Peter McGraw is joined by David Jitendranath for a Solo Book Club episode on Søren Kierkegaard’s The Present Age. They discuss why this slim, difficult book feels eerily modern: a culture of reflection without action, irony without commitment, resentment disguised as equality, and “leveling” as the force that pulls down anyone who dares to stand apart. A conversation about aliveness, deep water, and what it costs to act as an individual in an age of endless commentary.
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Listen to Episode #267 here
Solo Book Club: The Present Age
Welcome back. It’s been a long time since I’ve done a book club episode. I made a last-minute choice to tape this one in the SOLO studio. I have an in-person book club with four solos in Denver, but only two of us were able to stick with this book. I invited the other guy who brought it to my attention and has read it even more deeply than me.
You may know his controversial voice from the Masculinity and Manhood episode. He grew up in India and immigrated to the United States in 1999. He had a successful marriage and now enjoys being solo. A Neo-Renaissance man, he enjoys playing music at open mics, reading, and riding his motorcycle. On Substack, he writes about Neo-Renaissance life. Welcome, David Jitendranath.
Thanks for having me.
We’re here to discuss Soren Kierkegaard’s slim but deep book, The Present Age. You practically forced me to read this book. Before we get into the why of that, let’s talk about who Soren Kierkegaard is.
I’m not a historian of philosophers, but from my understanding of Soren, he’s a trust fund guy. He had a large inheritance.
He was his own patron.
He didn’t have to make money, write for a living, or anything like that. He was a dandy. He was enjoying life in the cafes. He was a Danish philosopher. He was walking around, philosophizing, writing, and so on. He broke off an engagement to Regina Olsen. He was educated in German philosophy. He comes a little bit after the German philosopher, Hegel. He is one of the biggest critics of Hegel. He does not like him.
The Life And Philosophy Of Søren Kierkegaard
In a way, he might have foresaw somebody like Marx. In a way, he might have said Hegel’s philosophy will lead to some sort of Marxist, socialist tendencies. There’s a little bit of a political thing there. His premonition was accurate because Marx was a very astute reader of Hegel. He wanted to flip Hegel on his head. In a way, he foresaw that rightfully. That’s Soren. He is the father of a philosophy called existentialism. He’s the father of existentialism, even though most people think it’s Jean Paul Sartre.
Most people will think Sartre is existentialism, but Soren is the guy. He has been an influence on philosophers like Sartre. Heidegger is another German philosopher. Soren and Nietzsche were at the same time. They did not read each other. It’s so fascinating that they lived in the same era, but they never read each other. It was like in the Zeitgeist. They arrived at the same philosophy.
This is the mid-1800s. A few things to add to this that I thought were interesting, as I was doing some research. Regina Olsen was the love of his life, but he was so committed to the intellectual mission that he was unfit for domestic life. This guy’s a solo. He never married. It did haunt him. I call it the counterfactual world. He wrestled with what it means to live solo and on purpose. He was well ahead of Peter McGraw.
Also, he died very young. He died at 42. He collapsed in the street and died later. He had spent down almost his entire inheritance, funding his own publications, which gave him a lot of freedom. No editors, no gatekeepers, no publishers to make happy, and so on. He did most of his writing in about a ten-year burst. I wonder if he died of exhaustion.
It’s possible, very much so.
He also would publish under pseudonyms and argue with himself, which I thought was great. The last thing I thought, which I think helped him be a solo and his own person, was that he was not always popular. There was a satirical magazine in Copenhagen. He provoked the magazine, attacked it, and then had to endure being publicly mocked, caricatured, and everything. This is a lot of foreshadowing. He walked the talk.
From the publication that mocked him, there were a bunch of kids who used to pelt him with stones when he was walking. They used to call him Either/Or because that was one of his books. He’s walking the streets, and there are these kids. You can imagine a movie-type scene where people are mocking him and calling him either/or.
It was a much smaller world back then, also. I’ve been to Copenhagen. It’s not a huge city. In the 1840s and ‘50s, it was an even smaller city.
It must have been. I’ve never been.
Why were you so keen on me reading this book?
I’ve come across Soren many times before this book. Either/Or is a big book. I’ve read portions of that book. I’ve also read another book called Fear and Trembling. I’ve read the book in its entirety. This book I came across when I was reading a book on theology, trauma, and psychoanalysis. In that book, it references the Present Age as how it is related to psychoanalysis. If you’re in therapy, you’re talking to a therapist.
Talk therapy was the origin of Freud’s work, for example.
Full Speech Versus Empty Speech In Modern Society
In that book, it talks about full and empty speech. Those could be certain things that we say, like, “I must do this.” That’s a full speech. We might even be silent when we decide to do something.
I was talking about a full speech I had at one point in time during a mushroom trip. It forever changed the way I behaved. That’s a full speech.
