Two Years of the COVID-19 Crisis: Anxiety, Creativity and the Everyday

Abstract

Doubtless, the COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely challenging in all aspects. However, rather than looking at COVID-19 exclusively as a catastrophic event, which has generated insecurity, anxiety, panic and helplessness, I suggest investigating this insecurity and anxiety through the prism of existential philosophy. Drawing, in particular, on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and the literature on the existentialist anxiety of international relations, this study suggested looking at anxiety not in terms of insecurity but as “freedom’s actuality”. In other words, the attention was focused not so much on the many restrictions and bans imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but on the many quotidian and minuscule creative interventions through which people attempted to counterbalance, respond and react to them by creating new possibilities of freedom. Special attention was devoted to the distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety. This distinction is especially important, as it connects to two different and opposing subjectivities. While normal anxiety encourages a proactive approach to life—inspiring individuals to change the present through new daily strategies—neurotic anxiety prevents it, as it tends to replicate the ordinary, the known and the familiar.