The Hidden Source Of Human Anxiety

The true source of anxiety is human existence itself.

Every human being is thrown into existence at birth and forced to live in a world that they did not choose for themselves.

This raises a fundamental question that everyone must confront at some point in their life:

What does it mean to live authentically in a world that you didn’t chose or create?

My own inability to answer or even understand this question has caused me years of suffering and confusion.

It has made it difficult for me to make major life decisions, secretly undermined my relationships with others, and led me to constantly feel like there is something “off” about ordinary life.

I remember when I was assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye in high school.

I didn’t read it.

But I liked being in class and hearing my teacher talk about it’s main character Holden Caulfield, because I saw myself in him at the time.

Holden was a 16-year-old boy who constantly called the people around him “phony,” judging everything and everyone as inauthentic, shallow, and fake.

“One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddam window”

-Holden Caulfield, The Catcher In The Rye

Holden’s attitude led him to experience profound loneliness, which he justified to himself as a good thing, since it would protect him from becoming “phony”.

The irony, of course, was that Holden himself was plainly guilty of the very same phoniness that he saw in others.

He would lie, perform socially, and act inauthentically — just in his own differentiated way.

It’s easy to read The Catcher In The Rye as suggesting a general point about human development — that we all must outgrow the immature state of being judgmental and narcissistic in order to develop authentic human relationships grounded in compassion and understanding.

Once we stop being so obsessed with ourselves and start making the effort to understand other people and their circumstances, we will see that they are not “phony” after all, but simply doing the best they can in an unfair world.

This reading misses a deeper point that might be true.

Perhaps Holden was right that everyone is phony, but not for the shallow reasons he believed they were.

Consider these two questions:

What if most people are inauthentic most of the time, but the real explanation of mass inauthenticity is not found in blaming individuals for failing to create themselves, resist conformity, and act authentically?

What if the real explanation for mass inauthenticity is something fundamental about human existence itself?

Whenever it’s the case that “everybody’s” doing something, I think it is a good rule of thumb to look for deep structural explanations rather than to blame particular individuals for failing to be different.

This shallow way of thinking often ends up being a psychological device that we use to make ourselves feel better than.

Perhaps the reason we are so quick to blame individuals isn’t just to make ourselves feel superior.

Maybe it’s because we often find ourselves wanting for explanations, but also lacking the awareness or ability to articulate the deeper causes of human behavior.

After all, we often find ourselves having to say something.

Maybe blaming individuals is the only thing we can genuinely think of.

Personally, I think it’s time we stop blaming individuals for things that depend upon structural features of human existence itself and instead try to understand what’s really going on.

These considerations raise the central question that I want to answer in this essay:

Is “phoniness” real and built into the nature of human existence itself, or is it just he byproduct of an immature, narcissistic, and judgmental mind?

I will argue that most people are inauthentic most of the time, but not for the phony reasons Holden had in mind.

Most people are inauthentic because being inauthentic is the primary way that human beings avoid having to confront the deep anxiety of human existence itself (most of all the fear of death).

Inauthenticity, then, is the byproduct of deep features of human existence that are impossible for anyone to fully avoid, rather than the blameworthy moral failures of phony individuals who sell themselves out.

In order to understand the unavoidability of inauthenticity, we will need to dive deep into the hidden source of human anxiety that no one talks about.

das Man

Modern life has become increasingly dominated by an unseen oppressive force that Heidegger referred to as das Man.

There is no perfect English translation of das Man, but common translations are “the They”, “People”, “Anyone”, or simply “One”.

The basic idea is that das Man is the anonymous public voice in our heads that we constantly use to judge ourselves and others and to make sense of our lives.

Das man is the mysterious entity that tells us what we “should” be doing by age 40.

Most people naturally think that the source of their anxiety is the pressure to meet social expectations or standards.

To succeed according to what “society” expects of us, but what no one who actually loves us should be pressuring us to do.

But the real source of human anxiety is not the pressure that “society” puts on us.

It is the very nature of human existence itself.

It is our fear of confronting our authenticity, death, freedom that comes with being human that causes us to flee into living for society.

It is the anxiety caused by human existence itself that leads us to seek refuge in das Man and have others choose our lives for us.

This is what it means to live inauthentically.

In order to understand how this works, we need to unpack the hidden source of human anxiety and see how it pulls us into living inauthentically and having the anonymous public dominate our lives.

Some of the ideas below you’ve probably never heard of, and they will be genuinely difficult and strange, but if you really want to understand how to live an authentic life and overcome the deep fears of human existence, it is worth making the effort.

We shouldn’t expect understanding deep truths about life to be easy…

Anxiety (Angst)

In Being and Time, Heidegger famously argued that what it means to exist as a human being is to exist as what he call Dasein (literally “being-there”).

Dasein is a being-in-the-world.

You are Dasein.

The basic idea is that “what you are” is not an “ego” or “self”, but a being that is “always already” fully immersed in the world.

You are a situational being.

You cannot be properly understood independently of the situations you find yourself in.

Since you are completely immersed in the world at all times, any attempt of modern science to study “the human mind” or “human nature” will always be in some sense artificial or limited, because it requires isolating and removing the object of study from its actual lived circumstances in order to “analyze” it.

