Geworfen denotes the arbitrary character of Dasein's experience in the sense of its having been born into a specific family in a particular culture at a given moment of human history.
Awareness and acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of Dasein is characterized as a state of "thrown-ness" in the present with all its attendant frustrations, sufferings, and demands that one does not choose, such as social conventions or ties of kinship and duty.
The idea of the past as a matrix not chosen, but at the same time not utterly binding or deterministic, results in the notion of Geworfenheit—a kind of alienation that human beings struggle against,[2] and that leaves a paradoxical opening for freedom: The thrower of the project is thrown in his own throw.
[3] For William J. Richardson, Geworfenheit "must be understood in a purely ontological sense as wishing to signify the matter-of-fact character of human finitude".
In 2009, Simon Critchley dedicated his column on The Guardian to Heidegger's concept of thrownness and explained it using the aforementioned verse of The Doors.