There’s a particular kind of unease that many people are carrying right now. It doesn’t fit neatly into a diagnosis. It isn’t always triggered by a single event or circumstance. It sits somewhere beneath the surface: a low-grade weight, a difficulty making decisions that used to feel simple, a sense that the ground is less solid than it was.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. And you’re probably not anxious in the clinical sense. You may simply be paying attention.

 

Yalom and the Four Givens

The psychologist Irvin Yalom spent decades exploring what he called the “ultimate concerns” of human existence: the irreducible facts of being alive that we all, eventually, must face. He identified four:

Our time is finite. However we live, however much we plan, our lives are bounded by time. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable fact we know, and the one we work hardest to avoid thinking about.

We each face our inner world on our own terms. However close our relationships, however supported we feel, there is a dimension of experience that is irreducibly our own. No one else can fully inhabit our inner life, or face our challenges for us.

Meaning isn’t handed to us. Life doesn’t arrive with a predetermined purpose. Meaning is something we create through our choices, our relationships, our values, and the way we engage with the world.

We are freer and more responsible than we usually feel comfortable admitting. Within the constraints of our circumstances, we have more agency over our lives than we typically acknowledge. That freedom is both a gift and a challenge.

These aren’t new ideas. Philosophers have grappled with them for centuries. But Yalom brought them into the therapy room and asked a practical question: what does it mean to live well in the full awareness of these truths?

 

The Distance We Keep

Most of the time, we manage these realities at arm’s length. We fill our lives with routine, plans, certainty and this isn’t a failure of courage. It’s simply how human beings function. We cannot live in constant awareness of our own mortality or the fundamental uncertainty of existence. We would be paralysed.

So we build structures. We make plans. We assume the future will broadly resemble the present. We take for granted that the world will remain navigable: that borders will be open, institutions will hold, and tomorrow will look something like today.

These assumptions are not naïve. For much of recent history, in many parts of the world, they have been broadly reliable.

But there are moments when the structures we rely on feel less certain. When the future becomes harder to picture. When ordinary decisions about travel, about money, about what to commit to, suddenly carry an unfamiliar weight.

In those moments, the distance we usually keep from Yalom’s four concerns tends to collapse. And what emerges isn’t quite anxiety in the clinical sense. It’s something older. More fundamental.

 

Existential Anxiety Is Not a Disorder

It’s worth being clear about this: existential anxiety is not a pathology. It is not a sign that something has gone wrong with you. It is, in Yalom’s framing, an honest encounter with the conditions of human existence.

That distinction matters, because the temptation for individuals and for therapists alike is to reach for the usual tools. Cognitive reframes. Breathing techniques. Behavioural strategies. These have genuine value in many contexts. But they are not designed for the kind of anxiety that arises when a person is grappling, at some level, with their own mortality, their freedom, or the question of whether their life means anything.

For that kind of anxiety, something different is needed: the willingness to sit with the discomfort, to name what’s actually present, and to resist the urge to smooth it over too quickly.

 

An Invitation, Not Just a Threat

Yalom was not a pessimist. His work is, at its core, about how awareness of the human condition, honestly faced, can become a source of vitality rather than paralysis.

The confrontation with finitude, for example, can sharpen our sense of what actually matters. When we stop assuming we have unlimited time, we tend to become more deliberate about how we spend it. Relationships deepen. Trivial concerns recede. The question of how we want to live, not just how we happen to be living, becomes harder to defer.

Similarly, the recognition that meaning isn’t given but made can be frightening. But it is also, ultimately, liberating. If meaning is something we construct through our choices and commitments, then we have genuine agency over the kind of life we inhabit.

None of this is easy work. It requires a certain courage: the willingness to put down our defences, even temporarily, and face what’s there.

 

What Therapy Can Offer

This is precisely the space that good therapy is designed to hold. Not to eliminate uncertainty or resolve the unanswerable questions, but to provide a context in which they can be explored without panic, with curiosity, honesty, and support.

If you’ve been feeling the weight of the world lately, in ways that are hard to name or explain, it may be worth exploring what’s underneath it. Not to fix it, necessarily. But to understand it and to find a way of living that feels genuinely yours, even in uncertain times.

Eucalyptus Psychology offers individual therapy with psychologists experienced in existential, depth, and evidence-based approaches. Our practices are located in Mooroolbark and Olinda, in the Dandenong Ranges.