That’s right. It’s like a transformational change. It might not even be a speech. It might be a silent thought, and then you stop whatever you’re doing. The other is the empty speech where we keep wallowing in something. We’re going on, processing something again and again. That’s empty speech. The book references the Present Age, where Soren had explored this idea. We’ll probably unpack it where he explores it. I suggested this to our group because of that. We live in the Present Age. I’m not talking about the book. It’s going to be confusing for the readers.
Let’s say contemporary society.
In our modern society, we are in the same predicament as Soren talks about in the Present Age. We are repeating in a different fashion. The same things are coming back, in a different way, in our modern times, where we are not doing anything. We’re engaging in empty talk.
Let’s get to his thesis. I do want to warn the reader that if you are inspired by this conversation and you want to read The Present Age. It is a slim volume, but it is not easy reading. Kierkegaard’s not an easy writer to read. One of the other books you tried to get me to read was The Sickness Unto Death. I didn’t even get through that book.
I’m a professional reader as an academic, but there were times here where I had to stop and write in the margins. There were times when I read a page and then realized I didn’t know what I had read. I had to start over again. It took me a tremendous amount of time. It’s a great travel book. I took the book with me to Asia. It’s small, easy to carry, and it takes you a long time to read. I also felt that it was profoundly relevant to contemporary society.
It’s 57 pages long. It’s a great compact book you can take anywhere. It took me a good two and a half months to finish the 57 pages. I was writing about that, too, so that was part of the process. It’s not like, “Fifty-seven pages? I can read it in one sitting.” It’s not possible.
One of the things that I’ve enjoyed is how excited you have become about some of these ideas. Some of that excitement will show up momentarily. What is the thesis, if you were to boil this down? As a Cliff Notes version or answering a short-answer question on an exam, what is Kierkegaard’s argument?
Kierkegaard wants, number one, for us to be an individual. He doesn’t want us to be part of a herd. Granted, we are social animals, but he believes that we have to individuate. That’s number one.
It is something that is a throughline for existentialists in general. Existentialism is not well-named. It’s not obvious what it means from hearing what it is. As an aside, I’m reading At the Existentialist Café, a very interesting book. One of the themes of existentialists is how much they tussled with the idea of how you find freedom in an unfree world. How do you find freedom in a world that wants you to be a good little boy? These are topics that are well-documented within this show for myself and then for solos, more generally. Deciding to be a lifelong bachelor spinster is, in many ways, an act of individuality and an act of freedom, both literally and figuratively.
That’s number one. The second point he wants to make is that you have to act with passion. This is a general comment he is making about the age of the people of his time. They’re leading passionless, bourgeoisie-y lives. Everybody’s telling them to do something. We could translate this to our times. We’re given a formula, like the American dream. We all have to pursue it.
The white picket fence, family, two-car garage, and all of that. It’s a similar concept to passionless lives. That’s what he wants to attack. He wants to say that to lead a passionate life, you have to do something exceptional. He’s always about intense enthusiasm. In leading an exceptional life, what does that look like for an individual? That’s the crux of the book.
This is coming at a time in my life when I am starting to focus. Maybe passionate is a better word, but I have been using the phrase, “I was alive today. I felt alive.” That could happen in any number of ways, but it is typically via some action, whether it be training in Muay Thai. It could even be having a spirited conversation in a show, and so on and so forth. I haven’t been working on how to figure out the right language. Rather than merely living, I FEEL ALIVE. He would say, “Rather than living in the present age, live in a passionate age.”
That’s exactly right.
I want to read a sentence that I think helps represent how passionate he is about this idea and how he does not pull punches. He says, “There is no more action or decision in our day than there is perilous delight in swimming in shallow water.” He’s saying that the present age is so safe, hedged, and non-committal that anything that seems like action in the era is like swimming in shallow water. There’s no real danger. There’s no real courage.
They’re super sanitized and sterilized.
You can’t drown, but you also can’t swim. The idea is in a passionate age, you swim out past the buoys. You swim in the deep end, so to speak. That is delightful. It’s perilous, also. There’s nothing safe.
There’s danger. You risk something.
As a result, it is exciting. In short, this passionate age is an age of action, commitment, and risk. They leap. They may rebel. You can think about rebellions, putting reputations at risk, or their lives at risk, even, for something they believe in versus the present age. How does he describe the present age?
The present age for him is that passionless, bourgeoisie-y life. You have a formula. In his days, he attacked the church. Lutheranism, the reformed church, was how people lived their lives. They used to go on Sundays to church, and then they would come back and live some moralistic life. That’s what he is attacking. There is blasé. There is no passion. Nobody is pursuing anything.
What’s interesting is that he was a Christian. Unlike the subsequent existentialists who are atheists, he was a Christian, which, in some ways, makes his argument stronger in that way. He uses the term that the present age is an age of reflection. There’s a lot of talk, deliberation, and opinions, but no one does anything with them. They don’t put themselves at any risk with those.
