Kindle Notes & Highlights
The belief that it is possible to live without anxiety will remain one of our illusions; it is integral to our existence and is a reflection of our dependencies and the knowledge of our mortality. We can only try to cultivate counterforces against it: courage, trust, knowledge, power, hope, humility, belief and love.
We should regard with scepticism methods of any kind that promise us a life free of anxiety; they do not do justice to the reality of being human and give rise to illusory expectations.
Even though anxiety is an unavoidable part of our lives, this does not necessarily mean that we are always conscious of it. However, in a manner of speaking, it is omnipresent and can impinge on our consciousness at any moment when summoned by an inner
Anxiety exists independently of the culture or level of development of a people or an individual. What are different are merely the objects of fear, those things which trigger the anxiety and, correspondingly, the means and measures we avail ourselves of in order to combat this anxiety.
If, through the agency of science and technology, we are able to make progress in mastering the world and therefore eliminate or do away with certain fears, we still exchange these fears for others. The fact that anxiety is an inescapable part of life is not altered in the least.
Only one new fear seems to belong to our modern life: We increasingly recognize anxieties that arise from acts and deeds of our own making which turn against us.
