Another reason I keep talking about creative anxiety is I’m rereading Being and Time, which situates anxiety at the very center of authentic existence. But then, the whole reason I am returning to this book after six years was to read about anxiety, and to see how Heidegger’s views on anxiety strike me now that I’ve had six years of experience applying the concept of anxiety to my life, and most of all to my work.

My main modification to Heidegger’s concept of anxiety is this: Dasein (the existential self) can potentially experience something like an existential death and existential rebirth (apart from biological death) by shifting perspectives, re-conceiving life, and subsequently re-perceiving it in a weirdly spontaneous non-interpretive way — and that each instance of “rebirth” (even a relatively trivial instance) induces the same anxiety (though at a lower intensity) as relating ourselves to our impending ultimate death.

The richest source of this anxiety is listening to other people who conceive and live differently from ourselves. As Sartre said “Hell is other people”, except I’d modify it to say “Limbo is other people” — because there is something on the other side of the anxiety that makes it completely worthwhile to navigate it all the way to the other side, never turning back.

This is why experience strategy is — and should be — an anxious process! If we are doing our job, we are actively seeing anxiety by seeking to understand other worldviews.

The job of an experience researcher/strategist is to wrestle with wicked soft-systems problems and to cross over anxiety to unique and superior worldviews created by finding syntheses of conflicting worldviews manifested as kick-ass products that afford kick-ass experiences that make people fall in love with a brand. The reason this happens so rarely is because it freaking hurts to get there.

But I’m digressing. Back to Heidegger.

In this rereading of Being and Time, I have seen nearly no evidence that Heidegger takes anxiety in the face of existential change seriously.

I have also seen ample evidence that Heidegger was in many ways allergic to alterity, especially any form of collective alterity (the They), which is hardly surprising, considering his time and place. (Perhaps he should have been much, much more allergic.) But I do believe in the legitimate existence of collective Dasein in which each Dasein participates, compliantly, activistically, rebelliously, alienatedly, etc.

That being said, this book still blows my mind. And the whole reason I started writing this rambling post was to share a quote, which isn’t even related to what I’ve been talking about, except that it is pure experience strategy gold. Here it is, anyway, and please forgive my complete absence of discipline this morning:

Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial individualization of the reticent resoluteness which exacts anxiety of itself. As something that keeps silent, authentic Being-one’s-Self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying ‘I’; but in its reticence it ‘is’ that thrown entity as which it can authentically be. The Self which the reticence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the Being of the ‘I’. Only if we are oriented phenomenally by the meaning of the Being of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self are we put in a position to discuss what ontological justification there is for treating substantiality, simplicity, and personality as characteristics of Selfhood. In the prevalent way of saying “I”, it is constantly suggested that what we have in advance is a Self-Thing, persistently present-at-hand; the ontological question of the Being of the Self must turn away from any such suggestion.

Care does not need to be founded in a Self. But existentiality, as constitutive for care, provides the ontological constitution of Dasein’s Self-constancy, to which there belongs, in accordance with the full structural content of care, its Being-fallen factually into non-Self-constancy. When fully conceived, the care-structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood. This phenomenon is clarified by Interpreting the meaning of care; and it is as care that Dasein’s totality of Being has been defined.

(For personality type geeks, this is the serum to cure Enneatype Four.)