The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.

Phelps’s aphorism frames modern anxiety not as a rare pathology but as a fashionable, socially contagious condition: a pervasive reluctance to engage fully with living. “Fear of life” suggests avoidance—of risk, responsibility, intimacy, and the unpredictability that makes experience real—while calling it the century’s “favorite disease” implies it is indulged, normalized, even excused as a mark of sophistication. The line also carries a moral challenge typical of Phelps’s public voice as a teacher and lecturer: courage is presented as an antidote, and vitality as a choice. Read historically, it resonates with early-20th-century disillusionment and the sense that modernity breeds nervousness and retreat.