Books and Life #5: The Human Lost Within Themselves: The Book of Disquiet and Passing Through Life Without Living

A human being wants to know themselves. They try to understand why they think this way, why they make the same mistakes, and why they can never truly be happy. They replay what happened to them over and over in their mind; they speak the words they failed to say, calculate the outcomes of decisions they never made, and wander through lives that have not yet been lived. While doing all this, they believe they are getting closer to themselves.

What if the exact opposite is happening?

What if the time we spend trying to understand ourselves causes us to drift away from our own lives? What if, while trying to decipher the meaning of everything we experience, we miss the experience itself? Have we grown accustomed to analyzing an emotion rather than living it, pondering the possibilities of a decision rather than making it, and questioning what a life means instead of simply being inside it?

Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet stands precisely at such a place. This is not a book that tells us what we must do; rather, it shows us what kind of world a person's own mind can transform into. Moreover, when we reach for the door to exit this world, we realize that the key is still in our own hands. The trouble is that a person sometimes does not even want to open the door.

Bernardo Soares, at the center of Pessoa’s text, leads an ordinary life in Lisbon. He is an assistant bookkeeper. He goes to work, deals with accounts, walks through the same streets, and returns to the same rooms. From the outside, his life holds no great events worth recounting. Yet what takes place within his mind leaves all the motion of the outer world far behind.

At this point, a question inevitably comes to mind: What must happen for a life to be considered fully lived?

Traveling, loving, succeeding, producing things, making grand decisions? Is the richness of a life determined by the number of events we can list when telling its story? Or is our inner life the one no one sees and that has no entry on a calendar the very essence of our life?

Soares’s world offers no easy answers to these questions. His daily life is small; his inner world is vast. Yet this vastness does not have to be a liberating one. The mind can grow as vast as a country, yet a person may still not take a single step within it.

Someone who appears to do nothing from the outside can live countless lives within themselves. They ponder a possibility, wander through it, and move on to another. They imagine what an unlived life might be like, and then abandon that dream as well. While not a single real door has opened in the actual world, they have passed through hundreds of doors in their mind.

Thus, a person becomes both the owner and the spectator of their own life. In fact, after a while, being a spectator starts to feel safer than entering into life.

Because while thinking, we hold the control over possibilities. While living, the world intervenes.

Let us imagine we are about to make a decision. Several paths lie before us. We calculate what each will bring, what it will cost, and how it will change us. We want to avoid making the wrong choice. We believe that if we think just a little longer, we will find the right path.

Yet as the number of possibilities increases, making a decision does not become easier. On the contrary, every path we do not choose turns into a separate life within our mind. When we choose one, we will have forsaken the others. Whereas when we have not yet decided, all of them remain possible. There is a strange freedom in having closed no doors at all.

Perhaps the reason we postpone certain decisions is not that we do not know what to do, but that we do not want to let go of the other possibilities.

As long as we do not choose, all lives seem to belong to us. Yet we never truly inhabit any of the unlived possibilities. They merely persist within our minds. And so, to avoid taking responsibility for choosing a single life, we leave life itself in the waiting room.

Reading Pessoa’s disquiet merely as unhappiness is therefore incomplete. Part of this stems from the human being multiplying within their own consciousness, yet having this multiplication keep them paralyzed from action. Thinking about how something might happen sometimes becomes more appealing than its actual occurrence. What actually happens is limited; what is imagined has not yet faced any test.

In real life, when we love someone, we also witness their ordinariness, their flaws, and the days they remain indifferent to us. The person we love in our imagination can be stripped of all these. When we want to go somewhere, there is the fatigue of the journey, the expense, and unexpected mishaps. In our journey through the mind, we can erase all of these. When we embark on a venture, there is the possibility of failure. While dreaming, we have not failed yet.

Thus, to avoid confronting the flaws of life, we may begin to live in a flawless draft of it.

Yet a strange thing happens to drafts: No matter how long we work on them, they do not transform into life on their own.

Questioning oneself is certainly not a flaw. Living without ever pondering what one is doing, why one is doing it, what one defends, or what one is turning into can also alienate a person from their own life. The issue is not whether to think or not to think, but the place of thought in our lives.

When we look back to understand ourselves, we can give meaning to our experiences. But if we feel compelled to explain every single experience the moment we live it, we are doing something else entirely. We are constantly observing ourselves from the outside, monitoring our own behavior, categorizing our emotions, and trying to make sense of what we feel the exact millisecond we feel it.

We might find ourselves listening to ourselves in the middle of a conversation. While replying to someone, we might be thinking about how our response looks; in the middle of a moment of happiness, we might be questioning whether our happiness is genuine enough. Sometimes we even ask ourselves: Am I truly happy, or do I just think I am happy?

Sometimes this question is necessary. Yet if it surfaces in the middle of every beautiful moment, a person can turn into the auditor of their own happiness. Instead of enjoying what they experience, they begin checking whether they are enjoying it or not.

After a point, a distance forms between a person and themselves. They know a great deal about themselves, but they cannot comfortably reside within themselves. They recognize their emotions, but cannot surrender to them. They can narrate their life, but forget what it means to actually be inside it.

This is one of the things that makes me reflect in Pessoa’s text: Consciousness does not merely bring a person closer to themselves. Sometimes our consciousness turns into the greatest distance placed between us and ourselves.

Throughout the history of philosophy, questioning oneself has been seen as one of the paths to liberation. Yet here we encounter another possibility: While trying to understand themselves, a person can close in upon themselves. They can enter a cycle where every thought breeds a new thought, and every explanation demands another explanation. Knowing oneself turns into an endless project.

