Tag Archive for: wellbeing

The New Platform for Finding Your True Self

When considering your next career move, it’s easy to define yourself by your resume – you studied to be a math teacher, you are a math teacher, and you will continue to be. This is a comfortable place to remain, and that plays a huge role in why so many of us do. Nineteenth Century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard refers to this limiting state as being ‘lost in the finite’.

At some point, however, whether it’s driven by a curious thought, change in the job market or midlife crisis, you may realize once again that you are a free human being who could pursue anywhere from a slightly to drastically new career at any moment. If you take this thought even a little seriously, you could very quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the options available to you and the countless consequences of each, just as petrified as before. Kierkegaard refers to this state as being ‘lost in the infinite’. He calls the anxiety induced the ‘dizziness of freedom’, and I think we can agree that he lived in a significantly simpler time. 

While both states lead to despair, Kierkegaard suggests that the acknowledgement of one’s own freedom can be productive for pursuing one’s life, goals, and, eventually, true self, “Anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go,” (Kierkegaard 1844).

Existentialist psychologist Rollo May comments further on Kierkegaard’s point, “creating involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living,” (May 1977).

If your passion is teaching math, and you can find a way to do it while leading a satisfying life, that’s fantastic. Still, the only way you could truly know is to be aware of your own freedom and consciously choose that path over the others available. So where should you go to better understand the future of work, especially when you don’t know what exactly you are looking for? There is nothing more overwhelming and unproductive than Google searching when you don’t know what there is to be learned or being bombarded by random, out-of-context, and incomplete tidbits of information on social media.

Enter Hunome. Hunome is a platform for generating collective, multidimensional insights. We aren’t hoping to eradicate an age-old philosophical dilemma. We have, however, taken part in enough interesting conversations to know that you and the unique individuals not-so-like-you have a lot of incredible ideas on pretty much every issue affecting us as humans. Those conversations have already been lost to the air, but it’s not too late for the next ones to happen in a place that will help so many more people benefit from them (even more so than before).

Hunome is the space which allows people of all backgrounds to organically think together. All thoughts on a theme can be found in a single place where they sit in the order in which they were originally thought. But you are free to navigate them as you please, see their ideas in a new light, and contribute your perspective.

We call these thoughts Sparks and where they live, SparkMaps.

Example of a part of a SparkMap.

We built Hunome so that important insights about how human thoughts vary can be analysed. For instance, we can make more obvious for you the variety of perspectives, what seems to be emerging, where agreement and disagreement lie, and why. After all, Kierkegaard said that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” While we at Hunome believe that understanding can be reached at any moment, relfection reveals a valuable new perspective.

Hunome facilitates growth as you face your raw freedom and search for answers rather than simple solutions. Contact us or sign up today and take a step towards actualising your true self.

Works Cited

“A Short Note on Kierkegaard and Dizziness.” On-Dizziness, Anderwald + Grond, 15 Sept. 2018, https://www.on-dizziness.com/resources-overview/kierkegaard-and-dizziness. 

Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855. The Concept of Anxiety : a Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Princeton, N.J. :Princeton University Press, 1980.

May, R. (1977). The meaning of anxiety (Rev. ed.). W W Norton & Co.