Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym Tank Top

During my junior year of high school, I spent a weeknight cruising East Fourteenth—the gritty artery that runs through San Leandro and Hayward—until one in the morning. I was in the passenger seat of Martino’s tomato red Ranchero, the two of us flexing imaginary muscles and real teenage bravado. Martino was my bodybuilding partner, my brother-in-biceps, and together we patrolled the boulevard like suburban centurions on a mission to kill time. And we succeeded.

When I finally crept back into my house under the cover of darkness, I wasn’t met by a parent’s scolding. No raised voices. No lectures. Just a deafening moral hangover. A private throb of guilt that came from inside—the inner thermostat dialed to “waste detected.”

That night, the dissonance hit me hard: I had thrown away hours of my finite life, not with rebellion or passion, but with asphalt apathy. 

Some people never feel that throb. For them, life is a sandbox without rules. Morality is performative, calculated just enough to avoid arrest or awkward silences. These are the functional nihilists—those for whom nothing is sacred, so nothing is squandered. There are no stakes, no salvation, no damnation. No trembling because there’s nothing to tremble about.

But Kierkegaard wouldn’t have cruised East Fourteenth. He’d have stayed home, in existential dread, kneeling before the void, trying to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. Not a metaphor. A mandate. A gun-to-the-temple kind of urgency.

And that gun? I’ve felt it every morning. Not the literal kind, but a cold steel thought pressing behind the eyes: Work or be worthless. Create or decay. Hustle or rot. I didn’t coast through college because I loved knowledge. I ground through it because I feared poverty, failure, and the humiliation of becoming a soft tomato with four toothpicks sticking out—Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym tank top.

Fear built my body. But can fear build a soul?

That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Muscles are visible. Measurable. The soul, by contrast, is a ghost that flinches from mirrors. What makes a good soul? Is it, as philosopher Elizabeth Anderson suggests, acts of reciprocal kindness—a kind of moral evolution, godless but decent? Or do we still need to shake in our boots, to feel that Kierkegaardian quake that says tend to the soul or become monstrous?

Then there’s modern self-care, the secular sacrament of our time. Meditation, hydration, positive affirmations—pampering routines dressed up as spiritual growth. But is self-care just aromatherapy for the abyss? What if the soul needs something harder than scented candles?

And what of the artist, the compulsive maker? Is the act of creating a form of salvation—or just another idol, a beautiful golden calf carved in your own image?

Forgive me. I’m in my sixties now. The questions don’t resolve; they just echo louder. I know indulgence makes me miserable and discipline brings fleeting peace. But that’s not the kind of salvation Kierkegaard meant. That’s just emotional maintenance.

So I remain agnostic, trembling not from conviction, but from having more questions than answers.