This is why many have turned towards philosophy to understand certain deep truths about human existence that science cannot make sense of.

You were originally thrown into a world, just as if you were thrown into the ocean, and forced to swim.

For most of our lives, we are fully at home in the world that we were thrown into and we aren’t really able to question it.

It is simply what we know.

It is how life seems to be for us.

Imagine you were a child born into the Soviet Union and had no internet or television access. In this example, your entire world would have been determined by your family, community, and culture.

It would be hard for you to imagine the world as other than it is.

Some people eventually begin to realize that the world doesn’t have to be the way that it is (usually when they are a teenager like Holden).

They realize that if they had been born somewhere else, it could have been fashionable to wear brown shoes with black pants rather than a faux pas.

The world suddenly becomes strange.

You might ask yourself:

Why is this the world for my life? Could my world have been different?

Others go on for years, and even in some cases decades, without ever questioning the “homeliness” or familiarity of their world (usually because it is serving them well).

At some point, however, everyone will experience a significant rupture or break that throws them into a mood Heidegger calls anxiety.

Heidegger argued that it is in anxiety (angst) that the free and authentic self first comes into existence.¹

Perhaps this shift in mood is caused by a nervous breakdown or the end of a serious relationship.

It is almost always triggered by death.

Whatever it is that causes us to question our world, when we shift into the mood of anxiety, what happens is that we become acutely aware of the conditions of our existence which is, as we will see, the very meaning of authenticity for Heidegger.

Disclosure, Anxiety, and Authenticity

Anxiety is a mood in which the world is “disclosed” to us rather than simply thrust upon us.

Disclosure means to “make known”.

So anxiety is the mood in which the world is made known to us.

As we will see, the way in which anxiety makes the world known to us is special.

Normally, the world discloses itself to us in a more mundane sense.

We simply find ourselves in it, and it makes sense and feels familiar because we grow used to it.

We find ourselves in a world that comes “pre-loaded” with meaning.

A world in which the background structure of social norms, rules, customs, and language is given over to us as the way things simply are (“one does not wear brown shoes with black pants”, “you must not say that”).

As you develop and are raised into a culture, this world discloses itself to you through your practical day-to-day encounters with other human beings and objects.

All of this is mediated by language.

In order to see this, imagine how different the world would appear to a human being from the inside if they never develop language.

The world still discloses itself to them through their practical engagement with it, but it’s meaning would be very different for them.

The meaning of the world for you depends upon the totality of the situations which you find yourself in, just as the meaning of a word or a language as a whole depends upon the totality of a culture and way of life.

For example, what it means to make love or have a meal is wildly different depending on where you were raised.

You can easily imagine a foreigner coming over to your house for dinner and saying “that’s not a meal!” because you didn’t include wine.

So the idea of disclosure supposes that the meaning of a word or thing depends upon the context in which we encounter it, including the way of life of which it is a part.

The meaning of everything is “given” to us by virtue of its connection to complex network of activities.

This network is part of the background “conditions of intelligibility” for the world. In other words, the conditions that must be in place for the world to be intelligible to a human being at all.

So anxiety is the mood in which the world discloses itself to us.

But what’s the difference between the way in which world that makes itself known to us in childhood and the way in which world makes itself known to us through the mood of anxiety?

Heidegger believes that there are two fundamental ways the world discloses itself to us.

On the one hand, the world discloses itself to us simply by us being-in-the-world and engaging with it.

This is the ordinary sense of disclosure.

We treat the world as given, stable, but we conceal the fact that it is part of our fundamental nature as Dasein for our world to be contingent and for our lives to be open and free.

While we are living in what Heidegger calls “average everydayness” the world seems, in some sense, necessary.

We say things like “I need to take the train to work”, or “You can’t raise your voice, we are in a restaurant, people will stare”.

These things are, again, just “what we do”.

They come from our understanding of das Man.

This necessity is broken by a shift towards the mood of anxiety.

While in this mood, the world discloses itself to us in a different way.

In fact, Heidegger thinks that we are not merely passive recipients of the world, we also “open” or “disclose” the world ourselves.

We become aware of the contingency of our own existence as thrown into the world and understand ourselves as fundamentally a possibility.

The meaningful social norms and rules no longer seem necessary, but completely empty inventions.

“Who cares if we are in a restaurant? All of these rules are so ridiculous. Who cares if people will stare? What if I want to make a fool of myself? What if I want to have my dessert before my entree?”

The world appears to suddenly lack significance or genuine meaning while in this mood. The rules of dining etiquette seem absurd, arbitrary, and perhaps even oppressive.

This is why Heidegger says that “anxiety reveals the nothing”.

Anxiety discloses to us the very nature of our own existence which allows us to see that we are fundamentally the sort of creatures for which “the world” could be different, we could be different, and our identity is not fixed.

Heidegger calls this “the disclosure of possibility”.

It is in this anxiety which authenticity consists.

We realize that what we are is a possibility.

