Despair is a heavy word. Say it and most people picture the dramatic sort, the weeping, the dark night, the visible falling-apart. So it’s a strange thing to be told that the commonest form of it is something far milder than that. Not a breakdown at all. Just the low, ambient condition of living as someone you aren’t, going about a perfectly functional life while wearing a self that doesn’t quite fit.
That, across an entire book about despair, is the version Kierkegaard reckoned almost everyone ends up in. And the reason it’s so common is exactly that it doesn’t announce itself as despair. It disguises itself as an ordinary life. Quite often as a rather successful one.
The despair that doesn’t look like despair
Loud despair at least has the decency to identify itself. You know when you’re in it. This other kind is sneakier, because the person carrying it is usually functioning beautifully. Holding down the job, hitting the milestones, turning up, laughing in the right places. There are no obvious symptoms to point at. The wrongness is ambient rather than acute, a faint sense that your own life is happening at a slight remove from you, that you’re performing a role you happen to be good at but which was never really yours. And because it never sharpens into a proper crisis, you can carry it for years, for decades, for a whole life, without once calling it by its name.
Kierkegaard’s sharpest line on this, the one that put a hook in me, is the idea that people settle for a level of the stuff they can live with and then go ahead and call it happiness. They mistake the mere absence of acute pain for contentment. They’ve never felt the alternative, so the low background wrongness simply reads as how life is, the baseline they assume everyone else is standing on too.
You don’t choose it, you drift into it
Almost nobody decides, on a given Tuesday, to stop being themselves. It happens by accretion, one sensible decision at a time. You take the practical path over the one you actually wanted, because it’s practical and you’re not a fool. You shape yourself, a little, to fit what’s expected, what gets rewarded, what keeps the people around you comfortable. Each adjustment is perfectly reasonable on its own. Nobody could fault a single one of them.
But stack enough reasonable adjustments on top of one another across fifteen years, and you can look up one morning to find you’ve built an entire, competent, well-regarded life around a person who isn’t you, and you can’t for the life of you remember where the original went.
The years I was very good at being someone else
For a long stretch, I was an extremely capable version of a man who wasn’t me. I ran restaurants, I ran them well, and from the outside the whole thing looked enviable. Busy, successful, sociable, the lot. If you’d asked, I’d have told you I was happy, and I wouldn’t even have been lying, exactly. Nothing was identifiably wrong. There was only a hum. A low, persistent sense that I was faintly miscast in my own life, narrating it from half a step back, doing a very convincing impression of a contented restaurateur. I assumed the hum was standard issue. I thought everyone had one and simply didn’t go on about it.
What I didn’t grasp until much later is that you usually can’t detect this particular despair from the inside, because you’ve got nothing to hold it up against. I only ever recognised mine in hindsight, by its absence. When I eventually sold up and rebuilt things around what I actually wanted, the hum stopped, and the silence where it had been was almost loud. I hadn’t known it was running until it switched off. That, I’ve come to think, is the true signature of the Kierkegaard despair. You don’t feel it arrive, and you don’t feel it while it runs. You only feel it leave.
Why it’s so hard to catch in yourself
The trap is beautifully made. A despair that dresses up as a functioning life hands you nothing to grab hold of. If you were miserable in the obvious way, you’d act on it. But you aren’t miserable. You’re fine. Fine is the disguise. Fine is what the despair of not being yourself puts on to go to work every morning, and fine is almost impossible to argue yourself out of, because on paper there’s no problem to solve. The job is good. The life is good. Why would any sensible person detonate a good life over a hum?
That question, why would you, is the lock on the whole door. It holds people exactly where they are, settling for the tolerable level, calling it happiness, for as long as they care to live there.
The contrast is the only clue I’d trust
I’m wary of turning this into a tidy instruction, because “find yourself” is about the emptiest advice going, and not everyone’s answer is to sell everything and move to the far side of the planet. Most realignments are smaller and a great deal less cinematic than mine was. But there’s one clue I’d genuinely trust, and it’s contrast.
Pay attention to the rare moments you feel unmistakably like yourself. Not happy, particularly. Just unmistakably you, fully present, the gap between you and your life shut for a second or two. Most of us get these only now and then, doing some specific thing, with some specific person. Mark them when they come. Then notice how far your everyday baseline sits from that feeling. The size of that gap is the truest gauge I know of how much of your despair is the Kierkegaard kind. A small gap and you’re mostly living as yourself, hum or no hum. A chasm is worth knowing about, even if you do nothing dramatic in response, because you can’t start to close a distance you’ve never allowed yourself to see.
If the wrongness is heavier than a hum, though, a real and persistent weight rather than a faint background note, that’s worth saying out loud to someone who can actually help, because the border between this despair and the clinical kind is thinner than a neat aphorism lets on.
I don’t believe the goal is some permanent, beaming state of total authenticity, which doesn’t exist and would be insufferable in anyone who claimed it. I think it’s just to keep the gap honest. To notice when you’ve drifted a few too many reasonable steps from yourself, and to steer back, before the competent stranger you’ve been assembling takes the whole operation over for good. Kierkegaard called not being who you are the most common despair. He might have added that it’s also among the most curable, since the cure was never out there to be hunted down. It’s only you, still in there, waiting to be let back into your own life.
