Chapter 3: The Dizziness of Freedom

Two Open Doors

Mateo is thirty-one and works as a sound engineer in a small recording studio. Three days ago, he received an offer he never expected: a job at a much larger studio in a city far away, with better pay, famous clients and the chance to work on projects he has dreamed about since he was a teenager. He has a week to decide.

It is two o'clock in the morning, and Mateo is standing at his window, looking at the dark street. He cannot sleep. On one side is everything he knows: his small flat, his friends, his parents twenty minutes away, the studio where he has worked for eight years with people he likes. On the other side is something new and exciting and frightening: a new city, new colleagues, new pressures, a new life.

What troubles him is not that one choice is clearly bad. Both are possible. Both could be good. Both could go wrong. Nobody can tell him which is right, not his parents, not his friends, not the people at either studio. The decision is his alone, and whatever he chooses, he will have to live with it. As he stands there, he feels a strange sensation, almost physical, like the feeling of standing at the edge of a high place. His stomach turns. His thoughts spin. He realizes that what he feels is not exactly fear. It is something more like dizziness.

More than a hundred and eighty years ago, a thinker gave a name to exactly this feeling. He called it anxiety, and he described it as the dizziness of freedom. This chapter explores what he meant, how later existentialists developed the idea and how understanding this dizziness can help us when we stand, like Mateo, in front of open doors.

Looking Down From a Height

In 1844, Søren Kierkegaard published a book called The Concept of Anxiety, under an invented author's name, as he often did. It is a difficult book, written partly as a religious and psychological study of human sinfulness and freedom. But one short passage in it has become famous far beyond its original setting. Here it is in my own plain translation.

"Anxiety can be likened to dizziness. When a person's eye happens to look down into a deep abyss, he grows dizzy. Why? The cause lies as much in his eye as in the abyss, for he need not have looked down. In the same way, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

What is Kierkegaard saying? When we stand at the edge of a cliff and look down, we feel dizzy. The dizziness does not come only from the cliff. It comes from our looking, from our awareness of the depth and of what might happen. In the same way, anxiety arises when we become aware of our own freedom, of all the possibilities open to us, including the possibility of choosing wrongly. We look down into the depth of what we might do, and we feel dizzy.

For Kierkegaard, this means that anxiety is not simply a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that we are free. A stone does not feel anxiety. An animal following its instincts may feel fear, but not this kind of dizziness about its own possibilities. Only a being who can choose, and who knows it can choose, feels the vertigo of freedom. In this sense, anxiety is part of what it means to be human.

Mateo's sleepless night is a perfect example. He is not anxious because something terrible is happening. He is anxious because he is free to choose between two possible lives, and he knows that the choice is his. The open doors are the abyss, and his awareness of them is the eye that looks down.

Anxiety and Fear Are Different

Kierkegaard made a distinction that many later thinkers found useful. Fear, he suggested, is usually about something definite: a dangerous animal, an illness, a person who might harm us. Fear has an object. We can point to what we are afraid of.

Anxiety, in the sense Kierkegaard meant, is different. It is not about a definite object, but about possibility itself, about what might be, what we might do, what we might become. It is vaguer and harder to grasp. We cannot point to it in the same way. When Mateo stands at the window, he is not afraid of any particular thing. He is anxious about the openness of his future.

This distinction can help us understand some of our own feelings. Sometimes we feel uneasy without knowing why. We may look for a cause, a problem to fix. But sometimes the unease is not about any particular problem. It is the feeling of having choices, of standing in front of a life that is not yet decided. Recognizing this can be a relief. It means the feeling is not necessarily a warning that something is wrong. It may simply be the feeling of being free.

I want to be careful with words here. In everyday language and in medicine, the word "anxiety" is used in many ways, including for anxiety disorders, which are real health conditions that can cause great suffering and that can be treated. Kierkegaard was not writing about these conditions in the medical sense. He was writing about a basic feature of human existence. Later in this chapter, I will say more about the difference and about when it is wise to seek help.

The Cliff Path

About a hundred years after Kierkegaard, Sartre took up the idea of anxiety in his own way. In his large philosophical work Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, he used the word anguish for the feeling of facing our own freedom, and he gave an example that echoes Kierkegaard's image of the abyss.

