Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologist, writer, and culture critic born
in the year 1813.
He has published a fair amount of works in his lifetime, most written under various pseudonyms.
These pseudonyms expressed all kinds of different, sometimes even contradicting, views that have
caused historians trying to find Kierkegaard’s true beliefs to scratch their heads.
Some of his pseudonyms were: Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Constantin Constantius, and
‘The Individual.’
Some of his most notable works are: ‘Either/or’, ‘Fear and Trembling’, ‘Sickness unto
Death’, and ‘The Concept of Anxiety’.
Kierkegaard is widely regarded as the father of Existentialism, a theory asserting that
human beings possess no innate essence or fixed purpose and are free to determine their
identity.
Kierkegaard wrote extensively on this subject, although never using the term ‘existentialism’
himself.
He was raised by a very religious father, something that influenced Kierkegaard greatly.
Throughout his life, Kierkegaard was a very passionate and devout believer of God, but
also a firm critic of the church as an institution.
Aside from religion, freedom, and society, Kierkegaard was very interested in the human
feelings of dread, fear, and anxiety.
His book, "The Concept of Anxiety" , explores his belief that anxiety is an inherent aspect
of being human.
Despite acknowledging that anxiety is a universal experience, Kierkegaard's approach is not
entirely negative.
Rather, he suggests that anxiety may offer a way for humanity to be saved rather than
doomed.
He believed that embracing anxiety could be transformative, leading to personal growth
and self-awareness.
And if you want to be able to transform your anxiety into something useful, too, in this
video, we bring you four tips from Kierkegaard that will help you with managing the feeling
of anxiety.
1.
Use Your Anxiety Kierkegaard says “Whoever has learned to
be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
When faced with the knowledge that one has the freedom to make any decision and form
any opinion, an individual often experiences a terrible case of anxiety or dread.
Making your own decisions means being responsible for them, and being responsible for them means
having to take responsibility for their consequences.
And what feels worse than realizing ‘This was my fault’ when something does not turn
out well?
In his book, ‘The Concept Of Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard uses the story of Adam & Eve,
specifically Adam in the garden as the very first instance of anxiety.
God told him not to eat the apple from the tree.
This implied a choice: Adam could choose to obey God or choose not to.
And as such, he felt anxiety.
When Adam ate the apple, the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ came into the world.
But before he had taken a bite out of it, those concepts did not exist yet.
Thus, Kierkegaard concludes, ‘anxiety precedes sin.’
In other words, in itself, anxiety is neither good nor bad.
Anxiety, as we know it, is often a synonym for nervousness, fear, or uncertainty.
However, for Kierkegaard, it was something significant in itself - an important term
that could not just be ‘explained away.’
As he described it, anxiety is ‘the dizziness of freedom.’
This anxiety has multiple aspects to it.
On the one hand, it feels negative as it represents the realization that you will have to make
an infinite amount of difficult choices like Will you keep working for a boss, start your
own business, go back to school?
Will you marry and have kids?
Will you move countries?
Will you leave the love of your life for your dream career?
On the other hand, it feels positive: it is exciting and freeing to know that you’re
capable of choosing everything all by yourself.
Anxiety is, then, inevitable to anyone who is free.
So the key to feeling better is not to get rid of your anxiety, like most think, but
to focus on its positive sides and use it.
We are often entirely encompassed by the negative side of our anxiety.
Aside from being dizzying, it can also be described as paralyzing.
The sensation of anxiety when making decisions and being responsible for them can be so terrifying
that we may freeze and not do anything at all.
But this feeling may never, ever pass - and thus, we have to move on from it and not let
it paralyze us, no matter how hard that might seem.
Change is scary, so we stay stuck in a dead-end job instead of risking a new job.
We might feel too insecure to try out new activities, meet new people, sell our house,
buy a car, and so on.
But you will never, ever grow if you don’t do any of those things.
And if you wait until you don’t feel the anxiety anymore, you’re going to have to
wait forever.
