The Cipher

I liked this other passage from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death regarding another loss of sense of self. This one is interesting to me because I have just recently come to know someone who fits this description. I otherwise would have never believed that this type of person existed, because it seems so odd to react to the uncertainty and risks of life by giving up one's sense of agency and power in exchange for the peaceful burden-free life of victimhood. (Probably because I reacted in the opposite way myself.)

Regarding the despair of weakness:

But the despair is essentially that of weakness, a passive experience; its form is, in despair at not wanting to be oneself.
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The despair of weakness is the despair of not wanting to be oneself. This kind of despair is a passivity of the self. It’s frame of reference is the pleasant and the unpleasant. What matter is what happens or does not happen to oneself. 

True despair is to lose the Eternal, but this kind of despair does not occur to the one who despairs in weakness. He is too preoccupied with securing his earthly existence. To lose the earthly is not true despair, yet that is precisely what this person calls despair. He is turned around and what he says must be understood backwards. He stands there pointing to something that is not really despair (a loss of some kind); he is explaining that he is in despair, and yes, sure enough, the despair is going on, but it is behind him and he is unaware of it. If everything suddenly changes and his wishes are fulfilled, then happiness returns to him. When help comes from outside happiness is restored to him and he begins where he left off. Yet he neither was nor becomes a self. He simply carries on living merely on the level of what is immediate and what is happening around him. 

This form of despair consists of not wanting to be a self. Actually, it consists of wanting to be someone else! Such a self refuses to take responsibility. Life is but a game of chance. Hence, in the moment of despair, when no help comes, such a person wants desperately to become someone else. And yet a despairer of this kind, whose only wish is the craziest of all wishes — to be someone else — is in love with a fancy that change can be made as easily as one puts on another coat. Or to put it differently, he knows himself only by his coat. He simply doesn’t know himself! He knows what it is to have a self only in externals. There could hardly be a more absurd confusion, for a self differs precisely, no infinitely, from those externals. It is impossible to draw a picture of him that is not comic.

"What if I were to become another, were to get myself a new self?" 

Yes, but if he did become another, I wonder if he would recognize himself again! It is related of a peasant who came cleanly shaven to the Capital, and had made so much money that he could buy himself a pair of shoes and stockings and still had enough left over to get drunk on -- it is related that as he was trying in his drunken state to find his way home he lay down in the middle of the highway and fell asleep. Then along came a wagon, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would run over his legs. Then the drunken peasant awoke, looked at his legs, and since by reason of the shoes and stockings he didn't recognize them, he said to the driver, "Drive on, they are not my legs." So in the case of the immediate man when he is in despair it is impossible to represent him truly without a touch of the comic.