I can relate to this in our modern age. Everybody wants to listen to podcasts. It’s like a knowledge acquisition game that we’re playing. Before I even start a morning routine, I want to hear a podcast about how to be consistent with my morning routine. First, start your morning routine and maybe you’ll develop consistency. To make a Sorenistic analogy, before you leap into skydiving, you go back and read the safety brochure. You’re like, “Which foot should I put forward?” It’s like that. You don’t want to do any action. That’s the concept of leap, where you want to make sure you’re doing it right.
You swim around in the shallow part of the pool. Although, he would say you never leap. You’re always preparing to leap. Early on in the book, he talks about suicide and about how you may deliberate so much about suicide that you don’t commit suicide.
He failed in suicide.
I found that a little bit funny. It was a bit of a dark comedy. I have talked about advocacy for solos. I say there are three levels of advocacy. Each one is more of an action. We have people tuning in to the show. He uses the term reflection a lot. You think about being solo. You gather information. I do think that is a useful first step, especially in a world that is only feeding you half the story. The level of action is that if you start living a remarkable life as a single person, you become a beacon.
You become someone people can look to. I’m shocked, looking back over 250-plus episodes, the number of guests who talk about an aunt. It’s often an aunt. Sometimes, it’s an uncle, a neighbor, or a teacher, but it’s often an aunt who is living this amazing life as a solo. They say, “I would never have known if it wasn’t for Aunt Betty.” That’s the first level. Live this great life. People will see it, and you’ll inspire them.
The second level is to talk to people about it. It’s the kinds of conversations you and I have all the time, about giving advice, reflecting ideas back to people, etc. It has the goal, though, of moving to action or change, rather than, “Let’s have a thought experiment about how your life might be different if you did these things.” The third level is true advocacy. For example, there are people in the solar community and beyond working on a single’s bill of rights.
They’re working on a document, which will be a living document, that is designed to change people’s hearts and minds to address policymakers in particular. There are books and podcasts sprouting up all over the place, and so on. There are all these kinds of things. There are people who are working on screenplays with powerful solo protagonists and so on. These people are truly acting, looking, and also putting themselves at risk of being judged negatively, being shouted down, being ignored, and all these kinds of things. I like this message. I kept texting you.
You also have made a point where if you’re living, you’re not posting on social media. I don’t know how exactly you say this, Peter. I’ve heard you say that if you’re doing things that you love and you’re passionate about. You’re living the life and not caring to advertise.
In some ways, you’re too busy to be doing all the posing, all the editing, and all the stuff to advertise this amazing life you’re living. I’m trying to get him on the show. I read this remarkable book called The Comfort Crisis.
Is he the rucking guy? He wrote a book on rucking, too.
Is that right?
Yes.
I think he did. It’s a well-written book. When I read books like The Present Age or The Comfort Crisis, I wonder why I am even trying to write books. I’m like, “I’ll never be able to write a book that good.” In the book, he talks about Miyagi or something like that. This is not his idea. He’s translating it. The idea is to take on an extreme challenge, typically physical, that you have about a 50/50 chance of succeeding on.
For the guy who came up with this, that’s the first rule. You have to follow that rule. The likelihood is based on you. For some people, running a 10K could be, “I’m not sure I can finish.” For some people, running 100 miles might be 50/50. The second thing is don’t die. You want to swim in the deep waters, but you don’t want to drown. You have some safety built in there. Those are the two hard, fast rules. There are two light rules. One is that it should be quirky.
This physical challenge should be quirky. A 100-mile run is fine, but it’s not that different. He tells a story about a group of guys who are moving a boulder 10 feet underwater and 8 kilometers. It takes them all day. They go one by one. They swim out, dive down, and pick up the boulder. They walk as long as they can, drop it, come up, and then it’s the next person. There’s a lifeguard in a boat in case someone doesn’t come up. It’s a very challenging endeavor. No one can die. It’s quirky. No one’s probably ever done that before or may never do it again.
The fourth suggested rule is that you don’t advertise it. This is not for Instagram. This is for your heart and soul, your muscles and bones, so to speak. This is for your will. We live in a world that is more comfortable than the present age that Kierkegaard wrote about, which is safer. Yet, we have to manufacture these challenges if we want to live passionately.
Think about it. The morning routines that are being advocated on a lot of podcasts like the Attias and Hubermans of this world are mostly stuff that was done by cavemen and ancestors of the past. That’s like, “Go look at the light. Go do this. Go do that. Walk, move, and all these things.”
Deep breathing, etc.
However, nobody has died from doing a morning routine in our age or our times. In our ancestral times, caveman days, people would die.
You get up, and you’re out picking berries.
