![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/80\/2013\/08\/soren_kierkegaard.png\" "\\"soren_kierkegaard\\"")
<\/a>All I really want to do with my life is convince you that the indie-rock group Typhoon<\/a> are a) awesome and b) channeling the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, but to do this I first have to explain humanity\u2019s desire for goodness and the concept of despair. It\u2019s an odd route round, but what else are you going to do, your job<\/em>? Right then.<\/p>\nHomo sapiens \u2014 may they be fruitful and multiply \u2014 experience a desire to be themselves<\/em>. This is utterly strange. Rocks, trees and bacterium are laughing at us for the fact. No rock is concerned with being the rock that it is. No dolphin, I assume, feels the daily weight of not being itself. We do not observe identity crisises in the non-personal world. But people,\u00a0people want to be themselves.<\/em><\/p>\n And it\u2019s not simply that we desire<\/em>\u00a0to be ourselves in the same way we might experience the pressing desire for an early lunch. Our claim is more absurd: We\u00a0ought<\/em>\u00a0to be ourselves, and not only this, but others\u00a0ought<\/em>\u00a0to be themselves as well. Thus I will, in shame, admit that \u201cI wasn\u2019t being myself.\u201d Thus I will, in judgment, remark that \u201cshe is not being her self.\u201d<\/p>\n We ought to be ourselves. Who would disagree? Human beings are those beings who experience a certain obligation upon their own existence. My existence comes with the obligation to be myself, and is thus set apart from every non-personal existence in the universe, which contains no obligation to be what it is. Things already are<\/em> what they are. People must become<\/em> who they are.<\/p>\n We experience \u201cbecoming ourselves\u201d as a moral obligation, but we are all of us in darkness, fumbling blindly through an unhelpful universe. How<\/em> are we supposed to become ourselves? It sounds like a tautology, like a bad joke, and it\u2019s precisely from this obscurity that Kyle Morton of Typhoon writes:<\/p>\n It\u2019s a desert mirage that you follow,<\/em> How often \u201cwho we are\u201d is just a figment of our imagination, \u201ca desert mirage\u201d we follow that, upon reaching, becomes a stale disappointment. We say that who we ought to be is \u201ca doctor\u201d or \u201ca writer,\u201d and as long as we are working to become these things, we are happy, for we may entertain the illusion that a career is an adequate description of who we are in our entirety. But at the end of our years of education, when we have finally \u201cbecome\u201d an engineer or a social worker, we are met with same obligation: Become yourself. How pitiful it seems, in the face of the question of whether we are ourselves (which is precisely the question we face on our deathbed), to hold up \u201cdoctor\u201d or a \u201clawyer\u201d as our answer, as if to say \u201cSee, who I am is this occupation!\u201d \u00a0We pursue labels to this same end<\/a>, to avoid the question of whether we have met our existential obligation. If we\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0a liberal or conservative or traditionalist or a radical then \u201cwho we are\u201d has been happily confused with \u201cthings we do.\u201d Or we may try to avoid the obligation entirely by annihilating the parts of ourselves that feel this obligation most strongly \u2014 our sense of shame, our desire to know the truth, our desire for modesty<\/a>, etc. We may pursue a life of fame or wealth so as to build our identity within a puffed-up sense of prestige. Really, there\u2019s no end to human mediocrity, to our unflagging efforts at sidestepping the ultimate obligation of human existence \u2014 to become ourselves.<\/p>\n This was Kierkegaard\u2019s thesis in The Sickness Unto Death<\/em>, that despair is not being the self who we are, that is, not being ourselves. Whether we are aware that we are not being ourselves is irrelevant \u2014 it is still despair. This is why Typhoon\u2019s lyrics are so unflinchingly dark. They are filled with an awareness of despair. They are aware that we pile up thing upon thing to create some semblance of complete existence, and thereby never fulfill the most obvious project of human existence \u2014 to become who we are. This is most apparent in the song \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 \u201cThe Sickness Unto Death,\u201d which it takes its name from Kierkegaard\u2019s famous work of existential psychology:<\/p>\n
\n it will disappear and relocate the moment you approach,<\/em>
\n and in the distance it changes color and form.<\/em>
\n What was here, a single cigarette, now is a life that isn\u2019t yours.<\/em><\/p>\nhttp:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mZoGcnxrzkI<\/a>\n