What Sort of World It Is
Thoughts on growing up, suicide, and existentialism.
As a child I felt the world was fundamentally a kind place. This is, of course, because I grew up in enviable circumstances. As the child of two married parents and brother to a few other happy siblings my family situation was better than many or most, and our financial situation was also enviable. We were perhaps merely upper-middle class in my early years but were certainly a rich family by my adolescence.
No surprise, then, that I felt that whenever things were less than ideal, they would no doubt take a turn for the better at some point. I faced the sort of challenges many do growing up—difficulty fitting in, making friends, that sort of thing—but I always knew in my heart that this was temporary, that I would grow into a man who did not have such struggles.
This turned out to be true, in the end. I always had a feeling, despite no ability with women, that I would find a lovely wife and live happily ever after. I did grow some ability with women and find a lovely wife eventually. It’s not that teenage me was hopelessly optimistic—clearly the optimism had some basis—but it was, indeed, founded in a general feeling that things in general would work out well. Things always had worked out well before, hadn’t they?
Going off to college made the world feel like an even more magical place as I started to have positive romantic interactions, make more friends, and really succeed in every way I had wanted.
I made a friend in college, one of my first roommates. He probably would have loved Substack. He was a born debater (the danger, I am told, of coming from a family of lawyers). He loved Ayn Rand and described himself as an anarcho-capitalist. He was the sort of idealist every eighteen-year-old is or should be, thinking the One Cool Thing they’d read is The Solution to Everything.
He was bipolar. As an eighteen-year-old myself I didn’t have the presence of mind to see his behavior and put a label on it, but he was manic-depressive. He would have periods of unmatched energy (once scheduling a “triple date” where all three girls were really his date) and weeks where he would eat nothing but corn flakes. Not even Frosted Flakes, the unfrosted unsugared ones. I had plenty of sugar for our apartment and told him to at least put some on it but he refused; “his pride wouldn’t allow it.” There was an ideological opposition to taking charity, as I mentioned earlier, but what I missed at the time was that he was probably too depressed to even bother.
That’s one of the more recent memories I have of him, actually. He ended up taking his own life about a year and a half later.
By that point in my life I had had my first major disappointments, things that mattered a great deal to me that didn’t go my way. Around this time my friend’s passing caused me to consider the world.
Clearly the magical world I had lived in was not the world-as-it-is. I was more experienced now and had seen not just the highs of the world but more of its lows in my own small sufferings.
My life was not at all bad, nor was I depressed. But my friend’s suicide did cause me to reflect on whether the world really was such a nasty place that one would want to leave. The thought occurred to me, as I think it has to many suicides’ families and friends, that perhaps the deceased wasn’t sick in the head but really perceiving the world’s true colors clearly.
I never really believed this, but now the possibility that it could be true danced in front of me. And it was quite a different place to live in a world where it was even conceivable that life would not be worth it. I grew more cynical and detached from things.
As I grew from a young adult into a no-longer-so-young adult my cynicism has faded. Life hasn’t grown easier—it’s been harder—but my attitude and outlook on the world are not only products of my current circumstances. My optimism is no longer the naïveté of a child but a measured hope for better things to come.
The Hegelian formula is very popular for its simplicity: thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or, in its more classy formulation, idea-negation-sublation. We are not Hegelians on this Kierkegaard blog, no sir, we don’t think his ideas are true, but they can provide useful language to model certain things, and so it is here. I could say my life journey dialectically advanced from initial innocence into the sorrows of worldly experience and now most recently towards an informed hope.
The Kierkegaardian knight of faith cannot be innocent or inexperienced in the world’s sufferings; no, he must first experience them that he might make the infinite resignation. It is in a sense the ultimate expression of the cynicism I once felt, a total giving-up, a complete renunciation of hope, an attempt at a Nirvana reached by no-desire. It is tempting. It is, perhaps, the greatest temptation one will ever face and the most subtle.
The knight of faith in his hope against all odds after making the resignation—“I can have no hope in this world, but I still have the God-hope of this”—is the higher man in every way. The man who does not fall into despair despite reason for despair all around him, the man who persists despite every reason to give up (having some mystic assurance, some revealed Word, some hidden fire in him) is superior to all the world, since all the world has proven insufficient to overcome him. In the world he may have tribulation, but he is of good cheer, for he has overcome the world for himself and One has overcome the world for all. I am not this man except perhaps in embryo.
What I feared after my friend’s suicide was that the world really was so awful as he perceived it. From Kierkegaard we are reminded that we need not be afraid of such a reality. Perhaps the world really is as awful as all that; the existential question, however, is always what is my relation to the world and not what is the truth of the world. We read those inspiring words “subjectivity is truth” and recall that it is of little consequence to me what the world may be. The world-in-itself is nothing, the world-for-me the only existentially relevant thing.
None of this is to make light of suicide in any way. It would of course be lovely to cure depression forever with a few written words, but what the existential attitude implies—the way to cure depression is not to change one’s world but to change one’s relation to the world, changing oneself—is really the hardest thing that can ever be asked of a human. Kierkegaard likes to say that he wanted to make Christianity not easier but harder, and so it is with mental health and everything else. Yet aim at the right target and you may succeed.