DE Weekly: The Anxiety of Choice, Despair, & Genuine Free Will
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 21, 2026.
The Anxiety of Choice, Despair, & Genuine Free Will
In Existentialism, freedom is one of the basest conditions of human existence that contributes to our human nature. Our freedom is as radical as it is inescapable; as humans, the existentialists would say, we have no predetermined purpose or meaning, meaning it up to us to define our essence through our own choices.
In writing that we are “condemned to be free,” Jean-Paul Sartre was emphasizing the true inescapability of the level of our radical freedom. That we are unable to shirk this level of sheer responsibility for our own lives might lead to despair.
Despair, in Existentialism, stems from angst, or the anxiety of choice. It is the “dizzying realization” that we are, in fact, radically free––and that we are ultimately responsible for our lives having meaning.
The most common type of despair this realization causes, I think, is the type that shudders at the seemingly infinite possibilities of what we could be.
The existentialist view on why the recognition of our radical freedom might cause despair is due to the following: we are first born (into existence), and only then do we get to define who we are (our essence), through our actions.
This implies that there is no fixed human nature. What this does not mean is that there are no fixed circumstances in our lives that might “fix” us in some fashion along the way.
I’ve already written extensively about such existential concepts as facticity and sedimentation.
Facticity meaning the unchosen, unchangeable characteristics our Self (such as height, our birthplace, our ethnicity), and sedimentation meaning the consequences and results of past choices that pile up like sediment, such as what we majored in in college, the career we spent a decade on, who we chose to marry, etc.
Despite these limiting factors, Existentialism holds that we are still radically free in essence, and so we still are responsible for making radical choices: choices that shape our very being and that make our lives meaningful.
And so, they would say, we cannot blame society if we feel our lives to be meaningless. We cannot blame fate, we cannot blame the Other, and we cannot blame God.
Who can we blame? Ourselves. Because there are no other people out there who are responsible for your life, the one person responsible for it is you. Is it any surprise that in accepting this state of affairs there might come a bit of angst, a bit of anguish?
After all, there are an infinite number of choices we can make in life. One can take you here, one can take you there. One can get you this, one can get you that. One can make you into this, one can make you into that.
The best analogy for the anguish that follows this overwhelming anxiety of choice comes from one of my personal favorite philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian and philosopher, the “Father of Existentialism.”
In Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, he wrote about the “dizziness” of freedom. He compared the level of freedom described above to standing at the edge of a cliff. Imagine it: you are standing at the edge of a cliff––how do you feel?
You might feel the fear of falling; or, you might feel a strange awareness and understanding that you are completely free to jump. Every choice is available to you––but some might close off other choices to you, forever. (Jumping off the cliff, in this instance, would close off every choice forever).
Another concept Kierkegaard masterfully wrote on was that of despair. To him, there were two primary types of despair, both having to do with the will we all have to become something or somebody in life. In this case, it helps to understand this will as the free will to do anything we choose.
The first type of despair, Kierkegaard wrote, is to will not to be oneself. In other words, this is a despair that results from our shirking our freedom and responsibility for fear that we might make the wrong choices and become something we don’t like, something not true to our Self.
The second type of despair, Kierkegaard wrote, is a truer, nobler type of despair: the will to be oneself before God.
This is the “good” type of despair, if ever there was one. This is the despair that ennobles us, for it is this type of despair that we feel when we understand what God wills for us, what we must do to align our will with His, and that we are always falling short of His good, pleasing, and perfect will no matter how hard we try.
The key difference between this latter despair and the former is that this will is the will that will actually help us find meaning and purpose.
To this point, strange as it is, the existentialist view on free will approaches that held in Catholicism.
The main difference, however, is that in the Catholic view, free will is a gift––not a condemnation––from God. This gift of free will is one that helps us, as humans, to make rational choices and to have the courage and ability to control our own actions.
This is genuine free will: we have total freedom and control over our lives in that we can either choose all that is good, true, and beautiful, or we can choose to reject it.
Similarly, Catholicism holds, too, that no other person is responsible for the outcome of our choices except for us; even God respects the free will he has imbued us with and allows us to choose as we please (again, either to choose Him or to reject Him).
Under this model of free will, as in the existentialist model, we are still free to choose abdication of responsibility, but the result is still the same. Shirking the responsibility and freedom we are born with will simply relinquish that control to someone else, weakening our ability to choose for ourselves and leading ultimately to sin and despair.
“To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision.”–– Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
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