Most people believe anxiety is bad—dangerous, even. Social media only fuels this fear, spreading memes like “someone’s watching me... it’s just my anxiety,” as if anxiety were some cartoon villain stalking us in the dark. This reflects the infantilized culture we live in, where any discomfort or existential threat is labeled a “no-no” and locked away behind digital distractions and chemical suppressants.

But anxiety is not a pathology.

It’s potential.

It is a signal—a deep inner call—to grow, evolve, and reorient.

Existential thinkers like Heidegger, Frankl, and Rollo May took anxiety seriously—not as a disorder to suppress but as a force that can shape meaning. Heidegger spoke of being-toward-death, a core concept where anxiety awakens us to the reality of our finitude. It reveals the urgency of living authentically. From a very young age—perhaps between 3 and 5 years old—we begin to sense death, and it casts a silent shadow over our lives. Most people push this down, drowned out by the noise of the world, but it never truly disappears.

There are two kinds of anxiety:

Existential anxiety, which is healthy and awakening.

And neurotic anxiety, which paralyzes and misguides.

Neurotic anxiety arises when we fail to adapt to reality. It’s what happens when the ego refuses to face life as it is—when the self splits and clashes with the demands of the real world. This anxiety becomes irrational and compulsive, trapping us in loops of avoidance, distraction, and fear.

As Rollo May said: Existential anxiety awakens; neurotic anxiety paralyzes.

Yet in today’s world, all anxiety is seen as pathological. There is no real education around anxiety’s developmental role. We fail to recognize that there are stages of life—around ages 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 49—where existential anxiety becomes not just natural, but necessary. These are critical turning points where we’re meant to meet ourselves in full and grow into a deeper version of who we are.

As Viktor Frankl taught in logotherapy:

In anxiety, there is often a cry for meaning.

And without meaning, anxiety becomes aimless suffering.

Modern society answers this suffering with comfort, distraction, and medication. But true transformation only begins when we stop numbing ourselves and start listening to what anxiety is telling us. As Paul Tillich said—and Rollo May echoed—the courage to be means facing the void, accepting the pain, and walking into the unknown like the mythic hero entering the darkest cave to retrieve the treasure.

Anxiety is also a confrontation with freedom.

As Heidegger put it, we are radically free—and that freedom creates dread.

We long for certainty. But life demands that we grow in uncertainty. That’s why we live under a “nanny state” mentality—where branding, institutions, and corporations soothe us with the illusion that everything is taken care of. The price we pay for this illusion is our freedom. We are calmed and tamed by the gentle tyranny of collectivism, and many seem happy in it—an unnatural happiness, filled with neurotic anxiety and numbed by Netflix, food, pharmaceuticals, and countless escapist sub-realities.

We are afraid of freedom.

And this is why religious and political institutions have historically stepped in to "protect" us—not just from the world, but from ourselves. In doing so, they reinforce and perpetuate the very neurotic anxiety they claim to relieve.

To truly live is to face the great questions without needing all the answers.

As Socrates said: The only thing I know is that I know nothing.

And perhaps, that is the most truthful foundation upon which a meaningful life can be built.