Most people who are quietly miserable do not know it. That, in essence, is what a Danish philosopher named Søren Kierkegaard tried to tell the readers of nineteenth-century Copenhagen in 1849, and what the empirical psychology of regret has been confirming, in laboratory studies and museum surveys, for the past three decades. When most people use the word “despair,” they mean acute unhappiness — the kind of low mood that follows a loss, a failure, or a difficult life event. Despair in this ordinary sense is something a person is aware of. They can name it, describe it, and (with luck) move through it. Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, used the word in a substantially different way. The despair he described was not an emotion. It was a structural condition of the self, present in the great majority of human beings, generally unnoticed by the people who carried it, and most acute precisely in those who did not know they had it. Kierkegaard’s book on the subject, The Sickness Unto Death, is one of the founding texts of existentialist philosophy.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Kierkegaard, the framework rests on a specific definition of what the self is. For Kierkegaard, the self is not a thing or a substance. It is “a relation that relates itself to itself” — a dynamic process by which a human being takes up the various contradictory features of being human (finite and infinite, possible and necessary, free and determined) and synthesises them into a coherent personality. The self is not given at birth; it is something a person has to become. And despair, in Kierkegaard’s account, is the misrelation that occurs when this becoming fails — when the synthesis goes wrong, when the person fails to take on the self they were capable of being.
The three forms of despair
Kierkegaard identified three primary configurations the failure can take. The first and most common is the despair of ignorance — being in despair without knowing it. A person in this state has not yet noticed any gap between the life they are living and the life they were capable of living. Their attention is consumed by the routine surfaces of daily existence: work, possessions, social position, the consumption of entertainment. The deeper question of what kind of person they are, in any meaningful sense, has never been seriously posed. Kierkegaard considered this unconscious form to be the dominant pattern in modern society — most people, in his view, were in despair without realising it, because the structures of their lives had insulated them from ever asking the question.
The second form is the despair of weakness — knowing what self one is meant to be and not being willing to be it. The person in this state has had some glimpse of their own possibilities and has, for whatever combination of fear, comfort, social pressure, or fatigue, declined to pursue them. The third form is the despair of defiance — willing to be a self other than the one one is, refusing the actual configuration of one’s life in favour of an imaginary or constructed alternative. The defiant form, Kierkegaard thought, was the most acute but also the rarest. As one frequently-cited line from the book puts it: “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss — an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. — is sure to be noticed.”
What modern psychology has found
Kierkegaard was writing in 1849, in a theological framework, with no empirical methodology beyond his own observation of the people around him in nineteenth-century Copenhagen. His specific claims about despair as a sickness of the spirit cannot be tested in the same way an empirical hypothesis can be tested. What can be tested is whether the basic phenomenon he described — that the failures most haunting to people across a life are the failures to become the self one was capable of being — shows up in modern psychological data on regret. The answer is that it does. Per a 2023 replication in Royal Society Open Science of the foundational research by Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec at Cornell University, the empirical psychology of regret converges on a striking temporal pattern: in the short term, people’s most acute regrets tend to be about things they did and wish they had not done. In the long term, the pattern reverses. The regrets that haunt people across years and decades, and that dominate when people look back on their lives as a whole, are overwhelmingly about things they did not do — chances not taken, paths not pursued, selves not allowed to emerge.
Gilovich and Medvec’s original 1994 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found this pattern across multiple population groups, including a sample of nursing-home residents reflecting on their entire lives. The 2023 replication, conducted at a Chicago museum of psychological science with a large public sample, reproduced the temporal interaction even though the specific magnitudes differed. The pattern is now considered one of the more robust findings in the empirical literature on regret. Its philosophical implication aligns closely with Kierkegaard’s framework, even though the researchers involved generally do not cite him.
Why the despair is so quiet
The most disconcerting feature of Kierkegaard’s account is his insistence that this despair is, in its most common form, undetectable to the person carrying it. Unlike acute sadness, which announces itself, the unconscious form of despair tends to be hidden by the very busyness of life that produces it. A person fully occupied with work, family obligations, consumption of news and entertainment, social media, the small daily tasks of contemporary existence, is unlikely to encounter the question of whether they are actually becoming the self they were meant to be. The question requires solitude, reflection, and a degree of confrontation with one’s own choices that ordinary life does not generally provide. As reported in D. Anthony Storm’s commentary on The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard described despair as a “misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself” — a sickness that, unlike most diseases, the patient is largely responsible for and from which the patient cannot escape simply by avoiding awareness of it. The avoidance, in Kierkegaard’s framework, is itself part of the despair.
What the framework does not promise
Intellectual honesty requires noting what Kierkegaard’s account does not establish. It is not a recipe for happiness. It does not specify what self any given person was meant to become, or how to identify that self, or how to pursue it once identified. Kierkegaard’s own answer to the question of how despair is overcome was specifically Christian — through a particular relation to God that he called faith — and many modern readers find that the theological framing limits the framework’s applicability. The diagnostic side of his work, however, has had broad influence well beyond the specifically Christian context, including on the existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century, on the founders of existential psychotherapy, on Erik Erikson’s developmental concept of “integrity versus despair” in late life, and on the broader twentieth-century literature on authenticity and self-realisation. What the framework provides is a vocabulary for naming a condition that often goes unnamed — the slow recognition, late in a life, that the person one has been is not quite the person one started out hoping to be. Kierkegaard called this the breaking through of despair into consciousness, and he thought it was, paradoxically, a kind of progress. The unconscious form, in his account, was worse than the conscious form, because it left no opening for change.
