourself from your state of despair. similar to kant idea of outsourcing things. echoes of buddism. 

while you are feeling anxiety you are becoming closer to your true self. 

aim to find a "truth that is true for me"

reject hegel notion that our choices are a product of our culture. 

father of existentialism