You get attacked by a wild animal. You might end up dead because you’re going at the crack of dawn. You could very much encounter a wild animal. We have sanitized and sterilized our environment so much that we have to push ourselves to experience a certain pain or suffering.
To feel alive.
That’s right.
It does feel like a prophecy of sorts. He writes about the press in this book a lot, but he’s describing X, Twitter, Reddit, and outrage culture, more generally. One of the things I wrote down in the margin was the current thing. For a reader who’s not on social media, first of all, congratulations. There’s this concept called the current thing. It can be a very short cycle, anywhere from a day to a few months, where the world of social media gets fixated on a war, some injustice, or whatnot.
People change their profile picture or add certain emojis in support of this thing. The thing doesn’t go away, oftentimes. The war may continue to rage, but then the public has shifted its attention to this other thing. The emojis change. The profile pictures change, etc. The idea with the current thing is that you’re commenting on it.
The Phenomenon Of The Current Thing On Social Media
How long did people have the Ukraine flag on their profile settings?
Whatever it might be.
Now, you move on to a different flag.
That’s right. This stuff happens. People want to support these things, but it is cheap talk.
You can call it virtue signaling.
That’s another phrase.
Soren certainly covers that. Like we want to unite with some sort of fake morality that we can advertise to the world, “I am a moral person. I don’t stand for this type of oppression. I don’t stand for that.” Nobody has gone out and experienced real oppression. That’s what he’s talking about. Our actions are held captive by these social media press-type situations. It’s easier for us to signal these types of morality posturing to make ourselves believe that we are doing some action.
I remember I had a guest. It might’ve even been the previous episode, I’m not joking, where he talked about why people do this. They do it because it’s easy. It’s the smallest thing that you can end up doing. It’s also this idea of the group or the public versus the individual. You get to belong. He uses the term the public a lot. How does he use that term?
You can translate it to our modern times as the herd mentality. That’s how I see it. We have some comfort in being part of the herd. A better word is society. We want to live in a society. We want to belong. A herd is more animalistic. We choose to ignore certain individuation and certain things that we internally are passionate about. Yet, we suppress those emotions to belong to a herd. It gives us some safety or comfort, like, “I belong to this group. I am a moral person.”
For existentialism, they’re indifferent to morality. There is no morality to life. That is how they would look at it. If you want to marry, you marry. If you want to be a solo, be a solo. Choose. Make that a choice. Don’t do it out of, “Marriage is good.” That’s what this whole episode is about. Make sure it’s a choice for you. It’s not like some prescription that you’re following to belong to something.
I certainly think what’s fun about this conversation is that the average reader, myself included, sometimes lives in the present age. He follows the rules, is a good little boy, talks, posts, and is bloodless, so to speak. Kierkegaard uses the term bloodless. On the other hand, I am living in a passionate age, launching a podcast, asserting my individuality by making this choice to be a lifelong bachelor, and so on.
What’s nice is that because this is not a bunch of trads. They know what it feels like to be the one solo at Thanksgiving dinner and to be under attack, for example, even if it’s well-meaning. He says, though, that what kills passion is not oppression. This is a very important idea. He’s not arguing that these passionless people who sit around, talk, and even pick at the successful people, the people who stand out, the tall poppy, so to speak. They don’t do this because they’re oppressed. They do it because it’s comfortable. It’s easy.
I don’t think he says reflection is a bad thing. I don’t know if you read one passage towards the end. He says reflection is good as long as it leads to action. You are like, “I’ve been missing this all along,” and then you feel like, “I’m led to this vocation or a calling.” You feel this intense enthusiasm to pursue that. That’s what he’s advocating for. If you don’t have that, it could be anything. It could even be a folly that you’re pursuing.
You could even be jumping off. You could be doing something that’s amoral. He doesn’t care about morality. You don’t have to pursue something that is all the time like, “It’s a good thing that I’m pursuing this, that I’m against this type of oppression.” This is where art comes in. Arts are typically immoral. They’re an interpretation of the world. Activism doesn’t lead you to art. There’s a sensibility or an aesthetic way of seeing beauty in this world that is expressed in your art. You cannot stop yourself from not expressing it.
The way I think about art is that art can serve multiple purposes. It can create activism, but it doesn’t have to. It could create all. I’ve always been a heavy reader, but I’m reading voraciously at the moment. I’m reading Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. He gets caught in that riptide where the world wants him to be a spokesperson.
For civil rights.
Also, a bunch of other forms of oppression. A lot of his art speaks to that, but he didn’t necessarily do it for that reason. He did it because he was commenting on the times, etc. He did not feel drawn to be that spokesperson, and people were disappointed and angry with him. He wanted to be a family man. He wanted to focus on his wife and kids. He had that tension. That’s a nice example. He made art. It did become advocacy and work, but it is also enjoyable to listen to.
That’s a true artist, in my opinion. You’ve seen the movie, the Dylan biopic.
