Leap: Why you feel like shit in a world of abundance

There’s a strange hollowness that creeps in when everything is going well. You’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing—eating well, exercising, hitting your goals, watching your serotonin-friendly shows. And yet: flatness. A sense that your life has been optimised into oblivion. This is the paradox of the modern world: we are surrounded by comfort, pleasure, and endless encouragement to enjoy—and yet many of us feel hollowed out.

Why?

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw this way back in the 19th century. He warned that an age obsessed with reflection, distraction, and detached cleverness would lead not to enlightenment, but to existential despair. He called it “The Present Age”—an age not of passion, but of clever detachment. People no longer do anything; they discuss endlessly, weigh up the options, make ironic comments, and hedge their bets. Everything becomes a topic for reflection, debate, or satire. Sound familiar?

Think Twitter. Think YouTube reaction videos. Think dating apps, where you can browse people like items in a catalogue and ghost them with zero consequences. Infinite choice. Zero commitment. Paralysis disguised as freedom.

We are told, endlessly, to be happy. That life is about finding enjoyment, maximising pleasure, and avoiding discomfort. If you’re not happy, there’s something wrong. The modern world encourages us to float above life, to observe it from a safe distance, to theorise and strategise instead of acting. The result is that we never truly engage. We never throw ourselves into anything. We stay weightless, option-rich, and empty.

But Kierkegaard offers something far more demanding and far more honest: that meaning—not happiness—is the real substance of a life well lived. And meaning rarely arrives gift-wrapped in pleasure. It often looks like commitment. Struggle. Depth. Sometimes, suffering.

A life lived in pursuit of enjoyment alone quickly becomes absurd. It hollows itself out. You become what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic person—someone who flits from pleasure to pleasure, avoiding any real confrontation with who they are or what truly matters. Eventually, this life implodes. Anxiety creeps in. Meaning becomes elusive. And no amount of “dopamine detox” or new productivity hacks can cover up the sense that you’re skating on the surface of something much deeper.

Kierkegaard believed the path to meaning isn’t found through rational planning or intellectual clarity. It’s found in existential commitment. Not applying a moral formula, but orienting your life toward something that calls to you—something ultimate. And doing so without smug certainty, but with trembling risk. You don’t get meaning by analysing your values in a spreadsheet. You get it by living as if something matters—really matters—even though you don’t know if it does.

Kierkegaard talks a lot about faith, but not in the Sunday school sense. He doesn’t mean blind belief in doctrines—or in a floating man in the sky. His version of faith is far more demanding—and far more honest.

Faith, for Kierkegaard, means understanding that things might not work out. That the thing you care about could fall apart. That you might give everything and still lose. That there’s no guarantee, no safety net, no ultimate reassurance. And that you act anyway.

It’s not certainty. It’s not comfort. It’s the leap: throwing yourself into something knowing full well that it could all be for nothing. It’s believing in the absurd—that something which seems impossible might still be true, not because logic says so, but because your life demands that you live as if it matters.

We often want reassurance before we move. We want to know for sure that the person we’re falling in love with is “the one”—that they’ll never leave, never disappoint us, never make us question everything. But love doesn’t offer that kind of clarity. You can wait for certainty forever and miss the thing entirely. To love is to leap.

Or we look at the climate crisis and feel paralysed—what could one person’s actions possibly change? What’s the point of doing anything when the scale of the problem is so overwhelming? But Kierkegaard would say: that’s exactly the point. To act, knowing it might not work. To choose meaning over certainty. To do the thing even when you can’t know what it will add up to.

It means acting out your deepest commitments in a world that gives you no guarantees. You’re not searching for some objective capital-T Truth that everyone must agree on. You’re cultivating what he calls “subjective truth”—a mode of living that’s passionately aligned with what grips you. Not what you think you should care about. What you actually do.

Faith doesn’t eliminate doubt. It coexists with it. You live inside the paradox. You commit, knowing you might lose. You care, knowing it might hurt. And you keep going—not because you’re promised a reward, but because life without that leap is weightless and numb.

You climb mountains. You play music. You become a parent. You nurse someone you love through disease. You teach, you build, you show up. These things might not always bring joy in the conventional sense. But they bring weight. Texture. Meaning. And none of them can be done ironically or half-heartedly. They require presence. Investment. Vulnerability.

Posturing ourselves in this way offers a kind of freedom through giving up on happiness as a goal. Not because happiness is bad. But because chasing it makes it more elusive. Meaning is a byproduct of commitment. And commitment often means discomfort. Friction. Staying when it’s easier to leave. Showing up when it would be simpler to check out.

That kind of inward commitment isn’t a free pass to do whatever you want. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith isn’t about ego or self-expression—it’s about living in radical responsibility to something that grips you, even if no one else understands it.

Kierkegaard famously wrote that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” And maybe that’s the price we pay for a meaningful life: a willingness to live with that dizziness—to stop floating above your life and fall into it.

To risking something. To choose a path and walk it, even when you’re unsure. By letting go of the fantasy that you can optimise your way to a life without risk, pain or suffering. And by remembering that the deepest things often don’t feel good in the moment—but feel right when you look back.

Happiness is retrospective. Meaning is lived forward.