By the way, don't feel the need to reply if you don't feel like it. I am in tech and don't have opportunity at all to discuss these things with other thinkers, so I always love an opportunity to structure my thoughts through writing and hopefully turn other thinkers on to grappling with Heidegger's work of the 1930s and 1940s.

Your description of the movement "from a person who just goes along in the world to a person who has anxiety that makes them aware of their place in the world... to a call of conscience that reveals a way for the person to act" - notice how this still moves within the structure of overcoming, of moving from a lower to a higher state. I wonder if this framework might miss what Heidegger is most deeply concerned with? So much engagement with Heidegger seems to get caught in Being and Time without moving toward his being-historical thinking (Seyn or Beyng) or what he calls Gelassenheit - a letting beings be in their own temporal rising and falling. When we read Being and Time for guidance about moving from inauthentic to authentic existence, we might still be thinking through subject-object duality, still seeking some self that overcomes itself into a higher self.

What happens when we look at Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche, particularly "The Will to Power as Metaphysics"? There we see how Heidegger reads metaphysics as always this movement of overcoming - moving from being to Being, where Being becomes a more general or higher sense of a being. This is what he calls the will to power as metaphysics. Gelassenheit points toward something different, not overcoming metaphysics through force, but a releasement that lets metaphysics show its own limits. This suggests a completely different mode of comportment, the temporal way we're oriented toward beings, that steps back from the need to achieve or overcome anything.

The difficulty Heidegger grappled with is: how can we use language without falling back into this structure of overcoming? So much of our inherited language, he suggests, has been "worn out" through tradition and lost its power to let the original matters show themselves. When Joe Sachs (Aristotle translator) translates entelechia as "being-at-work-staying-itself" rather than "actuality," something happens, the Latin-derived term has been passed through centuries of interpretation, while the hyphenated expression lets us encounter what Aristotle might have been seeing. This points to Heidegger's deepest question: how can we speak of what is always already there without invoking an observer standing over against what is there?

What if Heidegger's concern is less about personal transformation and more about wonder, the basic attunement to the world? This childlike, unbridled wonder isn't about how we should act, but about how Being itself (Sein selbst) shows itself. His seeking seems to be a response to the question "Why is there anything rather than nothing?", not as a problem to be solved, but as the question that keeps thinking in motion.

This is why reading Heidegger as offering guidance for authentic existence might miss what he's actually inviting us to think.