Anxiety Isn't a Malfunction — It's the Dizziness of Being Free

The night before a test, you're staring at the ceiling, stomach in knots, running through everything that might be on it tomorrow. Or it's the vaguer kind — 2 a.m., and out of nowhere you're hit with "what am I actually going to do with my life," and suddenly you can't breathe right. Or it's the everyday kind: wondering if your friends have a group chat that doesn't include you, talking about something you'll never know about.

The usual advice is that feeling is a problem. Fix it. Breathe deeper, open a meditation app, make it go away.

You're not imagining the scale of it, either. Anxiety among 18-to-25-year-olds is up nearly 140% since 2010, according to research on the subject. But a rising number doesn't automatically prove the "anxiety = malfunction" framing is correct.

A Danish guy who's been dead for over 170 years disagreed. His name was Søren Kierkegaard, and he's often called the founding father of existentialism. He wrote an entire book about anxiety — it's literally titled The Concept of Anxiety — and his conclusion sounds backwards at first: anxiety isn't a sign that something's wrong with you. It's the moment you first catch a real glimpse of the fact that you're free. That glimpse is supposed to feel uncomfortable. The discomfort is the whole point — it's what makes becoming yourself possible in the first place.

The Dizziness of Freedom

Kierkegaard used an image that still holds up two centuries later: anxiety is like the dizzy feeling you get looking down from somewhere high up.

That dizziness isn't purely the height's fault — it's also coming from your own eyes. You wouldn't feel it if you hadn't looked down. Freedom works the same way: the second you realize your life didn't have to go the way it's going, the ground you assumed was solid isn't there anymore. That's the dizzy spell.

Quick decode: the dizziness of freedom. This isn't saying freedom is scary, so freedom is bad — it's saying the dizziness comes bundled in with freedom, because freedom means there's more than one option, and you're the one who has to pick. The more options in front of you, the less solid the ground feels, and the dizzier you get. Here's the video's example: a kid wakes up and realizes their parents just aren't home. No supervision, do whatever you want. Sounds like a dream — but sit with that feeling for a second and it's actually half thrilling, half terrifying. That second half is the dizziness of freedom.

The Moment Everything Suddenly Feels Different

Kierkegaard wrote, "in the individual life, anxiety is the instant." What instant? The exact moment reality stops matching what you thought it was.

The Truman Show pushes this cracking-open feeling to its most extreme version: Truman spends most of his life before discovering he's been living inside a giant soundstage since the day he was born, everyone he's ever known is an actor, and his entire world has been a live broadcast staged around him without his knowledge. Most people never run into a version that extreme, but that specific feeling — the world I thought I understood turns out not to be that — is the same thing, just at a smaller scale.

Maybe you find out the friend group chat has a smaller chat you weren't in. Maybe a relationship you thought would define the rest of your life ends without warning. Maybe the path you assumed you were on — good grades, same school, same friends — gets knocked sideways by one bad test or one move to a new city. In that instant, the ground under "this is just how things are" cracks open, and what rushes in is partly fear, partly something harder to name that's tangled up with possibility, because once there's more than one road, the choosing falls back on you.

Fear and Anxiety Aren't the Same Thing

After Kierkegaard, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger picked up this thread and drew a sharp line between fear and anxiety.

Fear always has a target — spiders, the dark, bombing tomorrow's test. You basically know what you're dealing with; you just don't want to deal with it. Anxiety doesn't work that way. It has no clear target. It's unease about existing at all. So being nervous before a test is closer to fear — there's a limited set of outcomes. That 2 a.m. feeling where you can't say what's actually wrong is the real thing.

Quick decode: anxiety means you care — not that something's broken. If something genuinely didn't matter to you, you wouldn't feel anxious about it. Your stomach hurts over a bad grade because your future actually matters to you. You clock whether there's a group chat without you because that friendship is real. This cuts against a lot of modern advice, which treats anxiety like a bug to patch: ten deep breaths, zero out the negative feelings, get back to baseline. None of those tools are bad on their own — but if you only ever treat anxiety as the enemy, you might be muting the actual message along with it: that you might have more real choices in front of you than you realized.

Not "Anxiety Is Great" — Learning to Live With It

One thing worth being clear about: Kierkegaard isn't saying anxiety is awesome and you should chase more of it. He's making a narrower claim — that facing uncertainty head-on, without pretending you've got permanently solid ground under you, is something you practice, not something you figure out once and then you're done. He writes that someone who genuinely lets themselves sink into that feeling eventually comes back out of it lighter than all the small stuff that used to weigh them down — but that only happens with repetition, not a single flash of insight.

And there's a real line worth drawing here: if that unsettled feeling has gotten bad enough that you can't sleep, eat, or function at school, that's not "you didn't do the philosophy homework hard enough" — that's a sign to talk to an adult you trust or an actual professional. Learning to sit with anxiety and knowing when to ask for help aren't in conflict. They're the same skill, really.

You're Not the Only One Feeling Dizzy

This unsettled feeling doesn't only happen to one person at a time. When a lot of people are facing the same unclear future at once — a big shared worry, a future nobody can guarantee — some people's first move is to slam the door shut and draw a hard line around who's "in" and who's "out," just to feel like solid ground exists again. Others choose to stay inside the uncertainty instead, treating it as the normal condition of things rather than a leak that has to get plugged. Which one feels better in the moment is obvious. Which one is more honest is a different question.

The video closes on a line worth keeping around: "better to have freedom and anxiety than to have no anxiety and no freedom." That's not an argument for enjoying the discomfort — it's pointing out that between two ways of living, one where you get real choices and occasionally feel dizzy, and one where you never feel dizzy because you never really had a choice, you probably already know which one you'd pick.

Behind-the-Scenes Details

• The video runs on YouTube's auto-captions, which never once spell "Kierkegaard" correctly — it comes out as "kard," "kker guard," and "kir guard" at different points, and "Heidegger" gets mangled into "haiger." The harder a philosopher's name is to pronounce, apparently, the worse the captions get.
• Cow-hugging as an anxiety treatment is a real thing, not a joke — the host stops mid-sentence to clarify he means it literally.
• Kierkegaard himself was famously anxious: he got engaged, then broke it off because he was afraid he wouldn't be a good husband, and never married anyone after that. A guy who thought this hard about anxiety still didn't manage to shake it completely — which might actually prove his own point: living with uncertainty is something you keep practicing, not a test you pass once.
• Pixar's Inside Out 2 introduced a character literally named Anxiety in June 2024 — the same month this video came out. Pure coincidence, but it landed at the right moment.