In order to focus on the positive, exciting aspects of anxiety, one should pursue what
Kierkegaard called ‘passion.’
These passions are your personal goal or mission - an end result you’re aiming for, formed
on the basis of what you rationally find important, but also what you emotionally feel strong
about and subjectively care about.
It is crucial to find such passions and go for it with everything you have.
The anxiety will definitely be there.
What if this is a wrong thing to pursue?
What if I fail?
What if I don’t want it as much as I think I do?
But the trick is to acknowledge your anxiety without acting on it.
When the anxiety comes, try to see it positively: think about how excited you are or how proud
of yourself you will be after having taken a risk.
See it as a reminder of the freedom you have.
See it as motivation.
Do something daring not despite being scared, but because you’re scared!
Anxiety brings about strong emotions, and it can be just as helpful and beautiful to
experience them as it is troublesome to repress them.
Imagine you’re nervous for a job interview.
If you push these feelings down, they will fester and you might end up panicking when
the moment comes.
If, instead, you write down your feelings and let them out, you will feel lighter.
And, you will feel brave - because you acknowledge your fear, you can also overcome it.
Lastly, anxiety can also act as an invitation to be rational.
If your anxiety anticipates everything that could go wrong, then you can make sure to
prepare for each scenario.
Similarly, your anxiety may force you to sit down and think about whether you really want
something before you move forward.
In this way, anxiety can make you a more careful and prepared person.
In short, Kierkegaard considers anxiety inherent to being human.
We’re free beings, and that’s a pretty big responsibility!
No wonder we’re anxious.
Anxiety is a reminder that we are free and it can help us in making decisions.
We need to learn to face our anxiety and use it to be more grateful, considerate and motivated.
2.
Acknowledge Regret To quote Kierkegaard “I see it all perfectly;
there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that.
My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret
both.”
Very closely related to this dizzying freedom is another one of the greatest things that
brings us anxiety: the constant wondering whether we will regret the things we do.
How could we ever calmly act if we do not know the consequences?
Kierkegaard acknowledges our neverending tendency to regret everything and anything we do.
Every decision we make could have been something else.
If you pursue one career, you might regret not pursuing another.
If you spend the afternoon playing video games, you might regret not playing an instrument
that day.
‘The grass is greener’-attitude is simply very prevalent and present in our way of thinking,
and for most people it’s unavoidable.
This constant regret seems like a way to be miserable, but Kierkegaard argues that regret
does not have to be as miserable as it seems.
Regret is a medium that can help you realize what needs to change in life, but it is not
something that should be dwelled on.
One of the ways to embrace regret instead of letting it incapacitate you is to consider
all the possibilities you still have.
Kierkegaard said, ‘Pleasure disappoints, not possibility.’
Pleasure disappoints because we regularly make decisions with the hope that it will
bring us happiness.
However, the truth is, there are almost no decisions one can make that are that powerful
- and as a consequence, any choice we make inevitably results in disappointment.
But there is always a possibility.
Whatever state you are in life, you always have multiple ways that you can go moving
forward.
The endlessness of possibility in your life is something to cherish and feel excited and
happy about.
You can always make a different choice and you can always change.
But acknowledging all the possibilities you have is not the best medicine for regret.
Aside from that, Kierkegaard sees the problem of regret mostly as a problem for pleasure-seekers.
All personal choices that you make are things you might regret, but if you make a choice
in favor of the greater good, or a cause that you believe in, you often find that that regret
is further away.
Thus, if you find yourself regretting every single thing about your life, the best way
to combat this is to try and find a cause that means something to you and work towards
it.
If you make decisions that add towards a meaningful life, you will be less and less plagued by
regret.
Someone who lives in order to be happy will always regret everything that causes the slightest
feeling of unhappiness in their life.
But someone who lives in order to contribute to a cause, such as ending hunger in a certain
area, will probably never regret any decision they made that has benefited that cause.
So, when you feel immense regret - as all humans do at some point - try to find joy
in the fact that you have endless possibilities.
