This reflection is inspired by Søren Kierkegaard’s writings on despair, suffering, and the self.

This morning I woke up and began the day the same way I did yesterday.

Nothing unusual. No crisis. Just repetition.

As soon as I opened my eyes, my cat greeted me with a long, demanding miaaavvv! — as if she were asking why I was still asleep. It felt as though she knew exactly when I was supposed to get up, as if time itself had expectations of me.

While getting out of bed, a thought crossed my mind:

Imagine this life when you retire, Suzette.

Waking up whenever you want. No alarms. No rush. Letting the cat grow impatient because you choose to stay in bed longer.

At first, the thought almost amused me. The image of my future self sleeping in while my cat grows increasingly offended by my laziness made me smile. There was something comforting in imagining a life without schedules or constant demands.

But the thought didn’t stay light for long.

Almost immediately, another voice followed:

But wait — what if you’re sick by then? What if you’re broke? Alone?

What if you don’t even have savings for retirement, and therefore cannot afford a cat at all?

In that moment, freedom transformed into anxiety.

Slowly, the thought deepened. Freedom began to feel fragile — conditional on health, money, and the presence of others. I realized how easily the image of rest could turn into an image of isolation.

That was when I remembered something a friend once told me:

Life on earth is hard. It is painful. It is full of suffering.

At the time, I had brushed it aside. But this morning, it stayed with me.

I began to wonder:

What if the moment when I am finally free from the busy workplace is also the moment when my body can no longer participate in that freedom?

What if rest arrives together with illness — or loneliness?

Then another memory surfaced.

I remembered being close to someone who was suffering physically. I had witnessed how his body gradually became a burden rather than a home. One day, without anger or drama, he told me that it was over — that his body could no longer endure it.

I remember crying. I remember telling him that we had fought together, that we could continue together.

But I will never forget his answer.

It is over. I have had a good life. And you have been one of the most important parts of it. But the pain is unbearable — and the pain I cause to my family is too great. So now, it is over.

There was no despair in his voice. Only clarity.

Yet the suffering was unmistakable.

That memory changed everything. My earlier worries about retirement, freedom, and loneliness were no longer abstract. They were suddenly tied to the vulnerability of existence itself — not only emotionally, but physically.

I realized then that suffering is not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it appears quietly — in ordinary mornings, in imagined futures, or in remembered words that refuse to fade.

This is what Søren Kierkegaard calls existential despair.

For Kierkegaard, despair does not necessarily arise from external misfortune. One can have routines, stability, even moments of humor — and still suffer deeply. Despair arises from how we relate to ourselves over time.

He describes the self as “a relation that relates itself to itself.” We live in tension: between freedom and limitation, possibility and necessity, body and spirit. This tension cannot be resolved — only lived.

My thoughts about retirement reflected this conflict. Freedom appeared side by side with vulnerability. The future felt less like a promise and more like uncertainty.

This was not fear of something specific. It was existential suffering — the awareness of time, finitude, and fragility.

Yet Kierkegaard does not see this suffering as meaningless. On the contrary, it reveals something essential: to be human is to be exposed — to time, to choice, to loss, and to responsibility.

That morning, between my cat’s impatient cry and my quiet reflections, I did not experience despair as a collapse. I experienced it as recognition.

And perhaps that is the quiet truth Kierkegaard offers us:

existential suffering does not begin when everything falls apart — but when we begin to understand what it means to exist.