Dying Every Day
Dying Every Day is a podcast dedicated to the art of living. Each episode turns a passage of Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation for mortals—designed to help you (and me) remember to live.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The Unchosen Life—What Kierkegaard and the Stoics Knew About Freedom
Dying Every Day (Day 156)
Imagine a young man with every door open.
He is talented, and he knows it. He could be a scholar—the mind is there. He could be an artist; people have told him so. He could go into business and probably do well, or travel, or fall in love, or devote himself to a cause.
Every path is available to him, and that is precisely the point: they are all still available, all still open, because he has walked down none of them. He keeps them open the way a collector keeps things in their original packaging.
To choose one would be to close the others, and he cannot bear to close anything. So he stands at the center of all his beautiful possibilities, turning slowly, admiring them, committing to nothing.
We know this young man. Many of us have been him. And we live in the age that has perfected him: the age of the open tab, the unchosen life, the endless scroll of options, none of which we select.
We have made a virtue of keeping our options open.
Two very different traditions, separated by nearly two thousand years, looked hard at this man and came to the same unsettling conclusion.
He is not free. He is in despair, and he does not even know it.
The young man is a portrait from a book published in 1843 by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The book is called Either/Or, and it is built as a kind of trap.
Kierkegaard does not appear in it. Instead, he invents a set of characters and lets them speak. A fictional editor claims to have found a bundle of papers in an old desk, written by two different men, and to have simply published them.
The first man, known only as “A,” is the aesthete: the writer of the open doors, the connoisseur of moods and possibilities. The second, an older man named Judge William, is the ethical voice, writing letters to the first in an attempt to save him.
Kierkegaard refuses to tell you which one is right.
He hands you the two lives and forces the choice onto you. That is the either/or of the title. It is not the book’s argument. It is the book’s demand.
And the demand cuts deeper than it first appears. Because Judge William’s real charge against the aesthete is not that he has chosen wrongly. It is that he has never truly chosen at all.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it like this: the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical life “is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil,” whether to step into the kind of life where your choices actually bind you, actually cost you, actually make you into someone.
The aesthete’s whole existence is a strategy for avoiding that. He samples. He tries things on. He keeps every possibility in reserve. And he calls this freedom, but Judge William sees it for what it is: a man dissolving, because a self is not something you have; it is something you forge, and you forge it only by choosing, by closing doors, by daring to become one actual thing instead of remaining a shimmering cloud of potential ones.
Listen to how the Judge describes the inner life of such a person—and notice that it could describe anyone you know, or even yourself on a certain kind of afternoon:
“The person who lives esthetically tries as far as possible to be engrossed completely in mood... This accounts for the enormous fluctuations to which one who lives esthetically is exposed.”
— Judge William, in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or
Enormous fluctuations. Because if you have not chosen a self, then you are only ever your current mood—elated in the morning, hollow by evening, blown from one state to the next with nothing underneath to hold you steady.
The aesthete is not the captain of his life.
He is the weather of it.
And against this, the Judge sets the person who has chosen: the one who “has chosen himself infinitely,” and who therefore “sees his mood beneath him.”
That is the whole difference. Not a life without moods, but a life no longer ruled by them, because something has been chosen that stands above them and orders them.
Now here is what should stop us.
Because that idea—that a scattered, unchosen life is a kind of living death, and that steadiness comes only from choosing something above your moods to organize everything else—is not original to Kierkegaard.
He gave it one of its most piercing forms. But the Stoics were there eighteen centuries ahead of him, and they said it even more plainly.
Seneca watched the same restless man drift through the streets of Rome.
And he diagnosed him in a single phrase:
“Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”
— Seneca
“Everywhere means nowhere.” The man who is in all places is finally in none of them. The man who reads every book knows no book.
The man who keeps every path open walks no path at all.
Seneca was writing, in that letter, about scattered reading—flitting from author to author, never staying long enough to be changed by any of them. But he knew the disease was larger than reading. It was a way of living.
And in another place he described the sufferer of it like this: the person who pursues “no fixed goal,” who is “tossed about in ever-changing designs by a fickleness which is shifting, inconstant, and never satisfied with itself.”
Tossed about by fickleness, never satisfied.
That is Kierkegaard’s aesthete, described by a Roman Stoic writing seventeen hundred years before Kierkegaard was born. The two men are looking at the same human being. And they are pointing at the same cure.
Seneca gave that cure this well-known image:
“When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is favorable.”
If you have not chosen your harbor, then no wind can help you; every breeze is as useless as every other, because you have nowhere you are trying to go.
The winds of fortune blow, as they always will, and the man without a harbor is simply carried—this way today, that way tomorrow, mistaking the motion for a journey. He is not sailing. He is drifting, beautifully, nowhere.