Heidegger famously says that anxiety reveals Dasein as:

“the being for whom its own being is an issue”

Inauthenticity and das Man

If anxiety discloses our freedom and the possibility of living authentically, why do most people remain trapped in inauthentic ways of living?

Heidegger’s answer is that we are constantly tempted to flee from anxiety.

Anxiety confronts us with the unsettling truth that our lives are radically open and ultimately groundless.

When anxiety reveals our freedom and groundlessness, the world suddenly feels uncanny.

Rather than face this, we quickly reinterpret the feeling as fear—fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of uncertainty—and retreat back into the familiar world of social norms and expectations.

We flee into das Man.

Social expectation — what “they” would think.

Actually, this is much better — “what someone might think”.

What a ridiculous expression that is!

“What someone might think”.

That is inauthenticity par excellence.

We think that our usual routines, social customs, and expectations will provide us with psychological comfort and a solution to our fundamental anxiety as free beings because they make life feel stable and predictable again.

The old meanings return.

So we flee from our authentic nature as Dasein and into das Man.

It is important to point out at this point that Heidegger did not intend for inauthenticity to be understood as a kind of “moral” failure.

Rather, it is a fundamental feature of human existence.

It is part of the rhythm of human life.

We all find ourselves naturally drifting into inauthentic average everydayness from time to time, until something shakes us out of it.

This is why Heidegger says that das Man has a “tranquilizing” effect on us.

We find ourselves feeling pulled towards “what one should do”.

“I guess I should have kids”, someone might think, because they don’t really know what else to do.

“We should have a party?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s your birthday!”

The majority of our lives are already pre-determined by social scripts, traditions, rituals that provide a deep background structure for us to subconsciously follow.

This background becomes absorbed into das Man and internalized by everyone.

Falling

Our tendency to drift towards das Man is what Heidegger calls “falling”.

Falling, for Heidegger, does not mean sin or moral corruption, but the way in which we naturally find ourselves becoming absorbed in everyday life and living inauthentically.

We are constantly falling into small-talk, gossip, work, and what Heidegger generally refers to as “idle talk”.

Idle talk is what happens when we simply find ourselves repeating things without truly understanding them, or having conversations which require no genuine thinking or individuality.

It can come in the form of gossip, popular opinions found on social media, slogans, inherited half-baked political beliefs, and so on.

Idle talk is what happens when two people spend an hour at a family party “arguing politics”, and a spectator who listens on notices that they are literally not having a conversation but just saying a bunch of quotes that they have heard on a podcast or television.

When we talk about things without genuinely thinking about them, we keep ourselves busy and avoid confronting deeper questions about our existence.

Another way in which we keep ourselves falling is by constantly seeking new stimulation.

When we choose to spend our free time seeking novelty, entertainment, and stimulation that allows us to avoid our existence, we are living inauthentically.

Scrolling, watching the news for hours, switching channels, multi-tasking.

These are all uniquely modern ways of living inauthentically.

The irony is that we escape or flee into inauthenticity in order to “feel better”, only to find ourselves putting off a confrontation with the realities of our existence that are constantly getting worse in the background.

This can all carry on for quite some time until, of course, the nature of our existence thrusts itself upon us in the form of death.

Pre-occupation prevents us from confronting deeper questions about existence.

We might even take a permanent stance of avoidance by reaching some sort of personal resolution such as:

“I’m just a simple guy. I don’t want to think about those things. I’m happier if I don’t”.

As if the unavoidable conditions of existence will respect this statement…

Conclusion

In a way, Holden Caulfield was right.

Most of us are living inauthentically most of the time.

But not for the phony reasons he thought.

It is not because of some unique moral failure of you as an individual to avoid selling out, or to become interesting.

It is because we are constantly falling into inauthenticity as a way to avoid the fundamental anxiety of human freedom.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

Heidegger thought that the secret to living an authentic existence is to become someone that is able to live in genuine awareness of their own death rather than avoiding it.

This is what he famously called “being-towards-death”.

Properly understanding the hidden source of human anxiety and how it drives us into living inauthentically by avoiding our own freedom and mortality provides the hidden path one can take to answer the opening question I had struggled with for years:

What does it mean to live authentically in a world that you didn’t chose or create?

What that path requires and where it leads is something I will save for another essay on how to properly live towards death.

-Paul

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This essay was the sequel to an earlier essay on Heidegger and “thrownness”. I provided a brief summary and link below for you.

In my previous essay on our “thrownness” into the world, I offered a diagnosis of why so many people today feel that life has become shallow or “flimsy” and that they are missing a deeper engagement or connection with the world, but struggle to articulate it.

I appealed to Heidegger’s idea that it is a fundamental existential condition for human beings to be “thrown” into a world they did not choose and find themselves “lost in it”, drifting towards inauthenticity.

This drift is accelerated by modern technology and culture, which quietly nudges people to trade meaning for material comfort on a mass scale, only to realize that something has been taken from them.

Philosophy—in particular Heidegger’s existential analysis—promises to provide a radically new perspective on existence that helps individuals recognize the true source of their anxiety, the fundamental conditions of their existence, and how to consciously choose an authentic life.

1. Critchley, Simon. “Being and Time Part 5: Anxiety”. The Guardian. 2007.