Søren Kierkegaard believed the deepest despair in life isn’t unhappiness — it’s living an entire life without ever becoming the person you were meant to be, a failure so subtle and easy to miss that most people who carry it go their whole lives never realizing it’s there

What Kierkegaard actually meant by despairToday the word means crying in the car park. Søren Kierkegaard used it to mean something structural, a fault line running through the relationship you have with yourself. Kierkegaard proposes the same about despair, and reckons that the rarity worth remarking on is the man who has escaped it. He describes a sickness that can hide inside a person so thoroughly that the person carrying it has no idea. Kierkegaard believed eternity would one day put a single question to each of us: whether we lived in despair, and whether we ever knew.