Existential Angst Quotes

I sometimes look into the face of my dog Stan and see a wistful sadness and existential angst, when all he is actually doing is slowly scanning the ceiling for flies.

As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.

I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it's just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more that a deep existential angst the says, again and again, 'I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.

Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.

Banality is the biggest source of existential angst for the educated middle class.

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it. Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

Wild creatures somehow know where they must go, but we— we humans wander the paths of confusion. Trying to be so many things other than our true selves.

Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade.

Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story.

…ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning.

Upon the arrival of my new forehead wrinkle, I Googled “existential crisis” directly after I Googled “Botox.” I’m aware that my imminent birthday is exacerbating this angst.

Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.

I once witnessed a rather unfortunate production of Shakespeare's Hamlet - the lead actor didn't know his existential angst from his iambic pentameter and, alas, poor Yorick was a bemused bystander.

First, you hand over some basics--overwhelming joy, existential angst, a giving-in to desire, etc. And then you promise to withstand talking idly about the weather, to encourage cliché, to uphold the virtues of average. You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.

A person suffering a meaning crisis in their life can ill afford not to investigate their life and examine their beliefs before personal disdain for living conspires to exterminate their most precious gift, the spark of creativity and desire to produce an artistic testament to their existence.

I wasn't only sad--I was angry. I still felt lost in a dark, terrifying maze. And I was furious at the world for leaving me here.

The universal story is composed of segments of anxiety, disappointment, profanity, prayers, heartache, tragedy, and despair.

Whereas many people can find happiness by partaking in the ordinary trappings of life, creative people are especially susceptible to enduring an existential crisis, feeling that their life is aimless, irrational, and intolerably painful, especially when they are at an artistic impasse. The impelling act of using their imagination to create enduring artistic testaments is perhaps their only method to blunt the fateful feeling that it is useless to continue living in a world where life has no ultimate meaning, value, and purpose.

Anyway, back to the crush. Sorry to shift gears so fast, but we both know why we're here. I mean, if I wanted to discuss the existential angst of motherhood I'd be writing in a journal. Diaries are for the down and dirty, the stuff you don't want people to ever find out about you. Journals are the things you leave open around the house, hoping a literary agent will wander in, read it and declare you the next genius of your age.

Every form of life must struggle. Life is an aberration; death is ordinary. Life requires obstruction, conflict, reverses, and resolve. Life requires questing. Questing provides the meaning that we seek, a purpose to justify the inevitable struggle to live knowing the absurdity that we must die.

Whereas a belief in an absurd world arises out of the fundamental disharmony of a person searching for meaning in an apparently meaninglessness universe, an existential nihilist displays impassive intellectual stoicism towards their eventual mortality while embracing a passionate artistic commitment to munity against the underlying syndrome of insignificance and confusion encasing life.

Life numbed, unceasing, interminable, from zero begins to zero it ends.

The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us - anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt...but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. And existential angst. All these emotions are very much a part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces. The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time.

A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.

Adam and I left the party, and we got into bed and tried to get through another episode of the drug cartel show we were watching that everyone said got really good at the end of the third season, but we were only up to the second, and we had existential angst about whether we should be watching something that only promised to be good but wasn’t yet. We agreed the answer was yes, that hope was good, and in those moments—the ones when we endured, the ones where we agreed, the ones where we disagreed and found the other person’s point dumb enough to laugh out loud, the ones where he still agreed to do our fully choreographed wedding dance in the kitchen for no reason at all and to no music, the ones where he showed me a window into how much smarter he was than I was and how even though he was that smart he never needed to flaunt it, the ones where we rolled our eyes at how dumb everyone else was, the ones where he evacuated me from my misery and made me a cheese omelet because I was stoned and wanted something warm and milky, that was when I remembered the most essential thing about Adam and me, which was that I never once doubted if I should be with him.

All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.

The passage of time will ultimately obliterate the pallid signs of my toneless existence. My faint light will disappear entirely in the ebb and flow of the sprawling continuum of time, the impeccable sea of perpetuity that yawning encasement serves as the impeachable mantel for the inescapable predicament that horns the human condition.

