What does it mean that the courage to be?

Existing authentically requires courage in the face of uncertainty judgment and mortality.

Example: You have spent months recognizing your own bad faith — the ways you have hidden behind roles, deferred to authorities, and pretended that the shape of your life was something that happened to you rather than something you chose. Now you stand in the clearing that honesty has made, and you feel exposed. The job you kept because it was safe no longer provides the cover story it once did. The relationship you maintained because ending it would require you to face solitude has lost its anesthetic power. The beliefs you inherited but never examined sit in front of you like furniture you have been walking around for years but never actually looked at. You see all of this clearly, and seeing it clearly does not feel like liberation — it feels like vertigo. The question is no longer whether you have been living in bad faith. You know you have. The question is whether you have the courage to live differently, knowing that authenticity offers no guarantees, no applause, and no certainty that you are getting it right. That courage — not as a momentary burst of adrenaline but as a sustained orientation toward existence — is what this lesson is about.

Try this: Find a quiet space and set aside thirty minutes. Begin by writing down one area of your life where you know you have been avoiding an authentic choice — not a trivial preference, but a domain where the stakes genuinely matter to you. It might be a career direction, a relationship, a creative pursuit, or a moral commitment you have been deferring. Beneath it, write a sentence completing each of these three prompts, drawn from Tillich's three anxieties: "In this domain, I am afraid of losing..." (fate and death — what contingency or loss do you fear?), "In this domain, I am afraid of failing to be..." (guilt and condemnation — what moral standard do you fear violating?), and "In this domain, I am afraid it might all be..." (emptiness and meaninglessness — what if the pursuit turns out to mean nothing?). After completing all three, write a final sentence: "Despite all three of these, I affirm..." — and finish it with whatever honest affirmation you can manage. It does not need to be grand. It needs to be true. Sit with what you have written. The exercise is not about resolving the anxiety but about practicing the act of self-affirmation in its presence — the basic motion of existential courage.