The 19th-century Danish philospher, Søren Kierkegaard, is one of the best philosophers of all time. In his youth, he suffered quite a bit -- with all his siblings passed save him and a brother. This incident led him to write voraciously over the course of the next 15 years.
Kierkegaard was never driven by money, but by a compulsion to write and bring his wisdom to the world. He only lived until 42, but he made his life's works extremely influential.
Two of Kierkegaard's most popular books, Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard wanted us to give up our delusions and conventions, attacking the notions of family, work, and love, all notions that we really prioritize now as worldly works and possessions.
Kierkegaard always denied the fact that life had purpose and meaning. He strived to live in the absurd and prioritize a world where we pressed forward in the absurd.
Kierkegaard has a lot of enemies, and if there was something universal about Kierkegaard, it's that he angered almost everyone in Danish society, including the Church, bourgeoisie, and the rich.
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward," Kierkegaard said.
And he's right -- at the moment, we just have to press forward. Hindsight bias means that we know all the reasons for the past and learn from it, but we can't learn from the present as easily. He started to get disillusioned with natural conventions of love, politeness, and work and thought they were funny and laughed at it.
In particular, he was against conventions of love and marriage. Passion and prudence united to let someone enjoy all the thrills of a love affair and have the stability of the long term relationship.
As Kierkegaard noted, a romantic affair and marriage were mutually exclusive for all but the luckiest of us. Marriage is a covenant where things don't always go well -- which I've seen in my parents' marriage. Children, stability, and routine sometimes need to be prioritized about passion and romantic love.
That's not to say that my parents never loved each other, but it was a covenant and obligation kind of love much more than it was a passion kind of love. Kierkegaard knew that both were not compatible due to his own love life -- he fell in low with an 18-year-old named Regine Olsen, who he fell in love with, but he soon cut off the arrangement because he realized that living with her forever meant not having the same love for her forever.
Kierkegaard knew that life was full of incompatibilities.
"Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way."
Kierkegaard knew that life was full of regret. It's inevitable as part of the human condition. However, Kierkegaard was the only philosopher in his time who took laughter and humor seriously, who realized that humor is sometimes the only way to cope with life's hardships.
the founder of the existentialist movement, later philosophers like Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger would take after his ideas, particularly his embrace with the absurd and the inevitability of regret, and in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard coined our now universal term of angst, a feeling of intense anxiety and turmoil, giving a voice to the hormonal emotions of every teenager in the world today.
According to The School of Life, angst is a term that agonizes over how many choices we face and how little control of how we can wisely make these choices. Kierkegaard knew that the human condition is one of unhappiness, that no one could possibly be content all the time. He knew this especially in artists when he said that a poet is "an unhappy man who hide[s] deep anguish in his heart" but that creates music to the person's experiences.
Kierkegaard knew that we can't even be happy for a half-hour of our lives, that unhappiness is just a natural part of the human condition. And he also saw these realities as insanity-inducing but endured to press on regardless.
He openly talked about suicide and even contemplated it -- a bold move for a philosopher of his time, but in his later works, he looked towards Jesus as the answer to his philosophy. Kierkegaard hated the Church in Denmark, but he didn't hate the Gospel, which he loved.
For Kierkegaard, Christianity was religion of surrender, knowing that nothing is in our control and knowing that things in this life just don't matter for a greater good. He originated the term of a "leap to faith," where someone doesn't try to prove the existence of God, but turn off every part of us that needs everything to make sense and be rational and jump into a higher power's plan for us.
To pray, Kierkegaard told us that faith isn't to change God, but change ourselves, in that prayer changes the nature of the person that prays. Although Kierkegaard didn't offer solutions that fit all of us, he did accurately portray the nature of life that life sucks and the world is not going to save us.
Like Jesus, Kierkegaard was a person that understood the sorrow and hopelessness that life often is, save a few redemptive moments, and that we just need to press forward in spite of life putting us down and pushing us to the ground. Sometimes, we need to laugh at life's hopelessness and embrace the absurd and toil of life -- because it's meant to be a struggle where we don't feel hope at the moment, but see it in retrospect.
He knew this reality better than any one of his time:
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."
So live life not trying to be happy, but trying to experience and dive fully into the pain, suffering, and the hope. Don't try to fix. Don't try to solve, but experience, because you don't have all the answers -- and you never will, but when you look back, life will have answers for you.
