What Is Anxiety For?
What Pascal Taught Me About Uncertainty
I used to think that anxiety was something I had absolutely no control over, mostly because it seemed to appear out of nowhere, without any clear link to what I was actually worried about. I felt even more helpless when I realised that anxiety was usually treated simply as a medical symptom or something to get rid of.
A while ago, I came up with a different idea: what if anxiety is actually necessary for living? I started thinking of it as a signal that something needed my attention. If I could identify what was worrying me, look into its causes and understand what was at stake, maybe I could do something about it.
That idea was tested when I reached a point where I had to choose between staying in France or moving to places I wanted to explore — Australia and Southeast Asia. Plenty of friends and family advised against going, using sayings like “The grass is always greener on the other side” or “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
That made sense to them, though it really depends on which bush you are talking about. Joking aside, I felt very anxious because I simply did not know which choice was right. To work through it, I focused on three questions that kept coming back:
What exactly am I afraid will happen?
What might I lose?
What could I do about it?
No matter how many answers I came up with, I remained uncertain. Thinking it through gave me a much clearer picture of what mattered to me, but clarity did not give me certainty . My original idea about anxiety had hit a limit: investigating could help me understand the problem, but it could not tell me what to do.
Pascal’s Lesson
One day, while I was arguing with myself, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) came to mind. In school, our philosophy teacher told us that Pascal had faced a similar issue: how should we act when we cannot reason our way to a certain answer?
In his Pensées (1657–58), Pascal drew on ideas about probability to argue that wagering for God can be rational. This is known as Pascal’s Wager. We cannot prove with certainty whether God exists, but we still have to live our lives. Pascal framed it as a bet: if God exists, the potential gain is infinite happiness, while if God does not exist, what you lose is finite (time, pleasures or other worldly benefits you have given up). Given the uncertainty and the stakes, he argued that wagering for God is rational.
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What interested me was not Pascal’s point about God , but the problem underneath it: we can think through a problem as thoroughly as possible and still have to act without being sure of the outcome.
That was exactly the position I was in. I could not know for sure what would happen if I moved, but I could not avoid making a choice either — unless I wanted to spend the rest of my twenties stuck in an infinite loop. The question was no longer “What is the right answer?” but “What should I do when I cannot be sure?” Like Pascal, I simply had to place a bet.
Rethinking Anxiety
But if I had to decide without certainty, what did that say about my original idea about anxiety?
I had assumed that because anxiety can push me to investigate, it is necessary to live. I was wrong. Curiosity, interest or desire can also lead me to explore a problem. Anxiety might give me a reason to look closer, but it is not the only thing that can get me moving.
There was another assumption behind my original idea: that investigating a problem would eventually lead to a clear solution. My own experience showed me something different. Thinking things through helped clarify what was at stake and helped me understand my options, but it still left the actual decision unresolved.
Of course, everyday choices are not as neat as Pascal’s Wager . They are rarely a simple choice between two clear outcomes; we usually have several options, we may not know how likely each outcome is, and competing priorities can shift as we learn more about them.
Still, anxiety played a useful role in my decision. It acted as a signal, drawing my attention to something that mattered to me and prompting me to figure out what I was really worried about. The investigation did not give me certainty, but it helped me ask better questions.
A New Outlook
I no longer believe that anxiety is necessary for living. I can think, plan and make choices out of simple curiosity or interest, without needing anxiety to start the engine.
That does not make anxiety useless, nor does it mean that it is simply a flaw to eliminate. It cannot give us the answers, but it can point us towards questions worth asking. Even then, no amount of investigation will necessarily remove all the uncertainty. Eventually, we still have to make a choice.
So instead of treating anxiety simply as a problem to get rid of, maybe we can ask a different question:
Can anxiety be understood not just as an obstacle, but as one of the ways we discover what actually matters to us?
Image generated with ChatGPT (OpenAI), 2026.
Originally published at https://laurentcailliette.substack.com on September 24, 2026.
