Most people talk about despair as if it’s a mysterious shadow of the soul. Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, described it as the sickness of not being aligned with God—the clash between the finite (our limits) and the infinite (our longing for eternity). His cure was the leap of faith: only God could heal that split.
But I see despair differently. For me, despair is not always about infinity or faith. It’s about expectations—the invisible contracts we carry inside our minds. When those contracts are broken, despair slips in.
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The Roots of Despairing Expectations
1. Society – It pushes silent standards of what a “good life” should look like—money, status, happiness always on display. When life doesn’t line up, despair grows.
2. Schools (Rockefeller Effect) – Built to produce obedient workers, not free thinkers. Schools plant the expectation: “Success = fitting into the system.” Those who don’t fit are branded as failures, even when they’re just wired differently.
3. Commercials & Media – They sell illusions: buy this, look like this, achieve this, then you’ll be happy. When reality can’t cash that check, despair follows.
Together, these forces engineer despair. They create expectations not to empower us, but to control us.
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The Stages of Despair (Expectation Model)
• The Dreamer Stage (high expectations)
Always reaching for the perfect outcome. Every miss feels like failure. Motto: “It should have worked out better.”
• The Settler Stage (low or rigid expectations)
Lowering the bar to avoid pain, but ending up in stagnation. Motto: “This is just how it is.”
• The Hidden Contract Stage (unspoken expectations)
You don’t even know what contracts you’ve written in your head—until they break. Motto: “Why does this always happen to me?”
• The Captain Stage (rebalanced expectations)
You recognize expectations as tenants in your mind—they don’t get free rent. You steer them consciously: high enough to inspire, flexible enough to adjust. Motto: “I am the captain of my ship, I am the navigator of my future. Even though the waves of life may have pushed me off course, I will never stop steering back on.”
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Kierkegaard vs. My View
• Kierkegaard: Despair is existential. It comes from the clash of finite and infinite, and only God can heal it.
• My View: Despair is often engineered. It comes from mismatched expectations—most of them planted by society, schools, and media. The cure is not a leap of faith but a conscious steering of expectations.
Where Kierkegaard points upward toward faith, I point inward toward awareness and forward toward resilience.
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The Good Life
A good life isn’t about never missing the mark—it’s about refusing to quit steering. It’s not perfection, it’s persistence. And at the end, if you can say, “Yes, I made mistakes, but I did the best I could with the knowledge I had. I never acted out of malice,” then you’ve lived well.
I am the captain of my ship. I am the navigator of my future.