For eleven years, I occupied a desk just four away from a man who, by all standards the office valued, appeared to be doing well.
Capable, well-liked, never in hot water. A mortgage that was decreasing and a golf handicap that was not. If you handed him a life satisfaction form, he would have checked the average boxes and returned to his work. Then one Friday, during an unplanned beer, he confided in me that for thirty-one years he had dreamt of being a marine biologist and had never mentioned it to anyone, not even his wife.
Unhappy doesn’t capture the essence of that moment. He lacked a term for it as well, and a Danish philosopher had outpaced us both by a hundred and fifty years.
## What Kierkegaard truly intended by despair
Nowadays, the term evokes images of sobbing in a parking lot. Søren Kierkegaard used it to signify something deep-rooted, a fracture that runs through one’s relationship with oneself.
He begins [The Sickness Unto Death](https://www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/chapter-2-the-universality-of-this-sickness-despair/), released in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with a medical analogy. A doctor might assert that no one living is in perfect health. Kierkegaard suggests the same regarding despair, asserting that the notable rarity is the individual who has transcended it.
Then he delivers the blow that keeps the entire book resonating. One of the manifestations of despair is being unaware that you are experiencing it.
## The self as an ongoing endeavor
All of this hinges on a notion of selfhood that many readers might shy away from, and I almost did as well. According to the [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/), Kierkegaard sees the self as a relationship rather than a physical entity, something that must continuously relate to itself. In simpler terms, the self is a task with no endpoint. It comprises opposites: the finite and the infinite, what is necessary and what is possible. Maintain equilibrium, and you’re thriving. Let one overpower the other, and you’re not.
A cautionary note, his remedy is spiritual. He believed that this balance only exists when the self relies on the force that created it, asserting that faith is the sole entity capable of achieving that. You may accept the diagnosis while rejecting the cure. Many do.
## Why the understated version poses a greater risk
The truly disconcerting assertion in that book is that contentment can serve as a warning sign.
Security and peace, Kierkegaard observes, could indicate that you have emerged from despair and reconciled with your circumstances. Alternatively, that same serenity may embody the despair itself, donning your robe and brewing your coffee. He illustrates a disease that can dwell within a person so completely that the individual remains oblivious. The wasted existence, he claims, belongs to anyone who continued living, so caught up in joys and sorrows, that they never confronted the reality of being a self at all.
A harsh statement to digest at my stage of life. I read it and reflected on my colleague, and then, uncomfortably, on a decade of my own that I crowded with experiences I now find hard to justify.
## Insights from regrets research
Contemporary psychology arrives tardily to this subject and corroborates the mood.
Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich conducted six studies on actual regrets, published in the journal Emotion in 2018. Utilizing self-discrepancy theory, they categorized an individual in three ways: who you think you are, who you ought to have been, and who you wished to become. They then instructed hundreds of participants to classify their regrets accordingly.
The findings, as reported by [Cornell](https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/05/woulda-coulda-shoulda-haunting-regret-failing-our-ideal-selves), were far from close. Regrets concerning the ideal self appeared much more frequently than those related to the ought self, and when individuals identified their single most significant regret in life, 76 percent indicated a failure to become who they aspired to be.
Gilovich’s reasoning is nearly commonplace, which is why I find it persuasive. Ought regrets have boundaries. You missed a workout or were curt with your mother; you can rectify that. Once addressed, your mind considers the matter settled. Ideal regrets lack boundaries. Be a responsible father. Be courageous. Master the guitar. There’s no definitive end date or certainty about whether you’ve done enough, so nothing gets resolved and the concern lingers on, accruing weight.
Six studies, one concept, one paper. No one has conclusively shown that a 19th-century theologian had the human condition figured out. Yet, there exists a peculiar solace in observing the