Today, our view of genuine reality is increasingly clouded by professionals whose technical expertise often introduces a superficial and soulless model of the person that denies moral significance. Perhaps the most devastating example for human values is the process of medicalization through which ordinary unhappiness and normal bereavement have been transformed into clinical depression, existential angst turned into anxiety disorders, and the moral consequences of political violence recast as post-traumatic stress disorder. That is, suffering is redefined as mental illness and treated by professional experts, typically with medication. I believe that this diminishes the person,

Life is only meaningless if we fail to make a resolute effort at achieving bliss, attaining the active state of oneness that comes to a person whom is attentively alive and mindful of all the beauty and moral sublimity of existence.

We can combat existential anguish – the unbearable lightness of our being – in a variety of ways. We can choose to work, play, destroy, or create. We can allow a variety of cultural factors or other people to define who we are, or we can create a self-definition. We decide what to monitor in the environment. We regulate how much attention we pay to nature, other people, or the self. We can watch and comment upon current cultural events and worldly happenings or withdraw and ignore the external world. We can drink alcohol, dabble with recreational drugs, play videogames, or watch television, films, and sporting events. We can travel, go on nature walks, camp, fish, and hunt, climb mountains, or take whitewater-rafting trips. We can build, paint, sing, create music, write poetry, or read and write books. We can cook, barbeque, eat fine cuisine at restaurants or go on fasts. We can attend church services, worship and pray, or chose to embrace agnosticism or atheism. We can belong to charitable organizations or political parties. We can actively or passively support or oppose social and ecological causes. We can share time with family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances or live alone and eschew social intermixing.

Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. If you didn’t like something you changed it and if you couldn’t change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. (“Remind me not to come to you for therapy,” Julia said.)

Every road leads to sorrow. All aspects that make life beautiful – friendship, love, art, and truth – will end. All aspects that make life hideous – pain, poverty, illness, betrayal, hate, crime, war – will also end. The fact that human life is a mere blip on a cosmic scale is no reason for personal angst as we came from nothingness and will return to the great void that birthed us.

The powerful questions of life produce a dynamic dualism, which interplay creates the operatic structure that we must operate. Can the flesh and spirit coexist? Can inner despair and renewed optimism reside under the same roof? Can we harness humankind’s wretchedness in order to broker its salvation? Should all people seek out perfection or work to accept their fallibility? Should I eschew pain or embrace suffering? Do I cave into the meaningless of my life or actively rebel against the patent absurdity of human existence?

How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything. But the alternative—the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless individual—is clearly worse.

Emotional exhaustion follows fast on the footsteps of physical and mental depletion. I feel my lifeblood draining away in an oily spigot of inner turmoil. Questions abound and personal survival hinges upon sorting through possible solutions and selecting the most fitting answers. Is my pain real or simply an illusion of a frustrated ego? What do I believe in? What is my purpose? I aspire to discover a means to live in congruence with the trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. Can I discover a noble path that frees me from the shallowness of decadent physical and emotional desires? Can I surrender any desire to seek fame and fortune? Can I terminate a craving to punish other persons for their perceived wrongs? Can I recognize that forgiving persons whom offended me is a self-initiated, transformative act? Can I conquer an irrational fear of the future? Can I accept the inevitable chaos that accompanies life? Can I find a means to achieve inner harmony by steadfastly resolving to live in the moment free of angst? Can I purge egotisms that mar an equitable perception of life by renunciation of the self and all worldly endeavors? Can I live a harmonious existence devoid the panache of vanities?

The existentially gifted are more likely to experience a high degree of existential angst. Being aware of the finite quality of life and their potential, they constantly feel compelled to move forwards. This can manifest as strong creative urges, but also as constant restlessness, anxiety and insecurity.

On the practical level modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning. Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture. This

The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.1

It's not wrong to feel like the world is fucked up being repair, but...you can try to repair what you can, using whatever skills you might have.

I imagine that existential dread probably ought to get a devil. A devil of post-colonial angst. A devil of complicated grief.

Life can be wearisome and dreary because the world is indifferent to us.

L'angoisse commence pour un homme et le délaissement et les sueurs de sang, quand il ne peut plus avoir d'autre témoin que lui-même.

The young of the town, preoccupied with their own germinating angst, which each possessed in varying degree (though few were ever fully aware of its existence), felt no particular connection to the land, its people, its structures, or its history. As such, they had no inclination to defend its invisible borders from declared enemies within or without. They desired only escape from this small village, which each viewed as an existential prison built upon the antiquated expectations of their parents and their parents’ parents. And because of their invisible bondage, the young of this town were possessed by a quiet rage. But this rage laid torpid and inert within them, dulled to sleep by the tired repetition of nothing happening over and over and over again, day after day after day. This is the story of one of those young people, and the terrible things that happened to her, and the terrible things she did as a result.

