KIERKEGAARD: How To Avoid Boredom and Maximise Happiness

In Either/Or, Kierkegaard dedicates a chapter on the problem of boredom and the difficulty of maintaining happiness, and proposes his solution for it through the aesthetic sphere of existence.

To explain how one avoids boredom, the aesthete’s worst enemy, he proposes “crop rotation” as an attempt at a theory of social prudence. It is a sort of science of seeking pleasures characteristic of the reflective aesthete, and not mindlessly doing it as an unreflective aesthete, such as the legend of Don Juan.

This method can be done extensively or intensively. The aesthete proposes the intensive cultivation of pleasure as the means to avoid boredom, achieve pleasure and subsequently, happiness.

However at the end, it seems that the aesthete's way of approaching happiness is erroneous. For happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue.

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📚 Recommended Reading

▶ Either/Or (1843)
https://amzn.to/3dAg9YP
▶ Fear and Trembling (1843)
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▶ The Concept of Anxiety (1844)
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▶ Stages on Life's Way (1845)
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▶ The Present Age (1846)
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▶ The Sickness unto Death (1849)
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▶ The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849)
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⌛ Timestamps

0:00 Introduction
0:45 Boredom
5:10 Crop Rotation: Extensive Cultivation
6:33 Crop Rotation: Intensive Cultivation
7:35 Remembering and Forgetting
10:33 Arbitrariness
13:00 Conclusion

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📝 Sources

- Either/Or. Penguin Classics. Translated with an introduction by Alastair Hannay

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🎶 Music used (by Kevin MacLeod)

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2. Magic Forest
3. Evening Fall Harp

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