Emil M. Cioran, Romanian Philosopher, wrote: "Anxiety is not provoked: it tries to find a justification for itself, and in order to do so seizes upon anything, the vilest pretexts, to which it clings once it has invented them. . . . [A]nxiety provokes itself, engenders itself, it is “infinite creation.”
Meditation and therapy impact neurochemistry.
For most people anxiety is just a meaningless, disruptive symptom that does not require psychotherapy or even introspection
Spinoza wrote, “Fear arises from a weakness of mind and therefore does not appertain to the use of reason.”
For Kierkegaard anxiety helps us to know ourselves. It informs us that we are beings who have choices, who choose ourselves. Kierkegaard describes anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom.”
Kierkegaard writes: "Deepest within every person there is nonetheless an anxiety about being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. People keep this anxiety at bay by looking at the many people around them, who are related to them as family and friend; . . . one scarcely dare think about how one would feel if all these were taken away"
Anxiety helps us secure our identities as authentic individuals separate from the crowd
Kieerkegard writes: “Anxiety . . . is an expression of the perfection of human nature. It is the homesickness of earthly life for the higher.”
If you trust that your task in life is to become an authentic human being, then you will know what you should truly fear—namely, becoming a vacant-eyed, empty suit of an individual.
Kierkegaard said for those who don't experience anxiety “That is because he is spiritless.”
One in eight Americans are being medicated for depression.
Kierkegaard says depression “has robbed us of the courage to command, the courage to obey, the power to act, the confidence to hope.”
Psychoanalysts talk about the importance of having an observing ego, a psychological third eye, a part of the self that keeps watch on the inner workings of your mind.
In Either/Or Kierkegaard writes: "Depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love.”
Despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been folded into the concept of clinical depression. Americans seldom distinguish between psychological and spiritual illnesses.
In Either/Or Kierkegaard writes: "What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris’s bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music"
In 1836, Kiekegaard writes in a journal: "I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witticisms poured from my lips, everybody laughed and admired me—but I left, yes, the dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit —–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––—and wanted to shoot myself."
In Danish, tungsind literally means "heavy-mindedness".
Kierkegaard writes in Either/Or: "There is something unexplainable in depression [Tungsind]. A person with a sorrow or a worry knows why he sorrows or worries. If a depressed person is asked what the reason is, what it is that weighs [tynge] on him, he will answer: I do not know; I cannot explain it. Therein lies the limitlessness of depression."
Kierkegaard writes in The Sickness Unto Death: “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”. Despair is caused by an imbalance in this.
You should strive for reaching the moral ideal, as the sort of person you aspire to be, of the kind of individual who reminds you of what we are capable of.
Kierkegaard: "Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair"
We might not have much choice in how we feel at a given time, we have control over and responsibility for the way we relate ourselves to those feelings.
In "The Loss of Sadness", authors Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield contend that with the medicalization of just about everything, we have arrived at treating ordinary sadness as if it were a depressive illness.
Kierkegaard attests that depression develops into despair—into a spiritual malady—only when we let ourselves be defined by our depression and, in our hopelessness, toss in the towel on our moral and spiritual aspirations. That surrender is despair, not depression.
depression kept at bay can augment our ability to empathize with those feeling broken and without purpose
Tim Farrington: “It is in that surrender, in the embrace of our own perceived futility that real freedom comes.”
Thanatology is an emerging science of how to die and deal with death
Schopenhauer: "The cheerfulness and vivacity of youth are partly due to the fact that when we are ascending the hill of life, death is not visible: it lies down at the bottom of the other side. But once we crossed the top of the hill, death comes in view —death, which, until then, was only known by hearsay. . . . A grave seriousness now takes the place of the early extravagance of spirit; and the change is noticeable even in the expression of a man’s face. . . . For towards the close of life, every day gives us the same kind of sensation as the criminal experiences at every step on his way to be tried"
Schopenhauer believed the greatest achievement in life is overcoming the will to live.
Freud taught that belief in God was a projection of a childish wish for protection
Tolstoy wanted people to understand that in The Death of Ivan Ilych that modern life is spiritual death with its lack of authenticity and brotherly love. Ivan expresses his chagrin and perplexity at the fact that someone like him—someone who had done everything “right,” everything he was supposed to do—could be doomed to this dreadful fate of annihilation. Ivan expresses his chagrin and perplexity at the fact that someone like him—someone who had done everything “right,” everything he was supposed to do—could be doomed to this dreadful fate of annihilation.
Kierkegaard believed that awareness of death, like anxiety, has lessons for us.
Death is usually compared to sleep. Kierkegaard writes: Kierkegaard writes: “Look at the one who is sleeping in death; he is not flushed like a child in sleep; he is not gathering new strength . . . the dream is not paying him a visit in friendliness the way it visits the old man in his sleep!”
In “At a Graveside,” Kierkegaard describes moods as a form of internal weather sparked by something external. Dark and light, moods come and go.
, people long to die in their sleep, that is, to die without experiencing death; if not in their sleep then a quick death, one that affords the least amount of time, the minimal awareness that while life moves on for everyone else, it is over for you.
The Kierkegaardian understanding of death might be this: don’t be careless with the people you walk through life with. Don’t have arguments and leave them unsettled.
Even Jesus wept over his impending death in Gethsemane.
our capacity to absorb and tolerate the full weight of grief is part of becoming an authentic human being.
the once-urgent issue of authenticity seems to have been lost to selfies, social media branding, and managing your profile on LinkedIn and Facebook, as though everyone has become their own unabashed publicist. It is not who you are but who you seem to be
Chuck Klosterman: “I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.”
Everyone is enjoined to have some dream about their life, and you are authentic to the extent that you doggedly pursue that vision as though it were your essence.
Is the litmus test of authenticity the gap between who we feel we are and who we present ourselves to be? “Above all,” Camus wrote in his Notebooks, “in order to be, never try to seem.”
It is not possible to generate an unambiguous criterion for deciding whether or not we are leading authentic lives
Theodore Adorno says in Jargon of Authenticity all the sophisticated chatter about authenticity, about becoming yourself, is grounded in the fallacious assumption that each of us possesses an individual soul-like essence discernible by introspection.
Nietzche believes originality is: “to see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face"
This bracing awareness of death, coupled with the angst that it brings, grabs us by the wrist and pulls us out of the crowd
Philosopher Mike Martin writes: "Unconfronted, death is dreadful. It generates vague fears and anxieties that drive us away from authenticity and toward immersion in conventionality and everyday pleasures. . . . In fully acknowledging death we are pressured to unify our lives"
the idea of authenticity is intrinsically bound up with the notion of making something your own. Kierkegaard believed that we make our views our own not by hitting “like” on Facebook but by passionately relating ourselves to those ideas and expressing them in the medium of action
However we define it, authenticity does not seem to be something we can work at, save in the sense that we can make strides to avoid inauthenticity.
The either-or, however, is this: Is that self a self we create or, à la Kierkegaard, a plan of a self that is there from the start, one that you can fail to realize even as you conquer territories, move mountains, etc.