The Complete Unknown. I also watched it, which I thought was very good.
In my opinion, it contrasts Joe and Baez with Dylan. Baez and all the folk singers are disappointed with Dylan because he moved on to something else. He moved on to rock and roll, which he pursued as an art. They felt like, “I thought you were a civil rights spokesperson and activist.”
He was, but not fully. That wasn’t all that he wanted to be.
He wanted to be an artist. That’s what I would call amoral. That’s what, in my opinion, Soren is trying to indicate here. The moment you get into the world of morality, you’re getting into the world of being a herd. He’ll refer that to the church of his time, where everybody wants to lead a moral life. Everybody wants to publish a hymn book. That’s what he’s talking about. He is saying, “You could be outside the church.” He still calls himself a Christian, but he’s outside of church.
If he were alive, I think he’d get behind Nike’s ‘Just Do It.’
That’s a punchy way to say what Soren stood for.
The Distinction Between Reflection And Authentic Action
He’s the Nike of philosophers in a sense, in that way. This idea of reflection, the way he uses this term, is that it’s a lot of talk. It’s a lot of opinions and a lot of contemplation, but it never leads anywhere. He doesn’t care where contemplation leads, is what you’re saying. To your point about being amoral, he uses the metaphor of swimming in deep water.
That’s right. There’s another analogy that was very interesting. He talks about skating on thin ice where a jewel is placed in the middle of the lake. Our present age is so fascinated with people who can go up to the point where it’s thin ice. They return, and everybody cheers like, “Look at the way he almost attempted to get that jewel.”
He spends a lot of time on this metaphor.
It’s the same thing. We do all these actions. I’m not saying that those are bad things. We go to the gym. We go through cold plunges. It’s not dangerous to do a cold plunge. It’s still in a sanitized environment where we do it. Vis-à-vis, we remain in that state. Cold plunges don’t lead us to some sort of passionate action in our lives that leads to creating something exceptional. That’s what he’s trying to get at.
I went on a trip to Asia. In modernity, you would say that was an adventure. I was in Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. I spent a lot of time studying Muay Thai there in Thailand and doing some boxing in Japan and Vietnam. I was training. I experienced the culture and so on. I was gone for living out of a carry-on. I was gone indefinitely. I was on a one-way ticket. I even hurt myself training. I got laid up. When I’m being honest with myself, it still was very safe. I still had the bumpers on. I still had the guardrails on.
It was still climate-controlled mostly. In part because of this book and in part because of the other book, The Comfort Crisis. I wonder what happens when you take the guardrails off when you start to swim in the deeper water, not foolishly. What does that do to how you feel about your life? I wrote this down. People reflect instead of act and comment instead of commit, and they wonder why life feels flat.
The next level of this is I go on an adventure to Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, or wherever it may be, and I keep it familiar. I try to execute my rituals, my morning routine, in these other places. I don’t get uncomfortable slightly, but not really, and then you wonder why the trip wasn’t more exciting. I don’t know what’s going to come of all of this.
I’m hunkered down, trying to get healthy and recover from a variety of things. You start noticing these things. I’m seeing it in Dylan’s biography. I’m seeing it in that other book. I’m seeing it in this. I’m seeing it in the conversations you and I are having in private, which is why I wanted to have this conversation in public.
I would ask everybody, including myself. I do have a morning routine. I’m not against it. It’s not like saying to throw the baby with the bathwater. What he is trying to get at is what does that lead you to do? The morning routine that you have, why are you doing that? Does that lead you to do something that you’re called to do and that you’re personally passionate about? Does it make you do that, or are you staying in the realm of like, “I have my morning routine. I have this,” and that’s all you are about?
I get that. As someone who created a morning routine many years ago, I did so to create. The goal was to be able to create. I built a morning routine in order to become a creator because my routine at that time wasn’t leading to that. I see what your point is. I want to ask this question about creation. Is writing an action?
No doubt.
I think Kierkegaard wrestled with this a bit. You could spend a lot of time as a writer, critiquing and talking about the current thing.
The girl I went on a date with, I said I am a writer, and she asked me a very interesting question.
For most people who write, they say, “What have you written?”
That wasn’t the question.
That’s the typical question.
If you’re writing every day, that becomes your identity. You are a runner if you run every day.
I agree.
It’s the same thing
Writers write. I say that all the time. You don’t have to publish.
Her question was more about, “Are you talking about writing and journaling, or are you talking about writing a book?” To me, there’s a distinction there. It’s a very important question. The significance is that when you’re journaling, you’re in the reflection mode.
I have the same thing written down. A private journal is a reflection. That doesn’t make it not valuable because you may write something in your journal, and it’s a full speech.
That’s it. I won’t share the private stuff. You showed me, “I wrote this in my journal, and I decided to do this.” To me, that’s an indication of full speech. You wrote a sentence.