And Seneca pairs it with a second image:
“The archer must know what he is seeking to hit; then he must aim and control the weapon by his skill.”
First the target. Then the skill. Aim without a target is not aiming at all. And this is the order almost everyone gets wrong.
We work feverishly on our skills, our habits, our optimization, our productivity—the drawing and controlling of the bow—while never once settling the prior question of what we are actually aiming at. We become magnificent archers who have never once asked what we are aiming at.
So here is the convergence. Kierkegaard and the Stoics—two very different traditions—agree on something fundamental about how a human life works.
You cannot walk two paths at once.
The refusal to choose is not freedom; it is dissolution. And what makes the choice possible is clarity about a single highest good. A harbor you are sailing for. A target you are aiming at. One thing, chosen and held, beneath which everything else can finally take its order.
Without it, you are the aesthete turning among his possibilities. You are Seneca’s traveler with a thousand acquaintances and no friends. You are the archer in the fog. With it, for the first time, the motion of your life becomes a direction.
And now the pressure that makes all of this more than an interesting idea.
The passage about the drifter, the man tossed about by fickleness, pursuing no fixed goal, does not come from just anywhere. It comes from an essay titled “On the Shortness of Life.” And that title is an important point.
The aesthete believes, without ever quite admitting it, that he has time. That is the unspoken assumption beneath every door he keeps open—that he can hold them all a while longer, sample a little more, defer the choice, and still, someday, when he is ready, step into a real life.
The open door is a bet on the future.
It assumes the future is long.
And the truth is, the future is uncertain. This is the one fact the aesthete cannot metabolize, and it is the fact this whole podcast is named for. You are dying. Not dramatically, not today, but steadily, a little each day—and the time in which you might choose a life is not infinite. It is, in fact, short.
Every day spent keeping your options open is not a day held in reserve. It is a day of the one and only life you were given, spent unlived—drawn down from an account whose balance you cannot see and cannot refill.
This is what turns Kierkegaard’s “either/or” from a philosophical puzzle into something real and practical. The choice is not between choosing now and choosing later. There may be no later. The choice is between choosing now and quite possibly never choosing at all.
The refusal to choose is itself a choice.
Seneca put the whole matter in a single line, and it is the sharpest thing in this meditation: “It is not that we have a short time to live,” he wrote, “but that we waste a lot of it.” The waste is the drifting. The waste is the open door.
Now I owe you a word of clarification. Kierkegaard was not a Stoic. He would have resisted the label.
For the Stoics, the highest good was virtue. The tranquility the Stoics are famous for was never the goal itself but the byproduct of a life ordered under that one good. For Kierkegaard, the highest good is not finally a rational principle you deduce but a relation you enter with your whole passionate self, and he suspected that serenity itself could become one more sophisticated way of avoiding the terror and the commitment of really living.
And where the Stoic climbs above passion into calm, Kierkegaard insists that the deepest commitment is itself a passion, chosen in fear and trembling, never safely secured. That is a genuine disagreement.
They do not want the same harbor, and they do not agree on how you sail there.
But notice what they share beneath the disagreement, because that is what we can actually use tonight. Both saw, with complete clarity, that the unchosen life is a catastrophe wearing the mask of freedom.
Both insisted that you must choose a highest good and let it order everything below it. They disagreed about which harbor. They did not disagree, even slightly, that you need one.
Daily Practice
Ask yourself the one question both the Judge and the philosopher are finally putting to you.
What is your harbor?
Not what your options are. You have plenty of those; we all do. The question is what you have actually chosen.
What is the single good beneath which the others arrange themselves?
The thing that, when the winds of the week blow you around, tells you which way is still home. And here is the honest test, because most of us would rather not run it. Look at how you actually spent the last ordinary week of your life — the hours, the attention, the energy.
Not what you say you value. What the week reveals you value. Does it show a person sailing for a harbor? Or does it show the aesthete, turning slowly among his beautiful open doors, committing to none of them.
If you cannot name your harbor, that is not a failure.
It is the most important thing you could possibly discover tonight, because you cannot set a course for a place you have never named. So name it. Choose it. Close, deliberately, a few of the doors you have been holding open for years, not because open doors are bad, but because a life spent guarding them is a life never actually lived.
You cannot walk two paths. You were never able to.
You cannot wait forever at the fork, because waiting is not free—it is paid for, one day at a time, out of the only life you have.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
—
Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. Catch up on recent (and past) meditations in the archive!
I love your way of remind us that we can not serve many gods or we will look badly before all of them. I always say:
We have more life than time, so use it wisely.
This is a reminder that I have been wasting my time in things that don’t nourish my soul.
Another great article, Josh!