I spent another day unpacking old notebooks out of boxes.
Went through an old diary that had notes from the time I was balls deep in the studying of Søren Kierkegaard.
The quick skinny on the dude: “Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.” via our lads at Wikipedia.
Anyways.
I’d recommend you pick up some of his work regardless of what it is you’re doing in life. The Concept Of Anxiety is a great read.
But it leads me on to the next few points.
Kierkegaard understood something about human suffering that most philosophers missed.
Real pain isn’t in the big and dramatic moments. It’s in the quiet desperation of our mundane and ordinary life. Remember the last time you were struggling to hold it all together and you put on a brave smile while pretending everything is fine?
I know he spent the majority of his life going toe to toe with anxiety, depression and what he called “The sickness unto death” (another excellent read btw) like you were a husk of a person. You’re alive but not really living. I’m sure if he was around today, watching people scroll through Instagram while their souls slowly disintegrated, he’d have some choice words…
1) Stop trying to be like everyone else because it’s killing you.
He called it “The Crowd” and he saw it as the greatest threat to human authenticity.
Today’s version is social media lifestyle porn and the non stop pressure to optimise your life according to other people’s metrics and…
If you’re not apart of their clique. You are quickly banished.
You’re not supposed to have the same morning routine as some productivity guru. You’re not supposed to want the same things as the friends you went to school with and you’re definitely not supposed to live according to some random template some shitweasel designed.
You feel the highest form of anxiety when you compare your life to others. It’s your soul telling you that you’ve been living someone’s life instead of your own.
Becoming yourself is one of the hardest and most important type of work you could ever do. Screw success and being admired. Those things come later on. You need to become yourself.
2) The only honest response is to embrace the absurdity.
He understood that life doesn’t make any form of rational sense. You can’t logic your way out of existential anxiety. There aren’t any pills or potions that you can ingest to optimise meaning. You for sure as hell can’t productivity hack your way to happiness.
Most people spend their lives trying to add everything up and to find some system or strat that’ll finally make life feel manageable. Kierkegaard would tell you to stop that shit.
We look at uncertainty as problem to solve. Where it’s really just has having to accept the human condition as it is.
He called it “The leap of faith” but it wasn’t necessarily religious at all. It’s recognising that at some point, you have to choose to live without having all the answers. You have to act without knowing if you’re making the right choice and you have to commit to something even though you can’t prove it’s worthwhile.
3) Despair is your gift, so you best not waste it.
I found this one the hardest to swallow. He saw despair as a necessary stage of human development. Yeah we might want to avoid it but that’s the part we need to power through. Don’t avoid it and don’t medicate through it. It’s something that has to be experienced fully and learned from.
Authenticity emerges when your psyche starts to clean house.
Most people try to escape despair by staying busy, staying distracted and staying numb. (Which is very easy to do in the scroll hole side of the internet now…) But you have to sit with it. Let it teach you what isn’t working. Let it burn away the false dreams and borrowed ambitions that were never really yours anyway.
If you embrace despair it’ll end all the pretending, pretending will then fall to the way side and that’s when you’ll start to live.
I’m fairly certain he never promised that life would get easier if you followed his advice. He did promise that it would get more real and if you’re tired of performing “happiness” while dying inside then I’m sure that’s worth hearing eh?
We can take a break from trying to hold it all together and let ourselves fall apart. The great thing is that we can then build something true from the pieces.
Sit with it and think about it…
Stephen Walker.
P.S. Don’t forget to grab one of his books and have a little deep dive.