I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear. I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, “I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legend and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

We come from this earth and we will return to this earth. The word human is a derivative of the word humus. We spring from the same soil that houses our ancestor’s great sleep. We walk on the fossilized bones and decomposed flesh of all the people and every species that traversed the earth before our time. It is humbling and reassuring to know that I entered this life-giving sphere only after so many good people came before me to consecrate this land with their vitality and knowing that we share the universal story of struggle. It is consoling understanding that after I die Mother Earth will turn my decomposed shell into a new form of life. My decaying body will provide nutrients for life that will rise after I die. Until the soil opens up to receive me as its own child, I must take a stand and make the most out of the sunshine and rainstorms that beat down upon all people alike.

I have to assume that the images and information filtered through my consciousness are intrinsically relevant to these purposes that simultaneously compel and distort me. Everything exacerbates what it exasperates in an organic repetitive cycle.

The modern deal thus offers humans an enormous temptation, coupled with a colossal threat. Omnipotence is in front of us, almost within our reach, but below us yawns the abyss of complete nothingness. On the practical level modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning. Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.

Stored personal memories along with handed down collective memories of stories, legends, and history allows us to collate our interactions with a physical and social world and develop a personal code of survival. In essence, we all become self-styled sages, creating our own book of wisdom based upon our studied observations and practical knowledge gleaned from living and learning. What we quickly discover is that no textbook exist how to conduct our life, because the world has yet to produce a perfect person – an ideal observer – whom is capable of handing down a concrete exemplar of epistemic virtues. We each draw upon the guiding knowledge, theories, and advice available for us in order to explore the paradoxes, ironies, inconsistencies, and the absurdities encountered while living in a supernatural world. We mold our personal collection of information into a practical practicum how to live and die. Each day we define and redefine who we are, determine how we will react today, and chart our quest into an uncertain future.

I cannot shun the past because it contains information that is useful to script future goals. Looking back into the opaque window of reductive retrospect, what essential opportunities exist today that beckon one to seek with unrestrained enthusiasm? What iridescent signals flare from our conceptual self that if we heedlessly ignore their luminous summons, such deliberate acts of omission will suture the apex of our souls, relegating us to the dreaded curse of mucking along in an ordinary life stalled out by our overweening fear of estrangement?

The dark girl's gaze lights on me again, and something passes over her face, something I've seen before. Her face is speaking: you can't kid me. I know what you're like, I know who you are. I know her too. She and the blonde are the same kind. They belong to the same tribe. The better and smarter tribe. They're the ones who push aside the duds, the dupes, the dopes like me. They're the ones who know what to do, how to do it. They know what they want. How do they get that way? Are they born with that knowledge? Do they learn it somewhere? I've always felt like a stranger everywhere, unsure what to do, how to act, waiting for someone to tell me the rules. What are they? Would somebody please tell me? The dark girl knows. The blonde knows. What are they, six, maybe seven years old? -- and already they know things I don't know. And they hate me and scorn me for it.

And honestly, I don’t know a better way to battle existential angst and fear than by seizing each day by the throat and forcing it into a shape that feels productive and healthy and on track. You do not sit around bemoaning the big picture, day in and day out. NO. You focus on charging forward, on becoming a better, healthier, more generous, more balanced sort of a person; you call your friends and your family to talk often; you give of yourself; and you resolve to do that again and again, every second of every goddamn day until they come and grab your dead body and shove it into a coffin.

Am I alone in an ensconced inner world where I obsessively worry about what happens to me, where the story of personal survival becomes the central theme of my shallow existence? I think not. Swaddled in our own brand of strangeness, we all struggle to come to terms with our demonstrated personal shortcomings. Our yearned-for life of living in pink skyways far removed from harm’s way is depressingly marked in contrast by our actual crabby existence spent scuttling along akin to a smug lobster, scrunched down on the asphalt streets, working in the city grid as frumpy members of the faceless mob.

A person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode may be free from manifest assumptions but cannot be considered mentally healthy. Such individuals typically lead ego-centered, competitive, goal-oriented lives. They tend to be unable to derive satisfaction from ordinary activities in everyday life and can become alienated from their inner world. For people whose existence is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction. They become infused with a sense of meaninglessness, futility, and even absurdity that no amount of external success can dispel.

