The present age

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1. rublevSep 2016
   I'm not the guy you're asking, but I've spent some time 'in solitude' studying without an academic institution. I'd read philosophy books whenever I have down time. Consciously replacing entertainment with books works as well.

   Philosophy to me is less about studying philosophy itself as a topic but encountering different people's various personal philosophies about things. Kierkegaard's "The Present Age" and Glenn Gould's perspective on anxiety helped me a lot.

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2. 50May 2020
   One of the questions I was thinking about when I took that course on existentialism is why might religious existentialism be superior, for lack of a better word, than vanilla existentialism. Research on that question led me to an essay titled "The Other Side of Despair" by Thomas Merton [1]. It's a really good read that I think you'll like. I like the reference and analysis of Kierkegaard's idea of "leveling" - a process "by which the individual person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a public mind" - which is a lot like "alienation" in modern day. Which also reminds me, I should check out Kierkegaard's The Present Age.

   [1]: https://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/saturday...

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