If we are to embrace (or at least tentatively accept) Tillich’s proposal about the courage to be, then the engagement of existential anxiety is based on personal and collective agency: the willingness to make decisions and take action despite the uncertainties of life (as well as mid-21st Century volatility, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence and contradiction) (VUCA-Plus (Bergquist, 2026a).
Craving
This second feeling is rarely portrayed, except in songs (such as K. D. Lang’s “Constant Craving”) and in melodramatic movies about unrequired love. Basically, craving is a negative feeling about that which does not yet exist. The human capacity to imagine something that doesn’t exist (such as unicorns and lions that will attack us in our workplace), not only produces nonproductive anxiety, but also nonproductive and unrelenting emotional wishing for something. We not only “long” for the love of some other person, but also for recognition by our boss of a job well done. We long for the hidden satisfaction that comes with fulfillment of a desire, or even more basically for a sense of order (‘Peace and quiet”) in a VUCA-Plus world.
Building on a concept provided by the noted Jungian theorist, John Van Eenwyk (1997), we might consider craving to be a pattern of isolated and often contradictory desires that come together, much aa order is combination of neural firings (van Eenwyk, 1997, p. 66). Van Eenwyk introduces a concept from the field of chaos theory called the Hopf bifurcation (Van Eenwyk (1997, p. 61), In essence, systems often contain elements of the system that are in tension (bifurcation). In the case of a system such as the human psyche, tension might exist in the presence of hope for the fulfillment of a desire, and the counter presence of fear and a sense of hopelessness regarding the unlikely fulfillment of this desire.
Van Eenwyck notes that when a bifurcation fails to stabilize itself then there is a cascade of bifurcations. In the case of hope and hopelessness, this means the unsuccessful resolution of the tension between these two feelings. A specific hope of fulfillment attracts other related hopes of fulfillment (such as past loves), as well as fears of rejection that were realized in the past. We consider asking our boss how they feel about the work we have done. We can imagine our boss saying that we have done a good job; however, can we trust our boss’s appraisal since we “wrenched it out of this person in authority. And what if our boss indicates that they don’t particularly like what we have done or identifies several flaws in our performance. Perhaps it is better not to inquire about our performance. In this case, we will continue to have an unresolved tension. We will continue to crave some form of positive feedback from the person to whom we report.
Van Eenwyk (1997, p. 61) describes the outcome of a cascade resulting from an unresolved bifurcation: “The boundary between regular, ordered behavior and behavior lead[s] to chaos. [The chaos] occurs at a point of instability, where some influence acts upon dynamic to change its behavior”. As portrayed in many movies, the resulting behavior often leads to unproductive outcomes. The craving suitor makes a highly emotional and inappropriate appeal to their elusive love-object. A humorous version of this inappropriate appeal is found in the repeated unsuccessful courting of Andie Mac Dowell by Bill Murrary in the very popular movie, Groundhog Day. Alternatively, the behavior is never enacted but is instead repeatedly dreamt by the obsessed lover. We find this obsession in novels such as Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and virtually all the Brontё sister novels.