I seek to use the tools of the mind to overcome a narcissistic self and attain self-mastery. I aspire to engage in self-cultivation by making practical usage of the process of enduring privations, overcoming challenges, and rejecting illicit temptations in order to gain fortitude, courage, and wisdom. I shall reflect upon grievous personal mistakes and embrace the concept of repentance as a lifelong growth process through which humankind conscientiously learns to make better choices by forsaking vice, immorality, and wickedness. I must also unreservedly embrace fate by perceiving everything that happens in life including suffering and loss as good, and affirm a life filled with indignity, sorrow, and tragedy. I can only discover happiness – a meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, and essential value of existence – by living with dignity in the face of absurdity. When we affirm all aspects of being, we enjoy a tranquil existence.

A desire to attain short-term happiness while laboring under the weight a looming death sentence is an obvious paradox. Suicide, as distinguished from medical euthanasia, is an emotional reaction to the absurdity of life. Suicide is a panic-stricken reflex induced by the sinister twins of fear and foreboding. A rational person does not commit self-murder because their longing for happiness is incongruent with their present day reality. Suicide is a superficial response to hard times; suicide is a pusillanimous solution. A more measured reaction and, therefore, ultimately a braver and logical tactic is to meet life’s pillbox of irrationality headfirst. Upon soul-searching reflection, a thinking person accepts that while he or she might never comprehend a unifying meaning of life they still prefer to experience each permitted day of life to the fullest. A pragmatic person accepts the cold fact that happiness is fleeting and death is inevitable. By acknowledging and accepting the underlying absurdity of life, the prisoner awakens to discover his own humanity. By refusing to cooperate with death, by working each day to expand personal consciousness, by savoring each moment of life regardless of its hazards, adversities, misfortunes, and seemingly lack of overriding purpose, an impertinent ward of time transcends his or her incarnate incarceration.

I couldn't bear being this suburban mom who was alternating between screaming at her kids and being the heartfelt, privileged witness to their joy. But the people around us - the haranguing mothers and sexless fathers - I kept trying to find ways that I was better than these people, but all I kept landing on was the fact that the common denominator was me.

College students’ bizarre actions are incomprehensible until scrutinized under the lens that they are simply defying their mortality. A person learns how to live by contemplating death, because when a person faces death, it strips everything superfluous away, revealing the sterling qualities of life. University students newly freed from parental restraints desire to ascertain the essence of their life, but they lack the maturity and life experiences meaningfully to contemplate the weighty subjects of life and death. Realizing their immaturity and resultant angst, collegiate students act recklessly in order to loudly proclaim that they do not care if fate demands that they die will, when in fact they are terrified of both living and dying.

...No one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers--downers who don't realize how good we actually have it. Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop--a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters--as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

A person whom questions the purpose behind enduring life strafed with pain and self-doubt must construct a self-rescue plan. Does a demoralized person discover contentment and a meaningful life through expanded intellectual studies or by becoming engrossed in living deeply connected to nature? Should I seek personal conquest and eradication of ugly segments of my persona or merger and unification of the irrational splinters of a fragmented and traumatized personality? How does a person express what it means to be human? How does a person locate the incandescent flash of their flesh? If I shout into the wind with all my might, will responsive people hear my wild cry? Will placing pen to paper buffet the cantos of a troubled mind, expose the operatic musings of a madman’s ranting song, or will looking at each day through the diverse lens of both detachment and solipsism ignite an illuminating shaft of wisdom to grace the sinkhole of a fallen man?

Humans recognize the duality, autonomy, and latitude range of the mind and the body, and all humans comprehend their impending mortality. Unlike other animals, humankind knows despair brought about by understanding the inevitability of death of all living creatures. The radius of human thought touching upon the longitude of our transient existence causes infinite pain. Seeking to ameliorate existential anguish incites us to ponder spiritual matters, and this sphere of mental activity spurs us to contemplate the perimeter of unknown frontiers. Our ability to understand the compass of life and death allows us to view the circumference of the world as consisting of a past, a present, and a future in relation to our own lives. How a person views the range of their earthly life and how a person rationalizes their march towards a deathly outback creates a system of beliefs that separate people into classes, and the variations amongst class members’ belief systems supplements who we think we are.

Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.

Anxiety (loneliness or “abandonment anxiety” being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent that he loses orientation in the objective world. To lose the world is to lose one's self, and vice versa; self and world are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-world relationship, i.e., to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in the state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient himself—as happens, one hopes, in psychotherapy—and again relate himself to the world directly, experientially, with his senses alive, he overcomes the anxiety. My slightly anthropomorphic terminology comes out of my work as a therapist and is not out of place here. Though the patient and I are entirely aware of the symbolic nature of this (anxiety doesn’t do anything, just as libido or sex drives don’t), it is often helpful for the patient to see himself as struggling against an “adversary.” For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, he can help in his own treatment by taking practical steps when he experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in his fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. He is not only opening the doors of his closet where the ghosts hide, but he often can also then take steps to reorient himself in his practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests him.

Dadas las circunstancias, debo asumir a la vez los papeles de demandante y demandado, de juez y parte, y encuentro toda esa farsa de la naturaleza totalmente absurda, considerando incluso humillante tener que soportarla. En consecuencia, en mi indiscutible calidad de demandante y demandado, de juez y parte, condeno a esa naturaleza, que con tanta desconsideración y rudeza me ha traído al mundo para sufrir, a perecer conmigo… desconsideración y rudeza me ha traído al mundo para sufrir, a perecer conmigo… Y como no puedo aniquilar a la naturaleza, me aniquilo a mí mismo

No importa tanto la diferenciación entre el progreso representado por el ahorro de energía (que simplifica la vida cotidiana) o por la expansión de energía (que potencia nuestras aspiraciones o "aficiones" naturales), sino el acento puesto en la excesiva velocidad con que estas transformaciones han afectado al Japón, como consecuencia de la procedencia externa de los estímulos que, al no ser fruto de una secuencia generado intrínsecamente, ha obligado a una apresurada (y por ello superficial) asimilación de los cambios (muchos en muy poco tiempo), lo cual ha llegado a provocar una auténtica "angustia existencial.

A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose). Nietzsche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness. Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of any cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness―free flight―not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!

They were able to step back from their automatic responses and glimpse the full scope of existence. Life, they knew, endured through the cycles of the sun and moon and seasons, but as the dead around them attested, it also had an end. What was the purpose? Looking closely at these reflective individuals, I realized I could perceive their Birth Visions; they had come into the Earthly dimension with the specific purpose of initiating humanity’s first existential awakening. And, even though I couldn’t see its full scope, I knew that in the back of their minds was held the larger inspiration of the World Vision. Before their birth, they were aware that humanity was embarking on a long journey that they could already see. But they also knew that progress along this journey would have to be earned, generation by generation—for as we awakened to pursue a higher destiny, we also lost the calm peace of unconsciousness. Along with the exhilaration and freedom of knowing we were alive came the fear and uncertainty of being alive without knowing why. I could see that humanity’s long history would be moved by these two conflicting urges. On the one hand, we would be moved past our fears by the strength of our intuitions, by our mental images that life was about accomplishing some particular goal, of moving culture forward in a positive direction that only we, as individuals, acting with courage and wisdom, could inspire. From the strength of these feelings we would be reminded that, as insecure as life appeared, we were, in fact, not alone, that there was purpose and meaning underlying the mystery of existence. Yet, on the other hand, we would often fall prey to the opposite urge, the urge to protect ourselves from the Fear, at times losing sight of the purpose, falling into the angst of separation and abandonment. This Fear would lead us into a frightened self-protection, fighting to retain our positions of power, stealing energy from each other, and always resisting change and evolution, regardless of what new, better information might be available. As the awakening continued, millennia passed, and I watched as humans gradually began to coalesce into ever-larger groups, following a natural drive to identify with more people, to move into more complex social organizations. I could see that this drive came from the vague intuition, known fully in the Afterlife, that human destiny on Earth was to evolve toward unification.

