Kierkegaard Was Right: Freedom Is Terrifying. What We Do With That Says Everything

Freedom is not the absence of constraints. It’s the weight of having to choose. Most of us spend a considerable amount of time pursuing freedom. More options, more autonomy, more space to do things on our own terms. And then we get it, or something close to it and discover something that nobody really prepares you for. That freedom, real freedom, is one of the most anxiety-producing states a human being can inhabit.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote about this in the nineteenth century and called it the dizziness of freedom. This idea that when we stand at the edge of genuine choice, with no external force telling us what to do, what to be, or what our life should look like, what we feel isn’t liberation. It’s vertigo. A kind of groundlessness that we will do almost anything to escape.

He was writing about existential anxiety. Not the clinical sense we all know, the panic attacks and  generalised worry, but something more fundamental than that. The anxiety that comes from being a person who is genuinely free and therefore genuinely responsible for what they do with that freedom.

Imagine no script, no guarantee and no way of knowing in advance whether the choice you’re making is the right one. And I know what you’re thinking. “Well isn’t that just life anyway?” Yes I suppose it is. But the story we tell ourselves is often different. If I have that job then providing I do X hours, I’ll get X pay, right?

I find this idea equal parts terrifying and relieving. Terrifying for obvious reasons. Relieving because it suggests that the anxiety most of us feel when we’re standing at the edge of something important isn’t actually a sign that something is wrong with us. It’s really a sign that we’re taking the choice seriously. That we understand, somewhere underneath the anxiety, what’s actually at stake.

Because here’s what I think we get wrong about anxiety in the context of big decisions and genuine freedom. We treat it as a signal to stop. To wait. To gather more information, seek more opinions, create more certainty before we move. And sometimes that’s wise. But Kierkegaard’s insight is that certainty, in the context of genuine freedom, is never fully available. You cannot think your way to solid ground when the ground itself is the openness of possibility. At some point the choosing just has to happen, in the presence of the anxiety rather than after it has resolved.

This is something I see come up all the time in coaching conversations. Not always named as anxiety, often showing up instead as overthinking, procrastination, or the endless refining of a plan that never quite gets executed. And underneath almost all of it, when you follow the thread far enough, is this same Kierkegaardian vertigo. That paralysis we get. And I’m not talking about the one we get from not knowing what to do, but the one we get when we know that whatever you choose, you are the one choosing it. And that also means you are the one responsible for it.

Which is really uncomfortable. And also, I think, really important. Because the alternative to living inside that discomfort is to let the choice be made for you. By circumstance, other people’s expectations and the path of least resistance that presents itself when you don’t actively choose something else. What I call the non-decision decision. The fact many of us try to avoid accepting. That every time you decide not to make a decision, you’re still making one.

And this is where it gets really interesting. Because that feels safer. It distributes the responsibility. If the life you’re living accumulated rather than what was chosen, then nobody, including you, can be fully blamed for how it turned out.

But it also means the life isn’t quite yours.

Kierkegaard believed that the self is not something you are born with fully formed. It’s something you become, through the choices you make, especially the difficult ones made in the presence of uncertainty and anxiety. Avoiding the anxiety of freedom doesn’t protect you from it. It just means you never quite become the self that the choosing would have created.

So the question I’d offer to you, is this. Where in your life are you currently waiting for the anxiety to resolve before you act? Where are you gathering more information, seeking more consensus, refining the plan a little further, as a way of postponing a choice that you probably already know you need to make? And underneath that, what would it mean to make it anyway? Not in spite of the anxiety, but with it.

As Kierkegaard might have put it, to take the leap not because the ground on the other side is visible, but because staying on this side of it indefinitely is its own kind of choice.

The dizziness of freedom, as uncomfortable as it is, is also the feeling of being genuinely alive to what’s possible. Of standing at the edge of something that actually matters. Maybe with that in mind, could it be that the very specific place, right in between the perfect decision and faith in ourselves is the only place we can find true freedom?

I’ll leave you with this and let you decide…

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” - Viktor Frankl

Thank you for reading.

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If any part of this resonated, it may be worth paying attention to the emotional texture of the life you are returning to each week.

Sometimes dread is not simply exhaustion or stress. Sometimes it is feedback about the relationship between the life we are living and the life that genuinely feels meaningful to us underneath the routine.

At Logos Coaching, much of the work we do begins around questions exactly like these. Questions about meaning, work, burnout, self leadership, identity, fulfilment, and what it means to build a life that feels personally inhabited rather than merely maintained.

If you’d like to explore any of the ideas in this piece further, or speak with the writer about coaching through Logos Coaching, you can get in touch here.

Related Reflections:
• The Existential Vacuum: Why Capable People Feel Empty Despite Everything
• Digital Distraction and the Slow Erosion of an Inner Life
• What Integrity Actually Costs
• Ikigai, Positive Psychology and Meaning
• The False Summit