It rarely happens. You have to have a lot of empty speech to find a moment of full speech. I wrote something down. One of the things I wrote down was that I still have one foot in my old life, and that’s keeping me from creating a new life. As soon as I wrote it down, I was like, “Crap.” It demands that I remove one foot. The private journal is a reflection, but you put your name on something. You put it in the public square on Substack and a book.
My response to that girl was that I’m in transition. I have done a lot of reflection, but I’m in the process of putting something out there where I stand for something. I am about something. To me, this is the beginning of that Neo-Renaissance lifestyle that I’m trying to develop. What does that look like? How can I express it first? You talked about three levels. To me, I want to put it out there as an option. In Christian theology, they talk about working out your salvation with fear and trembling. What that means is you have to look at yourself. What is personal to you and what is a solo life to you, you have to work out on your own.
That’s true. It is unlike the relationship escalator, which is a script that you not only follow, but you must follow, versus getting critiques from other people you love for not following it exactly the way it ought to be followed. I like to think every solo is different.
That was your book.
I use these categories. A new way, no way, just may, and someday kind of single. Even within those rough categories, there’s an infinite number of ways to be solo. One’s not better than the other. It’s whether one’s better or worse for you in that sense. This neo-Renaissance idea, you probably should define it since we’re talking about it. I’ve seen it in you since I first met you. The first day we met, you talked about all these things that you were doing at the time that were very Renaissance-like. Years later, you are up and writing about it, doing videos about it, and so on.
It’s a process, like a transition. Bringing this full circle, we talked about routines and reflection. All of that is good. We’re not saying that that’s bad and to stop doing all that. For Soren, that should lead to some passionate action. Otherwise, you’re in the realm of reflection, swimming in the shallow waters, and not performing any dangerous act that is going out there. That, to him, is individuation.
To use Peter McGraw’s term, you’re merely living versus feeling alive.
That’s right.
This notion of individuation, we have to talk more about this. He goes on and talks about leveling. Earlier on, you said that this action is about doing something elevated, maybe even extraordinary. To do something great. It’s not necessary. He especially appreciates the tall poppy. The public, however, does not like this, so they engage in what he calls leveling.
The Destructive Process Of Leveling Exceptional Individuals
For the idea of leveling, our modern-day analogy is the crab analogy. It’s when a crab is trying to get out of a boiling pot of water.
I’m not familiar with this.
What happens with the crabs when you put them in a pot and start boiling them is that when one crab tries to get out, the other crab will pull it down. In fact, if one crab gets out, it may even pull the other crabs out, possibly if they’re intelligent enough.
There are limits to this.
It’s just an analogy. People use this a lot, like crabs in a pot of boiling water. It’s the same thing. Leveling to him, is when somebody ambitious tries to break out of the herd. The herd wants to deconstruct that, like, “He must have been born of privilege.” There’s never praise or appreciation for someone doing something exceptional.
There’s envy. The goodness of the action or the greatness of the action gets explained away.
To him, that’s the process of leveling.
He talks about the eye roll, or maybe I interpret it that way.
It’s similar to the envy part. It’s like, “It must be nice to have that amount of wealth. That’s why he’s successful.” It’s always that envy. He even talks about artistic talent. It’s like, “He must be born with it.”
It’s the prodigy.
We only see the tip of the iceberg. We don’t see what’s under the iceberg that can bring down a ship like the Titanic. There’s depth to that person that most of us don’t see. We only see, “It must be nice that this person gets to do this.” In a way, the leveling process is a destructive process for him. That is where people are united by envy to bring down something that is truly done as a great act.
God forbid, you try to do something great, and you fail. That’s when the public or in contemporary times, the herd piles on.
They’re like, “We already saw that coming.” They feel some sort of sympathy for you, almost like a fake concern. It’s a way to almost say, “We’ll see how far he goes. He must be leading a sad life,” and so on and so forth. For most solos, how will a married person even perceive a solo person? It’s like, “How sad is his life or her life?”
They’re like, “You have no one to take care of you. You have no one to spend time with.” When I first planned for us to talk, my first inclination was like, “I wonder how I’m going to connect this to solo-hood.” It’s quite profoundly connected in a sense. I wanted to have a fun conversation about this. He believes, though, that when enough people act, you can’t level. There are too many people doing too many things. The public can’t focus. I’m not sure he says this exactly, but for everyone who acts, that’s one fewer person in the herd. That’s the first thing. The thought experiment is that if the entire world acts, there is no herd.
That’s right. What would that world look like? He calls it the passionate age, where everybody is pursuing something that is passionate to them. What that would look like, I don’t think historically that has ever happened. Maybe it won’t even happen.
