Existential dread often involves questioning your purpose in life, especially after a crisis disrupts your personal values or self-identity which results in grim anxiety. “What is root cause of anxiety? This question posit a great challenge to me. Is it simply due to shying away from anticipated bads?”
The root cause of anxiety is the temporal finitude of our earthly existential constitution, of course. Our constitution is temporal because we are constantly bombarded with choices at every moment, and finite for the reason that we are compelled to chose this over that and have to face the consequences. This urgency is the spirit and essence of human anxiety.
Both secular philosophers and theologians agree on this descriptive aspect of the phenomenon. What they disagree on is how to read it and deal with it.
The former —like Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and the Buddha— simply take it at its face value: it is just the way reality is, and there is no way to escape it. You can never fully conquer this vain “restless willing”, “Sorge”, or “Dukha” —only lessen it a bit by stopping to resist it, fully embracing it, or releasing yourself into it. The temporality and finitude can’t be fled from, only made numb to an extent. Anxiety can be conquered only with death which is the end of existence itself.