But, most of all, ask yourself whether your life has meaning and if not, what you can
do to give it one - for meaning is the true antidote to regret.
And the less you are afraid to regret, the less anxious you will be.
3.
Embrace Absurdity Kierkegaard considers that “The only intelligent
tactical response to life’s horror is to defiantly laugh at it.”
According to Kierkegaard there is actually no meaning to the world.
This viewpoint is called absurdism.
Kierkegaard defines "absurd" as ‘having no rational explanation.’
The world is chaotic, irrational - absurd.
So how are we ever expected to be able to live a meaningful life in such a world?
We often try to organize our lives in a rational way.
We find meaning in our lives by trying to make rational decisions.
However Kierkegaard points out that this method is doomed to fail because the world is too
absurd.
Our lives cannot follow a set of rules or a clear structure.
This constant failing and confrontation with absurdity give many people an endless amount
of anxiety.
It is nerve-wracking to be desperate for your life to go a certain way, or to want to view
the world in a certain way and find yourself face to face with contradictions and oppositions.
Consider love for example.
There is no rational way to fall in love, no matter how hard we might try.
If one’s plan is to fall in love, one can never do so rationally or by following a step-by-step
guide.
Of course, one could marry out of convenience, or date around to fulfill one’s needs - but
is that really what we would consider true love?
In order to love truly, we must do so irrationally and absurdly.
Furthermore, imagine a man who falls for a woman.
He might be an ambitious worker, someone who feels like his intellect matches greatly with
the woman he is in love with, and the two of them could achieve a lot together.
Then, imagine he finds out the woman is terribly sick.
A rational decision would be to leave her, to pursue his own goals and dreams in the
most efficient way possible.
The absurd decision would be to stay with her and trust that it will be worth it despite
all the struggles.
It is a decision many would be anxious to make.
But we can all see that a true lover would choose the latter, and we would not consider
their lives meaningless no matter how absurd and chaotic they might be.
This trust in one’s decisions despite them being absurd is a core pillar of Kierkegaard’s
advice for living in an absurd world.
Or, as he calls it, taking a leap of faith.
This leap of faith is the antidote to despair in the face of absurdism.
When the world does not make sense and we cannot act according to reason or rationality,
we just have to believe that all is alright anyway.
Kierkegaard did so through his belief in God; an ultimate, all-powerful, and inherently
Good being that would guide his existence through this confusing and disorienting world.
One of the examples Kierkegaard uses to justify his dependence on Godly faith, is the story
of Abraham and Isaac.
God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac in the name of faith - an action so
very unethical, so unreasonable, that it could only be called absurd.
According to the story however, Abraham went on to do it nonetheless, and just before the
actual sacrifice, an angel stopped him.
Abraham had passed God’s test by action despite the absurdity of the situation and
he was rewarded by not having to sacrifice his son, allowing them both to live happily
ever after.
As Kierkegaard said, ‘To have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.’
You ‘lose your mind’ in the sense that you refuse to acknowledge the world for its
chaos, arbitrariness, and absurdity, and you need faith instead.
It seems like the most irrational of actions, but Kierkegaard considers it the most rational
thing to do.
Not everything has to make sense.
Sometimes, you have to make choices in virtue of absurdity: You choose things that do not
make sense or do not necessarily align because the decision feels right.
An ambitious man who possibly gives up his ambitions by staying with an ill lover is
a man who made a decision having no idea where it would lead him - but he did so as a leap
of faith.
Making decisions that have no clear advantages is very anxiety-inducing, but avoiding all
such decisions can only ever lead to disappointment and more anxiety..
Thus, as Kierkegaard says, you have to realize the world is absurd and make decisions in
the name of faith.
Only by embracing absurdity instead of avoiding it, will you feel less anxious and more confident.
4.
Realize That You Will Die In our final quote from Kierkegaard for this
video, he says “Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.”
According to Kierkegaard, most of the world lives in death-denial.
We vaguely know that we will die someday, but live as if we’re immortal.
