Americans are “in the grasp of deep, paralyzing dread” according to Andre Mouchard of The Orange County Register. Mouchard is commenting on the results of an annual study conducted by Chapman University in which researchers poll more than 1,000 Americans to find out what their top fears are. The researchers inquire about a wide range of phobias and fears, from ghosts to spiders to nuclear war.

The survey reveals that Americans today are more afraid than at any other time in recent history. The trends sketched out by ten years of the survey indicate that “Fear is taking a larger and larger role in American life,” according to Christopher Bader, a professor at Chapman and the lead investigator involved in the study. Americans are “afraid of more things than they used to be,” says Bader. “And they’re more afraid of those things than they used to be.”

Some of the possibilities contributing most to Americans’ knotted stomachs are these: corrupt government officials, loved ones becoming ill or dying, cyberterrorism, nuclear attack, terrorist attacks, biological warfare, the U.S. entering another world war, and financial concerns. A solid 51.6 percent of Americans feared the outcome of the election, and 48.6 percent dread subsequent civil unrest.

The number of fears relating to international conflict is striking, though not surprising given the ongoing coverage of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, with the ever-looming prospect of the U.S. getting sucked more directly into the quicksand of these conflicts. As Smithsonian Magazine notes, fears over government corruption also come as no surprise, though it’s worse this year than in the past few surveys.

Is the fear chasm deepening because of the wedge between traditional media and social media? Bader thinks that’s a possibility since, as the old adage goes, “fear sells.” Social media algorithms are programmed to dish out content that gets strong reactions and engagement—which often means fear-inducing posts. The same goes for TV network ratings. Our instinctively dramatic response to perceived threats may be contributing to the toxicity of the media, the poisoning of our brains.

So are we doomed to live in fear? Is the cresting tide of dread bound to sweep us into an abysmal void of paralysis and depression?

That all depends. Fear is, in some sense, the obvious response to the natural human condition. Though we often try to forget it, we are limited beings. We are subject to wind and rain, to cold and heat, to illness, to war and betrayal and catastrophe, to time’s patient pen etching the story of our joys and sorrows in the lines of our faces. And ultimately we are subject to death. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. Shakespeare’s Lear speaks for us all when he says, “Here I stand your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.”

But there is a resilience and peace that can come from recognizing our infirmity. The tides of this world are not for us to master, to borrow a phrase from Tolkien. Time spent worrying over matters that lie beyond us is time wasted. All we really have control over is our internal response to circumstances that assail us. That internal response can always be one of acceptance and the determination to do what is right–and therefore lead to inner peace. When we realize that our internal state remains under our control, independent of circumstances, we can find a certain courage and peace.

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, psychologist Viktor Frankl lays out what he calls “the case for a tragic optimism.” How is it possible, he asks, to say “yes” to life in spite of the “tragic triad” of pain, guilt, and death? For Frankl, the answer is that what makes life worth living is meaning, and meaning can be discovered in every situation of human life, however dire. Frankl writes:

Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. … In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life’s meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially.

All that to say that the uncertainty of the human estate need not engender fear because no event can render our life meaningless: the ultimate tragedy. We can choose another path. Life’s uncertainty could, instead, engender sheer gratitude, appreciation for the littlest things, an awareness of the sacredness of the present moment. That is a path to a fulfilling life. It can inspire us to make the most of what we have.

“In fact, the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives,” according to Frankl. In other words, realizing the transience of life can inspire us to do good, and once that good is accomplished, it endures permanently: “In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.”

To be human is to be small, yet with an infinite capacity for love and joy that far outstrips our mortal frame, Hamlet’s quintessence of dust so nobly formed. The most essential goods, such as love, joy, and virtue, can never be taken from us. This is one of Aristotle’s points in the Nicomachean Ethics when he says that happiness doesn’t derive from riches or pleasure, all of which can disintegrate like ash in a moment, but rather from possessing integrity of character, which nothing can take from us.

Living, conscious clay that we are, we are aware of our own mortality. It is a predicament that causes a constant psychological strain that makes us vulnerable to fear. To be human is to be transfixed somewhere between the stars and the abyss, capable of both inexpressible sorrow and inexpressible joy.

When weighed down by tragedy or even just the threat of tragedy—which is always present—we are forced to ask the most fundamental questions. The great poet Homer wrestled with these fundamental questions in his Iliad and Odyssey, where humans live in a mysterious, poignantly beautiful yet heart breakingly transient world, existing in a fraught and uncertain relationship to the gods and the other forces outside human control. Homer explored whether, in the final analysis, the fundamental force behind the universe is benign or malignant. Is the world merely the plaything of capricious gods, or is there some deeper purpose at work? The Greeks did not know. They grasped at half-understood realities, half-wrought answers.

Some might argue that with the advent of Christianity, humanity received the answers that it sought. In one sense, this is true. However, even Christian revelation does not promise us specific explanations for all the strange and tragic happenings in our lives, for the brokenness we find in ourselves and in the world. Rather, it invites us to a quiet embrace of what is, an act of faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, a blind assent to what happens, even though we may not understand it. Christianity holds up as the ultimate ideal the patient suffering of a Man whose sorrows were inexplicable, irrational, unjust.

The Christian life—or any life, for that matter—will always have this element of inexplicability, of mystery (both joyful and sorrowful) before which the tongue falls silent. We see now through a glass in a dark manner. Further answers are only promised to us on the other side of that glass. Yet Christianity also promises that the walls of this life, like glass, are breakable—that one day they will shatter, and we will step out into the clear air of a perfect understanding, unburdened forever of fear.

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