Kierkegaard

It is easy to think that with all the busyness of modern life that I am actually living an engaged life. 

In actual fact, however, rarely do I live with passion, or on the basis of conscience. Everything is calculated in a way that whatever I do is reduced to the reasonable or unreasonable, or worse yet, to the law of least resistance. Suffering is to be avoided at all costs. 

In the name of unconditional freedom options remain open, but in the process, I drift along. For to commit is to miss something else, somewhere.

In Kierkegaard’s words, ‘There are many people who arrive at conclusions in life much the way schoolboys do; they cheat their teachers by copying the answer book without having worked the problem themselves’.

I'll end with a quote from The Sickness Unto Death:

Doubtless most men live with far too little consciousness of themselves to have a conception of what consistency is; that is to say, they do not exist qua spirit. Their lives (either with a certain childish and lovable naïveté or in sheer banality) consist in some act or another, some ccurrence, this or that; and then they do something good, then in turn something wrong, and then it begins all over again; now they are in despair, for an afternoon, perhaps for three weeks, but then they are jovial again, and then again they are a whole day in despair. They take a hand in the game of life as it were, but they never have the experience of staking all upon one throw, never attain the conception of an infinite self-consistency. Therefore among themselves their talk is always about the particular, particular deeds, particular sins.