The Quiet Panic of Having Something to Lose
“Last night I started feeling this deep unease I couldn’t shake. I was sitting in my apartment, looking around at all the things I’ve worked for, and out of nowhere it hit me—how easily it could all be gone. My job, my health, my drive to keep going. The thought made me feel suddenly alone, like everything in my life was balanced on a thread. I turned on a show to distract myself, and it helped for a bit, but I keep wondering why that fear shows up at all—and whether I’d still feel it if I didn’t have to worry about money.”
Dear Mark,
What you described—that sudden wave of unease that seems to appear out of nowhere—is one of those deeply human moments we rarely talk about but almost everyone recognizes. You were sitting in the quiet of your own space, surrounded by the things you’ve chosen and earned, and then something shifted. The room didn’t change, but your awareness did. It’s as if you suddenly saw everything fragile and temporary all at once: the job, the body, the spark that gets you out of bed. The fear that followed wasn’t irrational. It was the recognition that control is thinner than we like to believe.
People often think fear comes from scarcity, but the truth is that it can appear just as easily in abundance. You can be surrounded by stability and still feel that undercurrent of panic about how quickly it could all disappear. That fear doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful—it means you’re awake to the fact that security, no matter how much we build, is always conditional. The mind catches that truth, even for a second, and it trembles.
It’s natural that your first instinct was to turn on the television. That’s the psyche’s way of dimming the intensity when it gets too bright. The noise, the dialogue, the story—it gives your nervous system a pattern to follow, a rhythm to borrow until your own steadies again. There’s nothing shallow about it. It’s self-regulation in disguise. You found a way to keep from falling through the hole that just opened beneath you.
But the question you asked—the one that lingers after the distraction fades—is worth sitting with: If I were financially secure, would this fear go away?
It’s tempting to believe it would. Money gives options, insulation, time. It buys us a sense of control over the unpredictable. But the fear you described isn’t really about finances. It’s about impermanence. It’s the mind brushing up against the truth that even when life looks solid, it’s still balancing on variables we can’t command. When we imagine “enough” money, what we’re really imagining is freedom from contingency. Yet even the wealthy worry about loss—they just shift the target. The fear migrates from survival to status, from status to health, from health to meaning. What changes is the storyline, not the emotion.
Part of what’s happening, Mark, is that you’re touching the edge of existential awareness—the realization that everything we have is temporary, including ourselves. Most of the time we live at a safe distance from that truth, wrapped in the daily routines and small distractions that keep life feeling stable. But every so often, the veil lifts. You catch sight of how easily it could all vanish, and for a few moments, you feel the full gravity of existence. That’s not pathology. That’s consciousness doing what it’s built to do: recognize the fragility of its own creation.
It can feel lonely when that happens because awareness is isolating by nature. No one else can live your life from the inside, so when you face its uncertainty, you’re suddenly aware of that separation too. But loneliness doesn’t mean you’ve fallen out of connection—it means you’ve come into deeper contact with your own interior world. You’re noticing the self that exists before identity, before titles and possessions. It’s unnerving at first, but it’s also where maturity begins.
The key is not to argue with the fear but to make space for it. Instead of trying to reassure yourself that everything will be fine, which the mind rarely believes anyway, you can acknowledge the underlying truth: things are fragile, but they are here now. That distinction matters. The goal isn’t to convince yourself of permanence, it’s to practice presence within impermanence. You do that by grounding in what is immediately real—the light on the wall, the warmth of the air, the sound of the television humming in the background. When you name what’s here, you anchor awareness back in the present moment, where anxiety loses its fuel.
There’s also a deeper psychological layer at play: autonomy. You said you were alone in that moment. For most of us, being alone with our thoughts reveals how dependent we are on structure and belonging to feel secure. We draw comfort from external systems—relationships, institutions, routines—that give our lives shape. When you imagine losing your job or your health, you’re not just picturing material loss, you’re imagining a collapse of orientation. The “what would I do?” question underneath it all is really “who would I be without what defines me?”
That’s the part of the fear that can’t be solved by income. It can only be softened by integration—by knowing that you are more than the roles you play or the possessions you maintain. Stability isn’t the absence of risk; it’s the ability to stay yourself while life changes shape around you. That’s a deeper form of security, one that doesn’t depend on conditions.
If you want to work with this feeling practically, try building small rituals of grounding that connect you to what’s real right now. Touch the countertop when you walk by it. Pay attention to the sound of your own footsteps. When you make coffee, slow down enough to notice its smell before the first sip. These aren’t mindfulness clichés; they’re ways of telling your brain: I’m still here. Nothing has collapsed. Over time, that message becomes embodied. It teaches you that you can coexist with uncertainty without losing coherence.
And when the fear returns—and it will—don’t treat it as a failure. Treat it as a pulse check of awareness. It’s your psyche reminding you how much you care about your life. You fear losing it because it matters. That’s love in disguise. Love of your surroundings, your work, your body, your sense of meaning. The anxiety just got there first.
You asked whether financial security would take away that worry. The truth is, you’re chasing something more profound than money. You’re chasing existential safety—the wish to be untouchable by loss. But life doesn’t offer that deal. What it does offer is continuity of self, the capacity to rebuild, reimagine, and reconnect each time something changes. That’s what you already did the night you turned on the television and steadied yourself again. You didn’t need a fortune for that. You needed presence and a bit of gentleness with your own mind.
So the next time that wave comes, you might try saying quietly, I see you. You’re the part of me that knows things end. And then look around. You’re still here. The walls are still standing. The air still moves. The moment you’re living is still intact.
You don’t have to outrun impermanence to live well within it. You just have to stop confusing its arrival with danger.
–RJ