Kierkegaard argues that mental well-being depends less on success and more on developing an authentic relationship with yourself.
Living only “from the neck up” disconnects thought from embodied experience. In our hyper-connected, metrics-driven world, it is easier than ever to mistake our profiles for our personas.
We polish our resumes, check our engagement statistics, and cultivate digital identities designed to project achievement. But beneath this surface of curated success, a deeper psychological question looms:, he gave a famously dense definition of what it means to be a human being: "The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self isn’t the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.
" At first glance, this sentence requires a few rereads. But unpack it, and you find a profound psychological roadmap for genuine mental well-being. To Kierkegaard, the human being is a tension—a relation—between the body and the mind . Crucially, the"self" is not just the fact that you have a mind and a body; it is the activeMany of us live almost exclusively"from the neck up.
" We reside in our thoughts, our anxieties, and our cognitive plans, only noticing our feet when they hurt or our bodies when they break down. Kierkegaard’s definition challenges this fragmentation. He suggests that selfhood is an ongoing, embodied feedback loop. To have a healthy self is to be fully present to how your mind and body cohere, balancing your immediate physical reality with the continuous flow of your psychological life.
When we lose touch with this internal relationship, we fall into what Kierkegaard calls"despair"—the true"sickness unto death.
": job titles, social prestige, wealth, or relationship status. Kierkegaard could be notoriously harsh toward those who built their lives entirely on social importance. To him, the despair people feel when they lose a corporate title or a prestigious position is shallow, because it reveals a terrifying truth: without the title, they are forced to sit alone with themselves..
This is not a pathological guilt to be medicated away; it is a sign of"bad faith"—the psychological toll of selling out who we could become for the sake of who society wants us to be.. True subjectivity means taking life—not yourself—seriously. It means acknowledging your past while remaining passionately open to the future. Ultimately, Kierkegaard reminds us that we cannot find a master plan for life before we start walking.
The existential challenge is to cultivate theThe Best Ways to Begin AgainSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back?
Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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