In this conversation, Samir Chopra invites us to think of anxiety not as a sign of failure or pathology, but as an indispensable part of being human. Drawing on Buddhist philosophy, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and critical theory, Chopra explores how anxiety reveals the fragility of the self and the contingency of the world, while also serving as a gateway to self-understanding, care, agency and even social critique.

In "Escape from Freedom", Erich Fromm wrote about the tension between our needs for freedom and independence, on the one side, and for belonging and security, on the other. The work was first published more than eighty years ago and now is the right time to revisit it, not so much for the psychoanalytic theory put forward in it, as for the more universal insights into the social and political situation at the time, which in many ways parallel our own.