In my own retelling: imagine walking along a narrow path at the edge of a cliff, with a long drop on one side. You may feel fear: fear that the path might crumble, that you might slip, that a stone might hit you. That fear is about things that could happen to you. But Sartre pointed to a second feeling that can come at the same moment, a strange vertigo. It is not about what the path or the weather might do to you. It is the unsettling awareness that your own next steps are not settled by anything outside you. Nothing in the world forces you to keep walking safely. Only your own choice keeps you on the path, and you must keep making that choice with each step.

This example can sound dark, but its point is about freedom, not about danger. Sartre was saying that anguish arises when we realize that our future actions are not fixed by anything outside us, that we must continually choose them ourselves. Even the decision to keep walking carefully is a decision, renewed with every step. There is no external guarantee.

In ordinary life, we rarely stand on cliff paths. But we often face smaller versions of this vertigo. A person who has decided to stop drinking may feel it when they walk past a bar: nothing forces them to keep their decision, except their own continuing choice. A person who has promised to be faithful may feel it when temptation appears. A student who has decided to study may feel it when friends invite them out. In each case, the past decision does not hold by itself. It must be chosen again, now. That is freedom, and that is why it can feel dizzying.

Why Freedom Feels Heavy

Most of us like the idea of freedom. We want to be free to choose our work, our relationships, our beliefs and our way of life. So why does freedom so often feel heavy, even frightening?

One reason is responsibility. If I am free, then what I choose is my responsibility. I cannot blame anyone else if it goes wrong. Sartre emphasized this strongly. In Existentialism Is a Humanism, he suggested that when we choose, we are responsible not only for ourselves but, in a sense, for the image of humanity that our choice expresses. This is a large burden, and it is part of what he meant by anguish.

Another reason is the absence of guarantees. When we choose, we cannot know for certain how things will turn out. Mateo cannot know whether the new job will make him happy or miserable, whether his friendships will survive the distance, whether he will regret leaving or regret staying. Every important choice is made in uncertainty. We step into the future without seeing where our foot will land.

A third reason is that choosing one thing means giving up others. If Mateo takes the new job, he gives up the life he knows. If he stays, he gives up the life he might have had. Every choice is also a loss, because the paths not taken disappear. This sense of closing doors can be painful, especially for people who like to keep their options open.

And a fourth reason is that there is no rule book that settles every choice. Rules and advice can help, but in the end, many important decisions, about love, work, values and how to live, cannot be decided by any rule. We must decide them ourselves, and that can feel lonely.

Ways We Run From the Dizziness

Because freedom can feel so heavy, many of us find ways to avoid feeling it. Recognizing these ways can help us understand ourselves better.

One way is to let others decide. We ask parents, friends, experts or partners to tell us what to do, and then follow their advice without really owning the choice. This can feel like a relief, but it does not remove our freedom. We have still chosen, by choosing to let someone else decide, and we are still responsible.

Another way is to hide in rules. We follow the rules of our job, our religion, our family or our society very strictly, so that we never have to make a decision of our own. Rules can be wise and useful. But when we use them to avoid ever facing a real choice, we may lose touch with what we actually value.

A third way is to stay busy. Some people fill every moment with work, activity and distraction, so that there is never a quiet moment in which the dizziness of freedom might appear. The busyness keeps the question away for a while, but it does not answer it.

A fourth way is endless research. Faced with an important choice, some people gather more and more information, read more reviews, ask more opinions, make longer lists, hoping that eventually the right answer will appear on its own. Information is valuable, but at some point, no more information will make the choice for us. We must still choose.

A fifth way is to pretend we have no choice at all: "I had to," "I could not do anything else," "That is just how things are." We will look at this in more detail in the chapter on bad faith. For now, it is enough to notice that this, too, is a way of escaping the dizziness, by denying the freedom that causes it.

Learning From the Dizziness

If anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, what should we do with it? Kierkegaard's answer was surprising. He suggested that anxiety can be a teacher. At the end of The Concept of Anxiety, he wrote, in effect, that whoever learns to be anxious in the right way has learned something of the highest importance.

