Good Morning Everybody!! We made it!! This is the last day of 2025! It has been a crazy wild year from all angles. Try to take an inventory of where you were at this time last year, and notice how much has changed. Even if you’re in the same place with the same job, you’re not who you were a year ago.

That’s a beautiful thing. The passage of time molds us into who we are and who we become. I’d like to note that Thought Breakfast only started being served this year, and I can’t wait to see where 2026 will take us. Thank you all for reading. Without further ado, let’s get into our last Thought Breakfast of 2025!!

Today, for our main course, Søren Kierkegaard will show us how transformation doesn’t always happen through effort, but through release. To burn that off, we’ll do a thought exercise called the White-Knuckle Inventory. To wrap up with our Book Nook, we’ll be opening up Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death.

Let’s dig in. Thought Breakfast is served!

Modern self-help tells us to optimize, control, improve, and upgrade our lives. Kierkegaard says the self is something received from God.

In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard emphasizes that the self is a “relation relating itself to itself - before God.” Despair happens when one tries to author their own identity. Faith comes when one accepts oneself as given.

We suffer when we try to manufacture our worth as human beings. We break off from our meaning and purpose when we try to control who we become. Transformation, then, begins when we stop self-constructing. We don’t have to “build” ourselves; we just have to receive ourselves in trust.

Christian mystics hold a similar view to Kierkegaard. A guy named John of the Cross wrote a poem called Dark Night of the Soul. In this poem, he teaches that transformation can sometimes feel like loss or confusion. He attributes this to God removing false supports. Following this line of thought, we can see that identity deepens through surrender. What feels like “failure” may be more of an interior reordering.

Both Kierkegaard and John of the Cross agree that surrendering oneself leads to interior formation. This doesn’t mean giving up, becoming complacent, or anything like that. This is simply a recognition of the following pattern: we try to control our “becoming,” control produces anxiety and fragmentation, surrender returns us to independence, and identity stabilizes through trust.

“Becoming” and “transformation” are not always to be accomplished; sometimes they are to be allowed.

Identify an area where you’re gripping tightly. This could be your career, faith, relationships, etc.

Once you find that area, ask yourself:

“The self is a relation which relates itself to itself, or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but consists in the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it.”
- Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Part I, Section A

This is quite a lot to digest, so let me try to break it down.

Imagine you’re building a little block tower that’s supposed to represent your “self.” You’re not just the blocks that make up the tower, and you’re not just the person who’s stacking the blocks. You’re the one who’s trying to make sense of yourself while you’re growing and changing.

Kierkegaard is saying that a person is never a finished thing. Rather, a person is the relationship within themselves. The relationship between what they want to be and what they already are: between big dreams and real-life constraints, between feeling small and wanting to grow.

So, to Kierkegaard, the self becomes healthy when it: stops trying to control everything, stops pretending it can make itself all on its own, and instead rests in the One who made it.

Munch on that for today. Have a great New Year’s Eve and come back next year (tomorrow) for 2026’s first steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

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Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast