"Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" is a science fiction novella by American writer Ted Chiang, initially published in the 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.

[1][2] The novella's name quotes a proverb by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) in his work The Concept of Anxiety (1844).

This creates two different timelines, initially identical (except for the color of the lights), but which diverge as time progresses due to the butterfly effect of chaos theory.

The ability to learn about alternate timelines causes existential crises for many people: “Many worried that their choices were rendered meaningless because every action they took was counterbalanced by a branch in which they had made the opposite choice.” The story is narrated from the view of two women: Nat, who works in a shop selling "parallel reality" access devices, and Dana, a psychologist who treats people struggling with this new technology.

Ted Chiang wrote in the story notes at the end of Exhalation: Stories to be agnostic about the Many-worlds interpretation and argued:[6]I’m pretty confident that even if the many-worlds interpretation is correct, it doesn’t mean that all of our decisions are canceled out.