Long before anxiety became a clinical affair, it was an existential predicament. The medical condition, an illness in want of treatment, emerged in the 19th century; the philosophical orientation has probably existed for as long as we have, and it cannot (and ought not) be eradicated. Unfortunately, in recent years, an army of gurus and pathologically positive thinkers have colonized the concept. Along the way, they have forgotten what philosophers have known for centuries: that to be human is to worry, and, accordingly, to excel is to worry well. As the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once put it, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
