It is truly wild how quickly one can spiral out once they've gotten lost in that infinity

“freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility”
🔥🔥🔥

“Freedom’s possibility”....so true. The foundation of anxiety seems to me to be staring down a vast infinity of empty space

Professor Anderson, I have read Kierkegaard for 40 years & even hold a few 1sr edition works, and attend the Kierkegaard Circle at University of Toronto. The poinr being i have read every explanation of Kierkegaards concept of Anxiety. Your deconstruction to practical 1st person experience is the most illuminating yet.

This is so beautiful. What's great about reading philosophy is that once in a while you can see the same phenomena in a new light, and thus changes your relationship with that phenomena. Eventually, a new life.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom 🎉

babe wake up Overthink podcast just dropped

anxiety is asking a question, “which action will you take?”. i worry too much about the outcomes of each action rather than just picking one. also forgetting that “no action” is always a possible action too

I think this form of anxiety, if i'm reading this correctly, is from the enormous, virtually unlimited amount of freedom of possibility we have-infinite really, and we at any given point in time, need to focus our awareness or become consumed in its awe. The realization that our time here is not infinite, so theres that kind of unsettling feeling that we need to choose wisely in how we will select from our infinite possibility. I get this feeling almost constantly, that i get so excited about life and its potential, that i experience a kind of overload of possibility, and often will fail to focus my attention to do one thing impeccably well....and that gives me that angst feeling, since i think i may unconsciously feel my time slipping away.... anyway, just my interpretation of what i get from the way he speaks of this term.
so maybe in a sense, it IS a type of fear...a fear of wasting time.

thanks for the wonderful analysis as always!🥰

Important to clarify here, as well, that to Kierkegaard, Freedom is not merely the ability to choose among options (I think the professor making these videos should challenge their notion of "Freedom" because it seems incorrect in this context). Kierkegaard thinks of Freedom as the existencial condition of becoming oneself (to fill in the blank of one's unjustified existence).

Clicked on the video as soon as I saw "Kierkegaard" on it. He is 🔥fire.

best content on YT. so refreshing. big thanks!

It seems to me that decisiveness is what therefore reduces anxiety, both in this framework and in practical reality to some degree. After all, to decide is to commit oneself to a particular path through the infinitude of potentials, thus (at least in the actor's mind) to reduce the vast scale of those potentials to contingencies upon a path. Those other potentials are no longer "potentials" in the strictest sense, because you have set your mind to something specific. The uncertainties that are left are those that surround the path, which are certainly anxiety inducing (what if I fail?, what if they stop me upon the path?, what if I am stricken ill?, what if I have chosen the wrong path?, etc...), but less anxiety inducing than to stand paralyzed by infinitude. Thus to plan, to decide, and to commit, are the antidotes to anxiety.

In my own personal experience, this also rings true. I was paralyzed by possibility when I was young and, accordingly, that was when I was most anxious. Accordingly, I am less anxious now, having committed myself to a path. The remaining anxieties I have are about the fact that I could be doing the things I have committed to; which remains, of course, a statement about potentials, vindicating Kierkegaard.

Anxiety for Kierkegaard is the moment,that brings together the different kinds of time, and really concentrates, synthesize them, but also at the same time, nothing.

Kierkegaard's books changed my life! always happy to see you cover his stuff

These days I’m very interested in Christian sources of modern psychotherapy.  Marsha Linehan is a devout Catholic who cites Christian piety as the source for the skill “radical acceptance” which she links to freedom from suffering.  She states “The drive to stop pain no matter the cost is the opposite of freedom.”  And I agree—I suspect this is accurate just because avoidance (the opposite of acceptance) distances us from authentic experiences like anxiety.   It is interesting that both Linehan and Kierkegaard noticed the paradox of allowing anxiety its due:  that without acceptance and the anxiety that comes with it, humans seem unable to cope with their counterfactually biased, inductively tortured, emotional brains.  Anxiety/acceptance seem to be both essentially ABOUT freedom and the door TO that freedom.

Religious people aren't supposed to feel any existential anxiety because the answers are already there, it's just whether or not your "faith" is great enough. I love that Kierkegaard spoke of the same isolation and backlash we'd deal with in todays church.

Trying to get into Kierkegaard because I know he has something to say. The light is coming on thanks to you. God bless you

It's interesting to notice how nowadays, more than ever I'd say, we tend to refer our anxiety to something and give it attributes. Think of social anxiety, separation anxiety, or the relatively new 'range anxiety' people have about electric vehicles. In a sense you could say that, even though we claim that we understand the world and ourselves better and better as civilization evolves, we insist on misreading this fundamental part of us as humans.

my life makes sense after all - instead of 'being', the choice to spend my life 'becoming' is my acceptance of freedom's possiblity. cheers.