Zygmunt Bauman on the anxiety of modernity:

“there is always a suspicion … that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever.” — Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003)

Sometimes I wonder if this anxiety, in part, comes from the same place as the paradox of choice. We live in a world of so many possibilities that an anxiety about which is best stirs a constant state of unrest within us.

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