11/03/2025
This is deep and it’s something I’ve been pondering lately.
Either/Or: The Myth of the Golden Rule for Life
We grow up searching for formulas: the right way to live, to love, to choose. Every culture promises one: discipline over pleasure, pleasure over duty, reason over faith, faith over reason... Yet the older we grow, the more we sense that no path truly protects us from regret. For every road taken, there is another forever closed, and behind each conviction lies the whisper of its opposite.
Kierkegaard saw this with piercing clarity. In Either/Or, he explored two fundamental ways of living: the aesthetic and the ethical. The first seeks beauty, experience, intensity. The second pursues duty, morality, purpose. Both, he argued, are traps in their own way: the aesthete is haunted by emptiness, the moralist by rigidity. The tragedy is not that one is right and the other wrong, but that both are incomplete. There is no final synthesis that secures us against doubt or longing.
Modern life only amplifies this dilemma. We scroll through infinite options (careers, relationships, ideologies...) each promising fulfillment. Yet beneath the abundance lies a quiet fatigue, the exhaustion of beings who have too many possible selves. We want to live fully, yet every choice feels like a betrayal of the lives we didn’t choose.
Perhaps the lesson is not to keep searching for the “golden rule” that guarantees happiness, but to live with the tension itself and to understand that dissatisfaction is not failure but part of being human. It is the sign of a consciousness too large to be at peace with any single answer.
When you look at your own life’s crossroads, do you ever wonder whether the problem isn’t your choice but the belief that one choice could ever be enough?
Painting: 'Crossroad in a Wood', 1660 by Jan van der Heyden