As I’ve done for the past four days, I googled Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy. He writes:
“Of all ridiculous things, the most ridiculous seems to me to be busy—to be someone who is brisk about food and work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, at the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or when he is spattered with mud from a carriage that drives past him in still greater haste; or when the drawbridge opens before him; or when a tile falls and knocks him dead—then I laugh heartily.”
Busyness as a kind of self-importance. A belief that what I’m doing is so urgent, so vital, that it justifies my absence from myself. That my motion equals meaning.
Kierkegaard goes on:
“The unhappy person is one who has his ideal—the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being—in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself.”
What strikes me is how unhappiness isn’t framed as sadness, but as absence. When the center of our lives—my worth, meaning, aliveness—lives somewhere outside of ourselves, we are constantly chasing ourselves. Improvement, validation, productivity, becoming—always just ahead. And we’re never settled inside our own skin. Happiness, then, isn’t about acquiring something better; it’s about returning and about reclaiming our presence from wherever we’ve sent it to wait.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 