Insufficient hope. Please deposit more faith to make a withdrawal. - Those dark feelings might not be so dark. They might actually mean something. They may be a flashing red warning: “Do that other thing.” Or “Don’t settle here forever.” - It’s okay to take a risk on your own, and dream big. - God endorses your dissatisfaction with the world’s self-concept package: “Large, with a side of self-doubt and a sprinkle of guilt". - Find the fire. Our twenties can be an anesthesia — they can numb us to pain and motivation. If we can stop the morphine drip of despondency, we will find that our unbearable existential angst is not a doom — it is the pain of depressurization, rising out of the depths.  - God does not expect you to be a Wall Street executive. God does not wish you were making six figures. God does not wish you had a happy-go-lucky personality. God does not wish you would just “Get yourself together already!” You can depend on Him for love, affirmation, affection, correction, a guiding hand, and His never-forsaking care. Breathe. - The possibilities for embarrassment and greatness exist in the same space. - Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live. Appreciate the moment, every loved one. here now.

The gyrfalcon Dan flew that day was a bird of the year who was just learning to hunt. When he brought her out, I shook my head at the size of her. She was massive; Dan had aptly named her Jabba the Hut. As with all falcons, female gyrfalcons are a third larger than the males. ... She thought that she was a person and treated Dan as her mate.This gave new meaning to the term "henpecked.

Psychiatrists should take the lead in expressing caution about solving emotional angst by taking a pill. Doctors of the soul will distinguish between the proper use of medication for treating psychiatric disorders and the inappropriate desire to cure social and existential pain with a pill.

I gave up everything I spent 33 years working towards on my quest to separate from the reality of death.

I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.

Here, the presence of other people felt different; or maybe she was different. Civilization had gone awry, with its buildings and highways, its digitalization and consumption. Binge-watching TV. Humans had adapted to a meaningless structure of work and wealth that resulted in a fundamental loss of identity. Here, you could return to the natural order, enjoy the two-part state of doing-the-necessities-to-survive and sitting-around-doing-nothing, unburdened of existential angst.

At twenty-four I did have a Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their midtwenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas.

Every individual can potentially follow the impulse to seek something greater. We often yearn for further evolution. We wonder if there could be more to life than what we are currently experiencing. Life transformations may lead to changes in identity, often accompanied by the pangs of existential angst. These are turning points in which our whole sense of self is altered. Triggering events may include marriage or divorce, death of a loved one, entering a new phase of life, or the introduction to a new group of intimates and peer group.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything that we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting the story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

Because of the disorientation involved, coping with severe anxiety is an agonizing experience. Most people, however, are spared from the tortures of severe anxiety, but few can escape from the milder form of anxiety which permeates the background of our daily existence. To differentiate it from severe anxiety, this more common form is sometimes called “angst” or “existential anxiety”, and rather than attempting to alleviate it Soren Kierkegaard considered it an indispensable ingredient in a life lived to full potential.

In a culture infused with existential angst and aggressive personal marketing, to be silent is to fall behind. To listen is to miss an opportunity to advance your brand and make your mark.

The glory of endemic existential angst invites in one the conviction that nothing good will come of anything, so there is no way you can actually disappoint me since I'm already disappointed down to the very core of my being.

I know how fortunate I am to have my health and my family and my jobs and my roof and my car and my democracy. I do know. I promise. And I know that saying out loud, “I think I might want a different life,” when you already have a perfectly good life is sort of like holding a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie in your hand while saying, “I don’t want a chocolate chip cookie. I think I want some other kind of cookie.” I know some people have no cookies. Unfortunately, having a fine life doesn’t exempt anyone from existential angst. Maybe it should. Maybe if we were all perfect people, we’d wake up in our nice warm beds, appreciate that we’re not waking up on concrete under an overpass, and cease fretting about our hopes and dreams, because if our basic biological needs are covered—food, shelter, water—what else could be so bad?

To me this perspective feels pragmatic, loyal, and without angst. Here, there’s no churning about the existential, the metaphysical, the unknown. There’s no “Are we?” or “Aren’t we?” It’s just you and me, moving through days, months, and years together, continuing to show up because we are an “us.” Lovely.

dadas las circunstancias, debo asumir a la vez los papeles de demandante y demandado, de juez y parte, y encuentro toda esa farsa de la naturaleza totalmente absurda, considerando incluso humillante tener que soportarla. En consecuencia, en mi indiscutible calidad de demandante y demandado, de juez y parte, condeno a esa naturaleza, que con tanta desconsideración y rudeza me ha traído al mundo para sufrir, a perecer conmigo… Y como no puedo aniquilar a la naturaleza, me aniquilo a mí mismo

Pervasive rationalistic, technical and bureaucratic ways of thinking have emptied life of meaning by destroying what Berger calls the ‘sacred canopy’ of meanings reflecting collective beliefs about life, death and the world in which we live. The resultant anomie, or loss of all bearings, the demise of any shared structure of values, leads to a sort of existential angst.

