One of the dangers of modern society is our addiction to hustle.

Our cities and towns are conveyor belts of production and achievement.

From a young age, we are taught to perform well so we can reach the top of “success mountain”. We determine our value as human beings almost entirely by how well we do, or don’t do. We have assessments and exams at school, performance evaluations at work, and if that’s not enough – social media’s endless scroll of comparison seduces us in our moments of idleness. 

This is where anxiety can actually be seen as a blessing rather than a curse. Because few things can expose the emptiness of our social conveyor belt like anxiety.

Anxiety is a lens that peers beneath the surface. It pokes at the system with questions like,

Is this all there is?

Why am I not happy?

Why is life so disappointing?

And if these questions (or others like them) ever haunt you and make you feel weird and out of place, you need to hear this and hear it really well:

You. Are. O.K.

In fact, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard went so far as to say he felt bad for people without anxiety. He saw his own anxiety, not as something to get rid of, but as something to learn from. For him, anxiety was a tool that could help people escape the tragedy of the social conveyor belt. It led to self-awareness and true freedom because it prevented its host from settling for the banal status quo that so many seemed content with.

If you pay close attention, you might just find that anxiety is more than soul-discomfort. It’s also a window into a dimension of being, a longing and desire, for something you instinctively know this world can’t offer.

It refuses to let you settle, and maybe that frustrates you and some of the people around you. But perhaps, there is another way of seeing it all.

Maybe – just maybe – it’s the anxiety that rescues you from settling for the almost and the in-between because it reminds you, you were made for something more.

And that’s O.K.