For eleven years I sat four desks away from a man who was, by every measure that office cared about, doing fine.
Competent, well liked, never in trouble. A mortgage that was shrinking and a golf handicap that wasn’t. Hand him a life satisfaction survey and he’d have ticked the middle boxes and got back to work. Then one Friday, over a beer he hadn’t planned on having, he told me he’d wanted to be a marine biologist and had told nobody in thirty-one years, including his wife.
Unhappy isn’t the word for what that was. He had no word for it either, and a Danish philosopher had beaten us both to it by a century and a half.
What Kierkegaard actually meant by despair
Today the word means crying in the car park. Søren Kierkegaard used it to mean something structural, a fault line running through the relationship you have with yourself.
He opens The Sickness Unto Death, published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with a doctor’s analogy. A physician might say that nobody alive is in perfect health. Kierkegaard proposes the same about despair, and reckons that the rarity worth remarking on is the man who has escaped it.
Then he lands the punch that makes the whole book stick. One of the forms despair takes is not knowing you are in it.
The self as a task you never finish
All of this rests on a definition of selfhood that most readers bail out of, and I nearly did too. Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kierkegaard treats the self as a relation rather than an object, something obliged to keep relating itself to itself. Which is a roundabout way of saying the self is a job with no finish line. It is built out of opposites: the finite and the infinite, what is necessary and what is possible. Hold them in balance and you are well. Let one swallow the other and you are not.
Fair warning, his cure is religious. He thought the balance only holds when the self rests on the power that made it, and that faith is the only thing capable of doing that work. You can take the diagnosis and leave the prescription. Plenty of people have.
Why the quiet version is the dangerous one
The properly unsettling claim in that book is that contentment can be a symptom.
Security and tranquillity, Kierkegaard writes, might mean you have come through despair and made your peace with things. Or that same calm could be the despair itself, wearing your dressing gown, making your coffee. He describes a sickness that can hide inside a person so thoroughly that the person carrying it has no idea. The wasted life, he says, belongs to whoever lived on, so distracted by joys and sorrows, that he never once faced up to the fact of being a self at all.
A rough sentence to read at my age. I read it and thought about my colleague, and then, less comfortably, about a decade of my own that I filled to the brim and can’t now account for.
What the regret research found
Modern psychology turns up late to this party and confirms the atmosphere.
Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich ran six studies on what people actually regret, published in the journal Emotion in 2018. Borrowing from self-discrepancy theory, they split a person three ways: who you believe you are, who duty says you should have been, and who you hoped you would become. Then they asked hundreds of participants to sort their regrets into those boxes.
The results, as reported by Cornell, weren’t close. Ideal-self regrets came up far more often than ought-self ones, and when participants named the single biggest regret of their lives, 76 per cent pointed to a failure to become who they had hoped to be.
Gilovich’s explanation is almost mundane, which is why I find it convincing. Ought regrets have edges. You skipped the gym or were short with your mother, and you can go and repair it. Once repaired, your brain files the matter as closed. Ideal regrets have no edges. Be a good father. Be brave. Learn the guitar. There’s no completion date and no way of knowing whether you have done enough, so nothing gets filed and the thing sits there accruing interest.
Six studies, one framework, one paper. No one has demonstrated that a nineteenth century theologian had the human condition solved. Still, there is a strange comfort in watching the ache he described in 1849 keep turning up in survey data.
The one almost hopeful line in the book
Buried in all that Danish gloom, Kierkegaard leaves something close to kind.
The man who says plainly that he is in despair, he writes, stands a step nearer to a cure than everyone who neither feels nor is thought to be in despair at all. Saying it out loud counts as movement. That is the entire hopeful content of the book, and on most days it’s enough.
My colleague never became a marine biologist. He retired, and last I heard he volunteers at an aquarium and has become insufferable on the subject of tide pools, which sounds like someone who eventually answered the question.
Kierkegaard believed eternity would one day put a single question to each of us: whether we lived in despair, and whether we ever knew. Eternity can wait. The smaller and far more inconvenient version of that question is the one about whatever you are currently too busy to say out loud, and it is available to you this afternoon.
