Daily Inspiration Quote by Rollo May

Panic has a motor, and Rollo May names it with a dry, surgical irony: when we are disoriented, we don’t slow down to reorient. We accelerate. The line catches a distinctly modern pathology - motion mistaken for meaning - and it does so without moralizing. “Ironic” is the key word: the behavior is not just irrational, it’s perversely self-defeating. Speed feels like agency, but it often functions as anesthesia.

May, an existential psychologist writing in the shadow of world war, mass conformity, and the mid-century boom in managerial “adjustment,” is taking aim at the cultural fetish for productivity as a substitute for inner clarity. Lostness is intolerable because it exposes freedom: you have to choose a direction, admit uncertainty, accept limits. Running faster is a way to dodge that confrontation. It turns existential anxiety into busyness, a socially rewarded form of avoidance.

The subtext is that “being lost” isn’t merely a navigational error; it’s a crisis of values. May’s work treats anxiety as information - a signal that something in your life demands attention - not a symptom to be suppressed. The quote warns how quickly we convert that signal into noise: more work, more striving, more plans, more goals. The tragedy is that the very energy that could be used to pause, reflect, and re-commit gets spent on momentum for its own sake. We don’t just lose our way; we build a treadmill and call it a road.