Good Morning,

Happy Monday, everyone. Our boulder is back at the bottom, so let’s push.

I was thinking about what this week’s theme was going to be. Realizing that we’ve built ourselves up on these themes of time, mortality, urgency, and meaning; it hit me. This week we’re going to widen the scope and talk broadly about Existentialism. We’ll do so through the minds of the most famous existentialists: Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert Camus. Lock in. It’s going to be a fun and deep week.

For our main course, we’re going to dive straight into Kierkegaard’s view of existence before essence. We’re going to burn that off with a meditation on certainty. In our Book Nook, you’ll find a related passage from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death.

Let’s dive into the abyss. Thought Breakfast is served!

We have an instinct to try and justify our existence. It’s interesting because our instincts are usually thought of as ancient, built-in intuitions to help us with survival. However, the modern brain tends to try to explain itself, optimize itself, and justify itself.

Kierkegaard confronts the modern instinct. Where people tend to want to explain, optimize, and justify themselves; Kierkegaard says “Before all explanations, you are already becoming someone.” This framing puts existence before the explanation of itself. In other words, we already are everything that we’re trying to understand. This gives a different meaning to the question of becoming. Before we ask “Who should I be?” Kierkegaard asks “Who am I already becoming?”

The self, then, is not a project that we create, but a relation we are given. More simply put, the self is received, not engineered. We don’t start life with a blank blueprint that’s fertile for creative becoming. We’re born into certain limits, temperaments, responsibilities, and constraints. Kierkegaard’s claim, put bluntly, says that there’s no way that we make ourselves from nothing; we are entrusted with ourselves.

Think about anxiety. Anxiety isn’t weakness, pathology, or any kind of failure. Anxiety is the rawest feeling of possibility; the awareness that your life is up to you in some way, shape, or form. It makes sense that anxiety and excitement have the same physical symptoms.

Kierkegaard also dives into faith within his philosophy. He frames faith not as intellectual certainty but as committing without full visibility. He coined the term “leap of faith” when he accepted that a God most likely exists, but choosing which one cannot be done with reason alone.

It’s hard to wrap Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy into a 5-minute morning read, but here’s what we can take away. No one else can live your life inwardly. No system, ideology, institution, or label can replace choice and our free will. Personal growth and becoming only happen quietly, through our habits, avoidances, honesty, and confrontation with ourselves. Even not choosing is itself a choice, and it still forms a self.

Answer this question honestly without overthinking it:

Take the leap of faith.

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur so quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Part I

This passage encompasses Kierkegaard’s philosophy. It shows that the danger is not failure, but never becoming a self. Loss happens internally, not externally or socially. Despair is not dramatic suffering, but simply an unconscious self-abandonment. Responsibility, then, means that no one else can lose (or recover) your self besides you. That’s what existentialism is at its core: the view that we are radically responsible for becoming who we are in a world that offers no guarantees, scripts, or excuses.

Munch on that for today. It’s going to be a deep, existential week. So strap in, and come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!!

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Thank you for reading along with us today! If you enjoy this content, and want to start your days grounded in thought and mindfulness, I suggest you have a seat at our table! Smash that button below to check out more editions and subscribe!

Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast