Despair as the Refusal of Selfhood
The most common form of despair is not being who you are. — Søren Kierkegaard
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
What feeling does this quote bring up for you?
Despair Beyond Sadness
Kierkegaard’s line reframes despair as something subtler than grief or temporary unhappiness. Rather than treating it as a passing mood, he points to a spiritual and existential condition: the suffering that arises when a person is estranged from their own identity. In that sense, despair can exist even amid outward success, because it isn’t measured by circumstances but by inward alignment. From this starting point, the quote invites a diagnostic question: not merely “What happened to you?” but “Are you living as yourself?” The unsettling implication is that despair can be ordinary—woven into everyday routines—precisely because self-betrayal can be quiet and socially rewarded.
Kierkegaard’s Idea of the Self
In The Sickness Unto Death (1849), Kierkegaard describes the self as a “relation that relates itself to itself,” suggesting that personhood is not a static trait but an ongoing task. You become a self through the way you integrate your possibilities, limitations, values, and commitments into a coherent life. Consequently, despair arises when that relation is mismanaged—when you cannot bear to be what you are, or refuse the responsibility of becoming. This moves the quote from motivational slogan to existential claim: the most common despair is not dramatic collapse, but a persistent misrelation—a life lived at a distance from one’s own reality.
Not Being Who You Are: Two Common Modes
Kierkegaard distinguishes different forms of despair, and they map neatly onto the quote. One mode is “not wanting to be oneself,” the impulse to escape one’s given limits, history, or vulnerability. Another is “wanting to be oneself” in a defiant way—clinging to a constructed identity that denies dependence, finitude, or moral accountability. Either way, the person becomes divided: the public performance, the private awareness, and the deeper values no longer match. Because these modes can look like ambition or self-confidence from the outside, they often go unnoticed. Yet internally they produce a chronic tension, as if one must continuously suppress the truth of who one is in order to keep the persona intact.
Social Masks and Quiet Self-Betrayal
The “most common” despair is common precisely because modern life supplies endless templates for identity—status, branding, productivity, belonging. It becomes easy to substitute roles for selfhood: the competent professional, the agreeable friend, the constant achiever. Over time, what began as adaptation can harden into self-erasure, where choices are made primarily to maintain approval or avoid conflict. Kierkegaard’s warning anticipates this drift: the more a person lives by external measures, the more they risk losing contact with their inward commitments. The despair then is not always felt as pain; it may appear as numbness, restlessness, or the sense that one’s life is happening “beside” oneself.
Freedom, Anxiety, and the Cost of Becoming
If refusing selfhood produces despair, then embracing selfhood is not automatically comfortable. Kierkegaard links human freedom to anxiety—the dizzying awareness of possibility, explored in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). To be who you are is to choose, and to choose is to accept that you could fail, disappoint others, or outgrow familiar identities. Accordingly, many people trade the risk of becoming for the safety of conformity. The bargain can reduce immediate fear, but it incubates the deeper despair Kierkegaard describes, because the self cannot be fully avoided without consequence.
Integrity as an Antidote to Despair
The quote implies a path out: not self-invention at any cost, but truthful self-relation—aligning actions with values and acknowledging one’s real condition. In Kierkegaard’s religious frame, this culminates in relating the self rightly “before God” (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849), but even read more broadly it points toward integrity: becoming someone whose inner commitments and outward life are increasingly consistent. Practically, this often begins with small acts of honesty—naming what you actually care about, setting boundaries that match your limits, and making choices you can stand behind. Over time, such alignment doesn’t eliminate suffering, but it transforms despair from a silent corrosion into a meaningful struggle toward wholeness.