What could it mean to be anxious "in the right way"? Kierkegaard's own answer was religious: anxiety, rightly understood, could lead a person toward faith. But many readers, religious and not, have found a broader lesson in his words. Anxiety, when we do not run from it, can teach us that we are free, that our lives are in our hands and that we are capable of more than we thought. It can wake us up from living without thinking. It can push us to take our choices seriously.

Think of the dizziness Mateo feels at his window. If he runs from it, by letting his parents decide, by researching forever or by distracting himself until the week runs out, he loses the chance to make a real choice. If he stays with it, he can use it to ask himself what he truly wants, what he values, what he is willing to risk and what he is willing to lose. The dizziness becomes a doorway to a decision that is genuinely his.

Staying with the dizziness does not mean enjoying it. It can be uncomfortable. But it can also be strangely alive. Many people who have made a major life choice, such as moving, changing careers, starting a family or ending a relationship, remember the dizziness before the decision as one of the most vivid moments of their lives. It was the feeling of standing at the edge of their own freedom.

There is also a kind of freedom in accepting that every choice involves uncertainty and loss. Once we stop expecting a perfect, risk-free option, we can choose more calmly. We can say: I do not know how this will turn out, and I will give up some things whatever I choose, but this is the path I choose, for these reasons. That acceptance does not remove the dizziness, but it can steady us.

When Anxiety Needs Help

It is important to distinguish the existential anxiety described in this chapter from anxiety that is part of a health condition. The dizziness of freedom is a normal part of human life. It comes and goes, often around important choices, and it can be a sign of growth.

Anxiety disorders are different. They can involve intense, persistent worry, panic attacks, physical symptoms such as a racing heart and difficulty breathing, and fear that interferes seriously with daily life, often without any clear choice or situation causing it. These conditions are common, real and treatable. If your anxiety is severe, lasts a long time, causes physical symptoms that frighten you or stops you from living your life, please talk with a doctor or another qualified professional. Philosophy can be a companion alongside that care.

Sometimes the two kinds of anxiety are mixed. A person facing a big life decision may also be living with an anxiety disorder, or a period of existential questioning may come at a time of depression or stress. If you are unsure, it is always reasonable to seek professional advice. And if you ever feel so overwhelmed that thoughts of harming yourself appear, please tell someone straight away: a doctor, a helpline or, in an emergency, your local emergency services.

Four Lives at the Edge

Lin is twenty-two and has just finished university with a degree in languages. Unlike many of her friends, she has no clear plan. She could teach, translate, travel, study further or try something completely different. At first, the openness thrills her. Then it terrifies her. She spends weeks reading about careers, asking advice and making lists, and the more she reads, the more paralysed she feels. A former teacher tells her: "You will not find the answer by reading. Choose one door, walk through it and see what you learn. You can choose again later." Lin takes a temporary job teaching languages to adults in the evenings. It is not her final answer, but it is a real choice, and it teaches her that she loves seeing adults learn.

Bernard is fifty-eight and has been offered early retirement by the company where he has worked for thirty years. He has enough savings to live modestly. For the first time since he was a young man, his days could be entirely his own. He expected to feel happy. Instead, he feels a strange dread. Without his job, who is he? What will he do? He realizes that his work had protected him from these questions for decades. He decides not to rush. He takes the retirement, but first he spends a month writing down what he might want his days to contain, and he talks with friends who have retired. The dizziness does not disappear, but he begins to see it as the feeling of a new beginning rather than an ending.

Hana is thirty-six and works in the finance department of a medium-sized company. She has discovered that her manager has been hiding a serious error in the accounts. Reporting it could cost her job and her friendships at work. Saying nothing would be easier, but she would know. She feels the dizziness of freedom intensely: nobody is forcing her either way. She talks with a trusted friend and with an organization that gives confidential advice to workers in her situation, which helps her understand her options and protections. In the end, she decides to report the error through the proper channels. It is frightening and difficult. But she says that, whatever happens, she knows she chose who she wanted to be.

Mateo, from the beginning of this chapter, uses the rest of his week differently. Instead of trying to find the right answer, he asks himself what kind of life he wants to have chosen, ten years from now, looking back. He realizes that he would regret not trying more than he would regret trying and failing. He takes the new job, telling his old colleagues that he hopes to stay in touch. On his last night before moving, he feels the dizziness again, standing at a different window. This time, he recognizes it as the feeling of being free, and he lets it be there.