There are times of more or less passion. Forgive me, reader. I’m mildly obsessed with Bob Dylan at the moment. If you think about Dylan and the ‘60s, there was a lot of action. Some of it quite horrible. You think about assassinations and so on. You also think about people rising up, individuals like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and then people rising with them to fight oppression. That was much more of a time of action than now. I worry that if X, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook existed in the ‘60s, there would be a bunch of chatter.
We wouldn’t have had this passionate uprising of all these exceptional people.
That worries me that social media has become this easy outlet to be reflective and to engage in.
In the time of Soren, that’s the press.
That’s right. The parallels are very real.
Something like social media can hold us captive. We are in that social media realm of doing something within that layer of social media, where we are not doing something exceptional like what Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and so on did. We stay in the realm of posting on something, virtue signaling, and that’s all we’re doing.
One thing that I want to say is not everyone can become Martin Luther King or Bob Dylan because there are such things as talent. There are certain things, such as opportunity or privilege. For example, Soren Kierkegaard had privilege. He had a pot of money that he could spend to amplify his voice. My analogy is about fitness. Not everybody can run as fast as Usain Bolt, for example, but you can learn to run faster.
I always talk about how fitness is conditioned on your genetics, your body, your access to nutrition, etc. The goal ought to be to improve yourself from where you are to be a better version of yourself. What applies to the idea of whether I want to feel alive or live passionately is that I don’t have to cure cancer. I don’t have to change the world. I have to be better than I am as a reflective person.
The level or the degree of the act may vary. Not everybody has to be hitting that high 10 out of 10 mark. I might still be 6 out of 10. I might have done something in my life that fulfills me and makes me feel like I’ve accomplished this. That’s what matters. Not everybody has to be this exceptional person who, for the rest of history, is remembered, and there’s a stamp on your name that you’ve done this for humanity. It doesn’t have to be.
I agree with that. I went with you to an open mic. The only ever open mic I had ever been to prior to that was a comedy open mic that I performed at. I read a couple of my poems at this open mic, and it was a good experience. Maybe there were twenty people there. My poems have not changed the world in any way, shape, or form. They’ve changed my world, but I was alive that night. That’s a very small thing.
It may not be recorded in history.
I’m not winning the Nobel Prize in poetry as Dylan did, but I moved to action that evening, thanks to you, because you invited me. You’ve been doing this with your music a lot. It was fun to see you perform, also.
Same thing. For me, that’s music and a little bit of writing on Substack. I’ve said this to you. Even though I call myself a writer, it’s not like I aspire to write like Soren Kierkegaard. There might be a desire there, but at the same time, even if I don’t achieve that, it’s okay. Leading to action in terms of writing and putting my work out there, to me, that is living a passionate life.
If Kierkegaard were here and he were talking directly to the reader, I think that he would say, “It’s fine to consider the world. It’s fine to learn about what’s happening in the news. All of these things are okay and even perhaps necessary.” When are you going to walk beyond the talk is what he’s saying. It could be, to our point, big or small.
It doesn’t have to be magnificent. It doesn’t have to be world-changing. As an outcome of that, A) You’re going to feel more alive. You’re going to feel passion. There’s no guarantee that you will be successful. The bigger you go, the more polarizing it’s likely to be. Some people will admire it, will applaud, will want to do the same kinds of things, and will be motivated in that way. Other people will be snarky, try to tear you down, roll their eyes, talk crap about you, and so on. That is necessary.
That’s the danger in it. The danger is that there’s no guarantee of success. Going and playing at an open mic or reading your poem at an open mic, it’s not like you all of a sudden went viral and there are two million views. That’s the danger you’re encountering by putting yourself out there in terms of like, “I could stop my music in the middle of the performance. I messed up. I bombed.” That’s what is dangerous. You’re going into the depths. You’re not just swimming in perilous shallow water. You’re going into the depths to put yourself out there. You’re performing some action without a guarantee of success.
My invitation is for people to reflect, but then decide to act in some way. The world can’t tell you the right way to act. If anything, they’ll tell you the wrong way to act. Reflecting back on this conversation, is there something that Kierkegaard addressed that we haven’t covered?
Towards the end of how he ends the book, maybe we can talk about that. What does that action look like? For Soren, it is a very intense, enthusiastic action. He differentiates between immediate enthusiasm and intensive enthusiasm. For immediate enthusiasm, it’s like you see something, and you also want to do that.
Immediate Versus Intensive Enthusiasm And Action
As an academic, this happens all the time. You have this set of projects. You get this new idea, you fall in love with this new idea, and you start working on it. That’s that.
That’s immediate enthusiasm.
Versus the intensity that you need to complete the project and be so into it.
You cannot stop working on it. You wake up in the middle of the night and feel like, “I’m going to get to work. I’m going to start writing.” Every chance you work, you work yourself to exhaustion, so to speak. He ends the book by saying that’s what he wants to differentiate between the two types of enthusiasm, the immediate and the intense.