He thought about the loss of humanity that was eating away at the world and the loss of the connection to the self that ate away at the consciousness which animated all into being. He thought about how the collective psyche was teetering on that knife’s edge between a desperation to live and a desperation to die. And here he was at the cusp of it himself.

We take them on; they make us happy. Give us purpose. Resolve our existential angst.” “Devour us inside out.” I laugh. “What doesn’t?

...I guess I've got a case of existential angst. Low blood sugar. Time on the wing. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Et cetera.

But I see differently. I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear. I think perfectionism is just fear of fancy shoes and mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it's just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, "I am not good enough and I will never be good enough

Causes of anxiety range from gut bacteria to adverse childhood experiences to existential angst.

But he knew he had to live his life without being afraid to die. The cage had taught him that.

He was making up for it now, even if only to himself, because he still felt impelled to put on a good face for the world, it seemed bad manners to do otherwise. 'If you can't say something nice.', his mother had tutored him, 'then don't say anything at all.' The hair was real. Crystal had no idea who it had once belonged to. She'd worried it might have come from a corpse but her hairdresser said, 'Nah, from a temple in India. The women shave their heads for some kind of religious thing and the monks sell it.' That's how Crystal referred to it - 'Got your head stuck in a book again, Harry?' It would be funny if his head did actually get stuck in a book. Her heart wasn't shattered, just cracked, although cracked was bad enough. "Are you Mrs Bragg?' Reggie asked. "Maybe," the woman said. Well, you either are or you aren't. Reggie thought. You're not Schrodinger's cat. What do you call a nest of lesbians? A dyke eyrie. "Great,' she said, so he knew she wasn't listening. An increasing number of people, Jackson had noticed lately, were not listening to him. Dogs, you know, stay by their master's side after they've died. Fido, Hachiko, Ruswrap, Old Shep, Squeak, Spot. There was a list on Wikipedia. I am the repository of useless knowledge. Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. if you didn't like something you changed it and if you couldn't change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. ('Remind me not to come to you for therapy,' Julia said.) This was better, Jackson thought, all he had to do was utilize the lyrics from country songs, they contained better advice than anything he could conjure up himself. Best to avoid Hank, though - 'I'm so lonesome I could cry. I'll never get out of this world alive. I don't care if tomorrow never comes. Poor old Hank, not good mental fodder of a man who had just tried to jump off a cliff. 'Diaeresis - the two little dots above the "e", its not an umlaut. Reggie thought if a day would ever goes by when she is not disappointed in people. "Jesus Christ, Crystal,' he said, dropping the baseball bat and pulling off his shoes, prepare to jump in and save Tommy. So he could kill him later.

We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything. But the alternative— the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless individual— is clearly worse.

At the heart of existentialist philosophy is the premise that all existence is absurd. Life has no meaning and death is the ultimate absurdity, But in the course of this absurd existence, man is forced to make choices, even if those choices may be about absurd issues. But man abhors this freedom of choice, a condition called 'existential angst'. Until we reach a time when most of our life lies behind us, we second guess ourselves interminably. 'What if I had done done this?' 'What if I had done that?' 'Could I have learnt from what others before me have done?' But that is a futile endeavor. It is just not possible to pass on the burden of decision-making to someone else, nor is it possible to learn from other's experiences. Every man has to make choices by falling back on his own experience. In short, man is condemned to be free.

The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships and perpetual youth.

Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity. The

Our reward for surviving the hard knocks of a corporal life is arguably paltry. The inevitability of the big sleep is our final reward for laying it all on the line each day that we still breathe. A person whom elects to transform him or herself does so because they believe that life is worthwhile. If a troubled person mints a newly reconstituted persona, it might enable them serenely to accept everything life calls for, even struggle, loss, defeat, disintegration, and death.

Maniacal obsession can be a destructive or a transformative psychic force. What is unacceptable is a life of blandness, not to dare penetrate into the heart of nothingness.

the practice of meditation can lessen human suffering—not just the existential angst kind of suffering, which is bad enough, but actual physical pain.

I had the sort of relationship with my parents where I could have long conversations with them about absolutely anything: sex, love, grief, ecstasy, existential angst. As long as I was talking about somebody else’s life, and not my own.