Nirvana's School and Your Own Existential Malaise

On Nirvana's Bleach album, Kurt Cobain sings of school sans recess. "Won't you believe it, it's just my luck," Kurt recites in reuttered repetition (reoccuring, but rejecting redundancy), conveying the message of being fucked over by circumstances outside of his own control. A constant process of so-called learning devoid of any breaks. Enter the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard (1813-1855) posits that we are constantly and consistently in the condition of angst, which is that nagging feeling that makes you feel like shit due to your responsibilities in relation to your own principles and the expectations of others. Angst is more than something superficially conveyed through My Chemical Romance tunes. It's something that affects our beings and choices whether or not we're aware of it. We have x amount of time to do y amount of z, and then we die. As it was with old video games like Ms. Pac-Man or Space Invaders, the object of the game is to get as high a score as is attainable until the inevitable GAME OVER. Furthermore, you're out of quarters. Yes, Dear Reader, the end is indeed imminent. Why are you wasting this irreplaceable time reading this paragraph when you could be wasting this irreplaceable time looking at pornography? You're already online; you should fucking do it. Better yet, why not spend time with those who mean more than two shits to you?

Still reading? How pitiful. Let's go back to Cobain's aforementioned verse, "won't you believe it, it's just my luck." Do we make our own destinies, or are we subject to where and when we're born in addition to our genealogy and circumstances? As the only cool Nazi, Martin Heidegger, would have it,whatever your stance on the free-will debate, you're still thrown into the circumstances of your being.

You're in high school again. Next lesson, we'll discuss the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre to discover how they think we can move past the angst that endlessly plagues us. Here's a hint: power, care, and being yourself (respectively).