He does advocate for reflection, too, to get to that intensive enthusiasm. I call it vocation or calling, whatever that is. It’ll change at different stages of your life. It’s not going to be the same throughout your life. There is a vocation that you’re called. Once you pursue that and want to complete it, that’s when you feel lit and alive. That’s how he ends the book.
It doesn’t have to be this amazing, huge project, but it may be. What he’s saying is that reflection is necessary for passion, but not sufficient in that sense. There’s research in psychology about what’s called deliberation and implementation. We will often deliberate. We’ll think about, “What’s the next big thing? I want a new career. I want to live in a different place.” You think about it, do research, talk about it with your mates, etc.
At some point, you have to move, quit, start, and all those things. You move from deliberating to implementing. I feel like I’ve given some prescriptions along the way. I’m often cautious about doing that. Is there a prescription you have? For example, suppose someone is a nerd like us. They may even decide to try to read the book and experience both the challenge and the delight.
I did write about this book, like a commentary, for every three pages that I read. They can follow it on Substack if anybody’s interested. It is @DaveStar.Substack.com as a commentary, but get back to what you said.
Let’s say they wake up tomorrow and they say, “I want to feel alive. I want to live passionately.” Where do you think they should start?
I am anti-Ryan Holiday here.
Tell people who Ryan Holiday is for people who don’t know him.
Ryan Holiday is a popularizer of Stoic philosophy for our times. I think there are good parts to the philosophy of not letting life, things that happen to you, affect you emotionally.
Don’t let life get you down. The Stoics are very good at that.
You cannot go through your entire life living this emotionless, passionless life.
I agree with this.
Ryan Holiday, even though he’s popularizing stoicism, many people take it as if you have to go through life without any emotion or any passion. That’s where I would like for people who are following stoicism to consider somebody like Soren Kierkegaard, where you have to pursue something with passion to do something exceptional.
To feel the pain. To have the highs and the lows.
That’s right. We can talk about passionless marriages, like in the movie American Beauty. There’s one spark that comes when he feels there’s some intimacy about to happen on a couch that they bought.
That’s right. I know this thing. She’s like, “Lester, this couch is worth X thousand dollars.”
He pulls back and says, “Elizabeth, since when did you become so joyless?”
That’s right. You recommended Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is the opposite of American Beauty. It’s a movie filled with passion, or people who are stoics who are living in the present age, and they see the passion. They’re tempted by it, but they can’t quite reach it.
Passion gives you courage. It gives you all the virtues that the Greeks talked about. Socrates was prepared to die. He was sentenced to death because of his passion. Something that makes you feel alive and something that you will also die for is passion. If anything, if Soren were here, going back to your point, I think he would say, “Do nothing without passion. Pursue your passion.”
That could sound very trite. If you’re looking for a starting point, one of the best places to look is backwards. When did you write in your journal, “I was alive today.” Seek out those moments more often. That’s one place. The other is to experiment. My trip to the open mic was an experiment. I decided I would do this again, but I also wasn’t like, “When is the next one?”
It doesn’t always feel that way.
It doesn’t have to, but if I hadn’t done the experiment, I would never know whether it was no, maybe, or absolutely.
It certainly puts you out of your comfort zone, don’t you think? You would not normally do that. I invited you. You wanted to try it out. You have written poems, and you have written a lot. You’ve shared that with close friends, but it’s not something that you’ve gone out and performed.
That’s right. I’m very comfortable being the center of attention at times.
You’ve done TED talks and all those things.
I’ve done teachings and stuff like that. It’s not my natural state. I don’t crave it, but I become comfortable doing it. Probably the time I like it the most is doing my solo salons. It’s not about me. I get to be a lubricant and have moments where I shine, but it’s mostly about the community and the performers.
Find the passions, whether it be looking backwards or experimenting, looking forward. The other thing is you don’t have to succeed to succeed. Know that you don’t have to become famous. You don’t have to get the gold medal. You don’t have to do any of those things for this to be successful. It’s moving from the present age to the passionate age.
That’s right. That’s it.
Thank you for doing this on short notice and doing a very fine job of connecting this book to the SOLO lifestyle, which I think is revelatory for me.
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
Cheers.
Important Links
- David Jitendranath
- David Jitendranath on Substack
- The Present Age
- Either/Or
- Fear and Trembling
- The Sickness Unto Death
- At the Existentialist Café
- The Comfort Crisis
- Chronicles: Volume One
- Masculinity and Manhood
- Solo Thoughts 18: Welcoming Rough Seas
About David Jitendranath
David Jitendranath is a tech entrepreneur and a neo Renaissance man. He grew up in India and immigrated to the US in 99. He had a successful marriage and is now enjoying being a Solo.
Among many things David is always learning and experimenting. He also enjoys playing music at open mics riding his motorcycle and writing on Substack.