Moreover, the day of completion for this project never arrives. Because a person is just as much the one being observed as they are the observer. Every time we look at ourselves, the very act of our looking becomes part of the equation. It is impossible for us to view ourselves entirely from the outside.

Perhaps we need to abandon the idea that a person must fully and completely understand themselves. We do not have to find the reason behind every behavior, resolve every contradiction, or utter the final word about who we are. Sometimes things about a person may remain unknown. Sometimes an emotion can be lived without being explained.

Knowing oneself is not the same thing as subjecting oneself to an endless examination.

Soares’s life also prompts us to consider another unsettling matter: The absence of grand events does not mean the absence of life. Yet it is also possible to use the absence of grand events as an excuse.

A person sometimes blames conditions for an unlived life. The right time has not arrived, a suitable place has not been found, funds are insufficient, the right person has not appeared. All of these may genuinely be obstacles. Ignoring the material conditions of life is just as misleading as placing human will above all else.

Yet it is also possible that when one obstacle is removed, another appears. Because sometimes the issue is not the conditions, but our unwillingness to face what we would do if those conditions changed.

I have no wish to easily turn Pessoa into a self-help prescription here. Nor would it be right to belittle Soares’s life. An ordinary life is not valueless simply because it is ordinary. Not everyone needs to achieve great deeds, travel to distant lands, or possess an extraordinary story. A person can lead a meaningful life without ever drawing the world's attention.

The real issue is not whether our life is glamorous or not, but what kind of relationship we hold with it.

A person can walk down the same street for years and see something new on that street every single day. Another can travel half the world and never truly be anywhere. One person's life may look small from the outside while expanding from within; another's life may be full of events yet pass by without ever touching them.

Thus, the magnitude of a life cannot be measured solely by what happens to us. But neither can we measure the richness of our inner world by pretending we have lived things we never experienced.

The distinction between the two is vital. Imagination can widen the possibilities of our living. Yet when it takes the place of living, it can also give us the illusion of a life we do not possess.

Disquiet is not always something we wish to be rid of. Sometimes it protects us. It stands in front of a decision, ensures we do not rush, and makes us notice when something is going wrong. Sometimes it announces that we must change.

Yet there are times when we turn disquiet itself into an identity. To be the person who constantly thinks, who never truly belongs anywhere, who is never satisfied with ordinary things, who cannot stop questioning themselves and the world—after a while, this becomes not just a state of being, but the very way we define ourselves.

Even finding peace can make such a person uneasy. Because peace seems as though it would strip away the mental restlessness they have grown accustomed to. They might fear losing their depth if questions diminish, or betraying themselves if they accept things as they are.

Yet peace is not always the cessation of thought. Sometimes it is learning to live with a question without finding its answer. Sometimes it is remaining within something without trying to decode all of its meaning. Sometimes it is accepting that life is far greater than our thoughts about it.

This is why I find it meaningful to read Pessoa’s text not merely as an expression of pessimism, but as a work exploring the boundaries of the relationship a person builds with their own mind. In Soares’s world, thought is both a sanctuary and a trap. A person retreats inside to protect themselves from the ordinariness of the world; yet when they stay there too long, they lose the ability to know what life outside might offer them.

Perhaps disquiet stems not only from what we lack, but from our unwillingness to completely let go of any single possibility. Choosing one life requires relinquishing the possibility of other lives. Settling in one place leaves behind the lives we could have lived elsewhere. Bonding with someone closes the door to the potential of other kinds of relationships. Embarking on a venture reduces the opportunity to dedicate our time to other things.

Is freedom keeping all possibilities open forever? Or is it giving reality to a single one by letting go of some possibilities?

This question may not have the same answer for everyone. But it is clear that being inside a life requires choosing things and leaving certain things behind. While trying to keep every door open, we may end up passing through none of them.

Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet makes me think less about how short life is, and more about how little we are actually able to inhabit life.

Because a person's years consist of more than just calendar pages. Years are made of moments where we truly reside, decisions we make, consequences we endure, relationships we build, and sometimes the things we lacked the courage to do. Our unlived possibilities belong to us too; but not in the same way the life we live does.

Perhaps our greatest delusion is thinking that one day we will understand ourselves completely, solve all our questions, and only then begin to live. As if life were an exam for which we must first complete our preparations. First we will know ourselves, overcome our fears, make the right decisions, and know definitively what we want. Then we will begin.

Yet even when that day arrives, the uncertainties inherent in being human will not vanish. New questions, new fears, new possibilities will rise before us. The life we waited for in order to know ourselves may well have slipped away while we were waiting.

We cannot pit a simple suggestion against this like "stop thinking." Thinking is an essential part of a person's relationship with themselves and the world. Sometimes we need to step back, observe, and try to understand. But when we allow thought to stop being a tool that prepares us for life and instead let it take the place of life itself, we can get lost within our own minds.

Perhaps what we must do is consent to living without waiting to understand everything. To make decisions knowing we might make the wrong ones. To partake in something without unlocking its entire meaning. To keep changing without uttering the final word about ourselves.

A human being is not merely composed of what they think. They are human also through the sides they cannot comprehend, cannot explain, and sometimes cannot even confess to themselves. We can live without fully solving ourselves. Perhaps what we call living is precisely what remains outside this never-ending endeavor of decoding.

Pessoa’s disquiet does not end here. Perhaps it does not need to end, either. Some books do not show us the way out; they make us notice the walls of the room we inhabit. The Book of Disquiet makes us ponder how a person can build a room within their own consciousness and, while watching the world from its window, how they place a distance between themselves and the life outside.

And a question remains behind, one that cannot be easily answered:

Are we living life in order to understand ourselves, or are we trying to understand ourselves in order to postpone living life?

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