Kierkegaard and Epictetus on Living With Limits

Dying Every Day (Day 160)

Oct 29, 2026

Dying Every Day

Dying Every Day is a podcast for mortals and curious minds. Each episode explores what it means to think like a mortal: to act, choose, change our minds within the limits of a human life, and remember to live.

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Kierkegaard and Epictetus on Living With Limits

Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 160.

It’s late, and you’re at the kitchen table. Your mother has an appointment tomorrow, and you haven’t worked out how she’s getting there. A piece of work is overdue. You move a task to Wednesday, and notice Wednesday is already full.

Somewhere, you’re sure, someone with exactly your life is handling it better. You’ve never met this person. They’re making you feel inadequate anyway.

So what do you do when life feels like too much? Two philosophers give very different answers, and together they point to something you can actually do tonight.

Kierkegaard and Epictetus can help us see which demands belong to the situation, which ones we’ve added ourselves, and what’s still worth doing when we can’t do everything.

Part One: Is This a Fact or a Forecast?

There’s a familiar way of talking about overwhelm: too many choices, too many options, too many possible lives. Kierkegaard is famous for a version of this. He called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom,” the vertigo of standing at the edge of everything you could do.

But sometimes the trouble is the opposite. The choices have gotten painfully narrow. Someone needs care. The rent is due. The work can’t just be dropped. Advice to go and live a more authentic life sounds rather different when another person depends on you being there in the morning.

Kierkegaard has something for this situation too, and I think it’s the more useful part of him. In The Sickness Unto Death, he describes the self as held in tension between possibility and necessity. We can lose ourselves in possibility, in imagined futures, without ever becoming actual. Or we can be so enclosed by necessity that no possibility seems left at all. For Kierkegaard, both are forms of despair, and his answer is finally a religious one, the self resting in God. We don’t have to share that answer to use the question he raises. When you look at the week ahead, are you seeing your actual circumstances? Or have they hardened into a forecast about the rest of your life?

Back at the kitchen table, tomorrow’s appointment starts gathering a whole future around it. The next appointment. A greater need for care. Another conversation with your boss. An argument with a sibling who seems to have more freedom than you do. Some of these deserve preparation. But tonight they all arrive at once, each carrying the urgency of something already happening. Your mind is busy living in every version of next month. Your body is sitting in a chair at the end of a long day. And the one arrangement you could make tonight is still unmade.

There’s a difference between having no one to help tomorrow and knowing you’ll always be alone in this. The first is a fact to contend with. The second is a future that exhaustion can make feel settled. The opposite move doesn’t help much either. Imagining an entirely different life can give you a moment’s relief while leaving the needs of this evening untouched. And somewhere between those two, the person you’re caring for can disappear from view, replaced by everything their need might someday ask of you.

None of this is solved by insisting there must be an easy way out. There may not be one. You may need more money, more support, or a change at work that’ll take time to arrange. Recognizing a real constraint is part of honest judgment. So is refusing to let one constraint claim authority over every possibility.

And here’s the limit underneath all of it. You have a finite amount of attention and strength, and you’re spending it at the ordinary rate of a life. You can love several people deeply and still be unable to meet all their needs. That isn’t a failure of love. It’s the shape of being a creature with one body, one attention, and a fixed number of evenings. The needs don’t become less real when your capacity runs out. And your capacity doesn’t grow because the needs are urgent.

Wisdom starts by letting both of those facts stay in the room. […]