This form of despair is: in despair not to will to be oneself. Or even lower: in despair not to will to be a self. Or lowest of all, in despair to will to be someone else, to wish for a new self. Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it cannot recognize itself and therefore generally ends in fantasy. When immediacy despairs, it does not even have enough self to wish or dream that it had become that which it has not become. The man of immediacy helps himself in another way: he wishes to be someone else. This is easily verified by observing immediate persons; when they are in despair, there is nothing they desire more than to have been someone else or to become someone else. In any case, it is difficult to keep from smiling at one who despaired in this way, who, humanly speaking and despite being in despair, is so very innocent. As a rule, one who despaired in this way is very comical. Imagine a self (and next to God there his nothing as eternal as a self), and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might become someone other–than itself. And yet one in despair in this way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be accomplished as easily as one changes clothes. The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities (here again the infinitely comical). There is hardly a more ludicrous mistake, for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality. So when the externals have completely changed for the person of immediately and he has despaired, he goes one step further; he thinks something like this, it becomes his wish: What if I became someone else, got myself a new self. Well, what if he did become someone else? I wonder whether he would recognize himself. . . When the man of immediacy despairs, it is impossible to give a true description of him outside of the comic; if I may put it this way, it is already something of a feat to speak in that jargon about a self and about despair. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, pp. 53 – 55.