GOOD QUESTION –
2025 – Recently a friend celebrating a milestone birthday (one signaling that the second half of life was upon her) announced that her new goal was to stop feeling so anxious about everything, and instead to have fun—to make her life “an adventure.” She asked for my advice on how to do that I told her about something that the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified back in the 19th century as “an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition.” He regarded this as “the most important thing” in life. Was he talking about climbing Mount Everest or running a marathon—or whatever feat equated to those adventurous things in the 1840s? No: Kierkegaard was referring to anxiety itself. He believed that understanding and using one’s anxiety was the great opportunity and adventure of life.
That might sound like a very strange proposition today, in light of the fact that, as my Atlantic colleague Scott Stossel—the author of My Age of Anxiety—has written, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in America today, affecting more than 40 million adults at any given time (and far more women than men).
