Kierkegaard wrote this in 1844 in The Concept of Anxiety, a book he published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis because he liked to disagree with himself in print. The original Danish is Angest, a word somewhere between dread and anxiety, closer to the feeling you get when the floor turns into a possibility rather than a certainty.

The common reading treats anxiety as a problem to be fixed. Kierkegaard treats it as information. If you are anxious, he says, you have noticed that you are free. You could have chosen differently. You could still choose differently. The ground under you is not a floor but a suggestion. Animals that are not free do not experience this dizziness, because they do not have the option of being otherwise. Anxiety is the tax on having a future that is not already written.

A kitten considering whether to emerge from under the bed is staging a miniature version of this. The room is vast. Any direction is available. The freedom is precisely what makes the choice heavy. Most of us, faced with the same vertigo, scroll. We try to outsource the decision to the algorithm. Kierkegaard would have recognized the maneuver and called it, politely, a waste of a perfectly good dizziness.