2026-06-07 / philosophy, algorithms, modern life

The Sickness of the Open Tab: What Kierkegaard Already Told Us About the Algorithm

Tell me one thing. How many browser tabs do you have open right now?

Count them honestly. Twenty? Forty? On the phone there are at least eleven more, no. One is a course on writing you bookmarked at 1am. Another is a job posting in Berlin. A third is a podcast called "How I Quit Software And Started A Bakery." Somewhere is a Notion page where you wrote "MBA?" and never returned. And the one tab you do not want to look at, your actual job's dashboard, blinking quietly in the corner.

Each tab is a life you said maybe to.

About 170 years back, a strange Danish man called Søren Kierkegaard already wrote down what is happening to you when you keep that 47th tab open. In The Sickness Unto Death he put it this way: "The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all."

The Design Of Modern Distraction

Modern recommendation systems are not designed to help you find. They are designed to make sure you keep finding.

A good librarian helps you find one book and leaves you alone with it. The Instagram feed, the YouTube sidebar, Substack discovery, LinkedIn "people you may know," the dating app you swore last week you would delete. None of these are librarians. The opposite, in fact. Their job is to make sure the book you just opened is never finished, because behind it sits another one, stacked up infinity high.

ChatGPT will give you fifteen possible career pivots in thirty seconds. You can ask it to imagine your life in Bangalore, Lisbon, Berlin, Goa, all before lunch. You feel productive doing this. You are not. You are only multiplying the tabs.

Possibility Is Not Freedom

When you hear "you can be anything," you feel a small lift. People take this for freedom. Wrong reading. That little lift is the disease in its early form. Kierkegaard had a phrase for it in The Concept of Anxiety: "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." The more options stretching out in front of you, the dizzier you get.

His larger idea, written in dense headache-giving prose (but bear with me, the man earned his complications), is that the self is not a thing you have. It is a thing you become. The becoming happens through choosing, meaning actually closing some doors, not the modern hobby of browsing forever waiting to see what shows up next month.

Real choice has one particular property. It closes things. Say yes to becoming a doctor, you are saying no, in the same breath, to the sculptor and the fisherman and that man on a canal in Lisbon with a cat called Pessoa. The modern person keeps the doors open and calls this "optionality." In Kierkegaard's exact technical sense, he is not yet a self. The self has been postponed.

The postponement does not feel like nothing. It feels like that low, humming anxiety you feel at 11pm when the apartment is too quiet. The feeling is not random. It is the bill arriving for the self you keep refusing to become.

Three Stages Of A Life

In Either/Or, Kierkegaard sketches three stages of a human life. The plain version:

The aesthetic stage. You live by taste, mood, and whatever is interesting today. Charming, well-read, well-travelled, good music recommendations. Everything gets sampled, cities, careers, relationships, philosophies. Nothing gets kept. Probably the most photographed life of our time. Kierkegaard's own line on this: "Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."

The ethical stage. You take on weight. You marry the person and stay through the boring years. You take the job and stay past the boring middle. You make promises and keep them on the days you would rather not. Less interesting at dinner parties. Also the person you call at 2am when something has gone wrong.

The religious stage. Modern readers usually want to skip this one. Do not skip. Strip the Christian vocabulary off if you must. The thing he is pointing at is that at some point even being ethical by community standards stops being enough. You have to make a leap that is only yours. Faith here has nothing to do with believing in supernatural things. It means staking your one life on a particular yes, with no proof the yes will be rewarded.

Look at your friends. Look at yourself. Most of us are stuck firmly in stage one. We are 31 and 35 and 41 and still "figuring it out." The algorithm has not even let us see that stage two exists.

A Quiet Despair

The sickness Kierkegaard names in The Sickness Unto Death is despair. But not in the everyday meaning of the word. No crying into pillows here. The despair he writes about is much quieter. It is the despair of the person who has 47 tabs open, a Notion page called "Life Plan v9," and a hundred future versions of himself he has not committed to.

The most dangerous form, he says, is the form where the person does not know he is in despair. He thinks he is simply busy. He thinks he is being smart, modern, optimising, hedging, exploring. Twenty years go by. He has not become anyone. He has only browsed.

Ghosting Ourselves

The younger people have a word now. Ghosting. Usually it means one person disappearing on another mid-sentence. The more I watch people, though, the more it seems the other-people version is just one small case of something much bigger. Mostly, what we are ghosting is our own lives.

A friend of mine has been "about to start" his PhD thesis for four years. He has a Notion database, has read the literature twice. He is not starting because the moment he starts, the thesis becomes one specific thesis, and the other twenty possible theses in his head will quietly die. He is ghosting the writer he said he would be at 26.

An old college batchmate keeps switching cities every 18 months. Mumbai, Dubai, Singapore, Lisbon, now Bali. Each move is described as growth. What is actually being escaped is the next 18 months of being whoever the last city was about to make him.

I have done my own version of this. For a long stretch I was the man with seventeen open side-projects on a Trello board, each feeling like a more attractive future than the actual work in front of me. It took years to admit, quietly, that the side-projects were not where I was going. They were where I was hiding.

The algorithm helps us do all this with a clean conscience, because the algorithm always has one more new thing. A new course, a new framework, a new city. The older commitment can always be ghosted, gently, on the grounds of "growth."

The person you ghost, in the end, is yourself.

Engagement Is Postponed Commitment

Tristan Harris and the people at the Center for Humane Technology have been making this case for years: every recommendation system you use is engineered around one single business metric. Engagement. Engagement, when you look at it honestly, is just another name for postponed commitment.

Commit to one career and go deep, you stop searching. The job board has lost you. Commit to one writer for ten years, you stop scrolling discovery. The platform has lost you. Commit to one teacher, one craft, one city, one philosophy, and the entire algorithm has nothing left to sell. The industry's revenue depends on you staying exactly where Kierkegaard's aesthetic person stayed. Tasting. Sampling. Refusing to close anything.

Their product is your indecision. The content is bait that keeps the indecision going. Kierkegaard called it a sickness of the soul. The engineers in San Francisco call it a business model. Same beast, different uniform.

Closing Tabs

So what to do. Honestly I do not have a clean answer, and any man who hands you one is selling you another tab.

Kierkegaard's word for the way out is "the leap." You cannot make it on the basis of complete information. Wait until you are sure, you will never leap. You will only browse the leap. Forty-one tabs of leap research, no actual leap.

In ordinary unphotographable life, the leap is small. Close some tabs. Not all, some. Pick a career and stay past the boring middle, the part where the early dopamine is gone and the mastery has not yet arrived. Take up a craft and do it badly for ten years until one day you do it well. Choose a city and let it become home, with all its small irritations and old aunties and bad traffic and the familiar chaiwala who already knows how you take your chai. Choose a few people and commit to being their person.

Become someone by saying no to all the other people you could have been. Most of your potential selves have to die for one of them to actually live. The algorithm cannot afford to tell you this; its whole business is keeping every one of those potential selves on life support, at a small monthly cost.

Kierkegaard himself never married, broke off his only engagement, lived alone, wrote books almost nobody read in his lifetime, and died at 42. He did not get every part of his own life right. He simply saw what most of us still cannot. In his journals: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

Close the tab. Pick a life.