The Dizziness of Freedom

I played weekend soccer in elementary school. Though I was far from the best player on the team, I was the fastest kid on the field. That meant I’d sometimes end up on a breakaway, with the ball at my feet and no defenders ahead of me. When that happened, I’d fall down. I’d literally laugh and fall down, and I wouldn’t even try to kick.

Now, decades later, I realized what I was doing. My body was sabotaging itself. The laugh came first, then the legs going soft, then the grass.

This was a reflex. If I had thought about it, I would have had plenty of options. I could have practiced it, until my body knew what to do when the moment came in a real game. But I wasn’t thinking. Underneath the not-thinking was a fear I couldn’t have named at the time. It was a fear of making a decision, and possibly failing.

I thought I didn’t deserve to score. That was the fear underneath, and the usual advice only made it worse. “Fake it till you make it” sounded selfish, a way of saying “I don’t know what I’m doing, so please bear with me while I figure things out.” But the real selfish act is sitting with your own insecurity so long that you forget there’s a job in front of you that needs doing.

Alfred Adler, the great psychologist from the early 20th century, had a word for how to think about this: Gemeinschaftsgefühl. It’s a German word that loosely translates to “community feeling.” The idea is that we’re here to contribute to something larger than ourselves. We are here for the benefit of others, not ourselves.

I have one friend who’s genuinely curious and warm, and asks people good questions. But when a conversation gets into really interesting territory, where something ambiguous or tender is sitting on the table, she laughs. She’s laughing because it’s funny and interesting to her, and also a little uncomfortable. The laugh shuts the conversation down right when it’s getting good. She doesn’t mean it that way, but the laugh does the work of closing a door.

I recognize this because I do versions of it myself. My adult version of the soccer fall is gratitude, both giving and receiving. If someone thanks me for something that actually mattered, I feel the reflex start up. I’ll crack a joke or shift the credit to someone else before the moment can land. Giving it is almost as hard. When I want to tell someone what they’ve meant to me, I can feel my body trying to find a lighter, safer version that won’t require me to sit in the fullness of what I actually mean.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard had a name for this reflex. Writing in the 1840s, he was one of the first people to treat anxiety as a philosophical problem. He’s sometimes called the father of existentialism, and what he named was existential anxiety, the dizziness of freedom. It’s the intense uncertainty that hits you when you realize the next move is yours, and so is whatever comes of it. That dizziness is terrifying enough that we spend most of our lives trying to avoid this responsibility.

This matters more as I get more senior at work, where people look up to me. Authenticity matters when you’re a leader, because other people are depending on you. The temptation is to talk about the problems rather than trust the company strategy. But that’s its own kind of falling down in the grass. Part of the job is putting on a brave face even when you’re not confident. Your job isn’t to feel brave. It’s to give other people the steadiness they need.

One of my mentors, a former CEO of several companies, told me once, “You don’t have enough time to be an expert in everything. You do it a couple of times and then move on to something new.” It wasn’t advice so much as access. He was showing me that even at his level, he hadn’t figured everything out. Nobody does. There’s no moment when someone tells you that you’re allowed to take the next step. You grab it anyway.

Now I have the chance to do that for other people, and it’s become one of the best parts of my job. Someone I worked with, I’ll call her Nancy, was very competent but had spent a decade without a real chance to grow. She didn’t feel worthy of the space she was taking up. We worked on small things together, starting with how she introduced herself in a meeting. It was a tiny thing, but it was the same kind of muscle memory I needed on the soccer field. I could stand with her as a coach while she did the work.

Immanuel Kant, one of the great moral philosophers of the Enlightenment, wrote that we stay children, and not because we lack reason. We have the reason. What we lack is the resolution and courage to use it without someone else directing us.

Being an adult doesn’t mean the dizziness goes away. It means you learn to manage it. You stop waiting to feel ready and start. I came across a phrase from the Disordered podcast that sums up this whole essay. The hosts were talking about clinical anxiety, but it applies to existential anxiety too. They call it shortening the time between “oh my god” and “oh well.”