Lin, Bernard, Hana and Mateo faced very different choices: about work, retirement, honesty and a new life. In each case, they felt the dizziness of freedom, the awareness that the choice was theirs and that nothing could guarantee the outcome. And in each case, staying with that dizziness, rather than running from it, helped them make a choice that was truly their own.

Practical Steps

First, name the dizziness. When you feel uneasy in front of a choice, ask yourself whether the feeling might be the dizziness of freedom, the awareness that the choice is yours. Naming it can make it less frightening.

Second, distinguish fear from anxiety. Ask: am I afraid of a specific thing, or am I uneasy about the openness of my future? If it is fear, you may be able to address the specific danger. If it is anxiety, the task is to choose.

Third, notice how you run. Watch for the ways you escape the dizziness: letting others decide, hiding in rules, staying busy, researching endlessly or pretending you have no choice. Simply noticing them weakens their hold.

Fourth, accept uncertainty and loss. Remind yourself that every real choice involves not knowing how things will turn out and giving up other paths. There is no perfect option. That is not a failure. It is the nature of choosing.

Fifth, choose a door and learn from it. When the dizziness makes you freeze, remember that most choices can be followed by other choices. Take a step, see what you learn and choose again.

Sixth, seek help when anxiety is too much. If your anxiety is severe or lasting, talk with a doctor or qualified professional.

A Short Exercise: Standing at the Edge

This exercise takes about twenty minutes. It helps you look directly at a choice that is making you dizzy, instead of running from it.

Choose a decision in your life, large or small, that you have been avoiding or that makes you uneasy. Write it at the top of a page. Then sit quietly for a minute and notice what you feel when you think about it. Where do you feel it in your body? What words would describe it? Write these down.

Now write two short paragraphs. In the first, imagine that you have chosen one option, and describe your life a year later, as honestly as you can, including what you gained and what you lost. In the second, do the same for the other option. If there are more than two options, choose the two that matter most.

Then write your answers to these questions. What am I afraid of in each option? What would I regret not having tried? Which choice would I be proud of having made, even if it turned out badly? Who is this decision really for?

Finally, write one sentence: "If I had to choose today, I would choose... because..." You do not have to act on this sentence immediately. But writing it makes the choice visible, and it reminds you that the choice is yours.

Notice how you feel after the exercise. The dizziness may still be there, but you may also feel a little steadier, having looked at the edge rather than turning away from it.

Questions People Often Ask

"Is it bad to ask others for advice?" Not at all. Advice from people who know us and care about us can be very valuable, as Lin and Hana found. The existentialist point is that, in the end, we are the ones who choose, including whose advice to follow. Asking for advice is wise. Pretending that someone else made the choice for us is not.

"What if I make the wrong choice?" Every choice carries the risk of turning out badly, and the existentialists did not pretend otherwise. But "wrong" is often clearer in hindsight than it was at the time. If you choose thoughtfully, honestly and for reasons you can stand behind, you have chosen well, even if the outcome is not what you hoped. And most choices can be followed by new choices. A door you walk through is rarely the last door.

"Can the dizziness ever be pleasant?" For some people, yes. The awareness of freedom can be thrilling as well as frightening, like the mixed feeling at the top of a high slide or before a journey. Many people find that, as they become more used to facing their freedom, the dizziness becomes less threatening and more like a sign of life.

Chapter Summary

In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Kierkegaard compared anxiety to the dizziness felt when looking down into a deep abyss, and called anxiety the dizziness of freedom. Unlike fear, which has a definite object, this anxiety is about possibility itself. It is a sign that we are free. Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), described a related feeling, anguish, using the image of a cliff path where only our own continuing choice keeps us safe.

Freedom feels heavy because of responsibility, uncertainty, the loss of paths not taken and the absence of a rule book. We often run from it by letting others decide, hiding in rules, staying busy, researching endlessly or pretending we have no choice. Kierkegaard suggested that anxiety can be a teacher, and staying with the dizziness can help us choose genuinely. Existential anxiety is different from anxiety disorders, which are health conditions that deserve professional care.

In the next chapter, we look at one of the hardest kinds of choice: the choice between two good things, when no rule can tell us what to do.