We know we all age, but we still use all kinds of creams, cosmetics or even surgeries to
try to look younger, attempting to spread the myth that we have all the time in the
world and that we should never change.
And despite how carefree this might seem, this is actually one of the worst ways to
exacerbate your feelings of anxiety.
There are two ways in which people generally avoid death.
The first is that they ‘get lost’ in the pleasures of the world, seeking thrill after
thrill.
All of these thrills, such as food, drinks, excitement and pleasure, are temporary.
These people are so concerned with temporary pleasures that they are blind to the big picture
of life, including the end of it.
These people live in the moment not because they’re relaxed and free of worry, but because
they know they would be paralyzed by worry if they looked just a little beyond the moment.
This way of living creates a heavy dependence on such thrills, making one incapable and
heavily anxious without them.
The second way to avoid being aware of death is clinging to some false sense of immortality.
This second form of denial is present in almost everybody in society.
We do not live like we might die tomorrow; instead, we live like the end of our lives
is incomprehensibly far ahead of us, like we have all the time in the world.
We let ourselves be caught up in minor worries or trivial concerns like what strangers think
of you, how you should deal with your partner forgetting the dishes that one time, and so
on.
We do not see them as a waste of time because we truly do not think of our time as something
finite.
This tendency to spend time on little worries is one of the greatest ways of inducing anxiety:
we do not look at our lives in the grand scheme of things and thus everything seems like it
is worth stressing over.
According to Kierkegaard, there are two ways to be aware of death.
The first kind of awareness he calls ‘mood’ and the second kind of awareness he calls
‘earnest.’
Mood is when you think about death in a removed, abstract, and impersonal way.
Examples of this kind of thinking are ‘everybody will die someday’ and ‘at the end of every
life is death’ or ‘most of us are going to live until we’re somewhere between seventy
and a hundred.’
You acknowledge the existence of death but do not relate it to yourself.
Almost everybody is aware of death in this way, but it still results in death denial.
The other way of thinking about death, in earnestness, is personal.
You think about how you, personally, will die someday.
And not the far, undefined future, but any possible day.
Earnest thinking about death includes the realization that your death might happen at
any moment, not in some far away distance, and that it will include the extermination
of all your sorrows and worries, as well as your hopes, dreams and goals.
According to Kierkegaard, any experience not considered through the lens of earnest death
is inauthentic.
In order to have a true genuine experience of life, one must consider death.
According to Kierkegaard, life is fundamentally influenced by death.
Those who fail to acknowledge this reality are not truly living, but rather living in
a fictional world.
When faced with the truth of mortality, these people become anxious and scared.
Mortality is a truth about existence that cannot be ignored, and doing so means to deceive
oneself greatly.
As soon as one does gain awareness of death, they cannot view life outside of the context
of death ever again.
This would cause them to reevaluate everything in their life to see if it still fits in this
new light or, rather, in death’s shadow.
This is because when you actually, truly acknowledge the fact that you, personally, will die, you
will be forced to think about what you truly find important in life and you will start
to figure out and pursue those goals with more haste and motivation.
We can see examples of the benefits of earnest thoughts about death in real life.
After disaster strikes, people often involuntarily gain a sense of earnestness that then affects
their following decisions and behavior.
A victim of a near-death experience or witness of a tragedy often suddenly picks up commitments
that they had been procrastinating on, and starts ignoring petty concerns.
Because they have realized that if they do not act now, the chance might not be there
in the future.
So, in short, earnest thoughts of death will make one feel a sense of urgency in relation
to their life.
One who truly experiences earnestness has no time to mope or worry excessively, and
they certainly have no time to get lost in the anxious paralysis we discussed earlier.
They realize that life is there to be lived.
And someone who has acknowledged and truly dealt with the notion of death would not be
paralyzed by the news that they themselves will die soon.
Instead, they can continue living just as they have before.
The only way to truly live life to its fullest and let go of all that does not truly matter
- is to consider your own, personal death.
Earnest thought about death is the way to live life without fear and anxiety.
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Thanks so much for watching.