Is it in anxiety that we find ourselves, and is it perhaps in anxiety that we can answer fundamental questions like “Who am I?” or “Why am I here?”

Lacking a definite object, anxiety is a fundamental mood that discloses us in our very being. Unlike fear, which requires an object to feel afraid of–like a spider, the darkness, or heights–anxiety exposes us to something deeper, something that does not even require an object. It exposes us to a fundamental condition of human existence: nothingness.

Nothingness is not to be intended as absence of things; our everyday life is absorbed with things. We are expected to wake up at a certain hour, commute to work, perform our tasks, run our errands. But at times, these familiar experiences feel almost strangely alien. They don’t disappear; lose their familiar meaning. We still wake up at a certain hour, we still commute to work, we still perform our tasks. But we feel like we lost our place in the world. We feel like we’re no longer at home.

This feeling of not being at home, though, is not necessarily negative; it reveals something essential about our existence. It makes us aware that the world was never simply guaranteed as meaningful. Its familiarity can withdraw. And in that withdrawal, we encounter nothingness, which is not emptiness, and it’s not void. It’s the unsettling, uncanny disclosure that beings as a whole are fragile, contingent, and without final ground.

Just like a pebble in our shoe makes us notice the comfort we had previously taken for granted, anxiety makes us notice the hidden familiarity precisely when that familiarity is broken down.

#Who Are We?

We are not just isolated human subjects. We are Dasein, beings for whom being itself is an issue, because our existence is never simply given to us; it is something we must understand, interpret, and take up as our own.

That feeling of nothingness discloses to us exactly what we are: we are beings-in-the-world. We are thrown into a world we did not choose, in a context we could not avoid. We come to recognize that we, and only we, own our own destiny. We are responsible for taking over the existence into which we have been thrown.

In everyday life, we often avoid this burden by losing ourselves in das Man, the anonymous "they": we do what one does, think what one thinks, and live according to meanings already provided for us. Anxiety interrupts this evasion by revealing our finitude and our being-toward-death. Others may die before us, or even sacrifice themselves for us, but no one can undergo our death in our place. Death individualizes us because it reveals that our existence is ultimately ours to confront and take responsibility for.

We are thrown into a world we did not choose, yet we are still responsible for how we take up that thrown existence as our own.

This is the strange beauty of anxiety. It unsettles us, but it also awakens us. It strips the world of its obviousness and reveals that the meanings we live by are not guaranteed once and for all. Anxiety gives no doctrine, no map, no final name for what we are. It only lets the everyday world fall silent long enough for the question of our being to become audible.