I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
What would a released existence feel like? As I said earlier, nothing would change, and everything would change. It would look exactly like our ordinary life. Except it would be free. A relaxed, limpid openness between thinking and existence. If detachment from the suffering restlessness of the will could be maintained as a disposition, a mood, a quasi-musical attunement to things and persons, then perhaps we could find a condition of rest, a feeling of joy, even happiness, a bulwark against melancholy, weal against woe.
A released existence would be a condition of complete simplicity.
Mysticism, Simon Critchley
For the mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), Gelassenheit meant a spiritual letting-go, a release of the self’s will, desires, and attachments so that you can become open to the divine. It means “letting-be” or “letting-go-ness.” Eckhart thought that in order to receive God, a person must become empty of self in a kind of radical openness or detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) from all worldly striving. Gelassenheit, to Eckhart, is an interior state of surrender where the self releases control in order to participate in the divine.
Heidegger revives Gelassenheit in his later philosophy, especially in the post-war period, notably in his 1955 address “Discourse on Thinking.” He secularizes and ontologizes the term. For Heidegger, releasement means a letting-be of beings, a way of being that neither dominates nor manipulates the world through technology or calculation. He contrasts it with the modern will-to-control characteristic of technological thinking (Gestell, “enframing”).
Instead of trying to master or optimize everything, Heidegger proposes that human beings should cultivate:
- Releasement toward things (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen) — allowing beings to be what they are without imposing our purposes on them
- Openness to mystery (Offenheit fũr das Geheimnis) — a meditative stance that welcomes what cannot be fully known or controlled.
The goal is to restore a sense of wonder and humility before Being (Sein) itself. For Heidegger, this was not a theological or religious practice, but philosophical and existential.
In both Eckhart’s and Heidegger’s conceptions, releasement is the opposite of optimization or control. It is a freedom from the will not freedom of the will. It is not passivity but rather a readiness to receive what is and what unfolds. It is, in my philosophical framing, reckless rather than reckful.
On Day 92 (September 5, 2025), I considered what it might look like to set down ambition:
I’ve been wondering lately what it might look like if I set down my ambitions. What if I lived in joy and creativity without thinking about where it all might end up? What if I didn’t keep saying, to myself and here on this blog, I’m going to do X.
I also wrote:
I sense in my own life and maybe that of other people’s a new flavor or fragrance in the wind: a wish to live more simply and frugally, a desire to get off social media entirely, an urge to give up the activities I’ve been doing just in case they pay off with a job or important networking contacts for the future.
In every era, there are people who want to withdraw from the busyness of life and from attention to meaningless things like endless consumption of stuff or, in the modern era, vapid online content. So I may just be noticing other people wanting to do this right now because I want to do it, not because there is some new tendency towards it.
But there was a recent article the end of our extremely online era, by Tommy Dixon, that went viral. He writes:
I think we’re at the precipice of a technological revolution.
I think this whole smartphone scrolling, content consuming, prolific posting, all day everyday screen time, being extremely online thing is going to fade.
I’m ready for this technological revolution. I’m not so sanguine as Dixon though. I’m not sure this is going to happen:
I think we will witness a reversal. As a culture, we will wake up to the fact social media is an addiction, engineered to drown us in more and more dopamine until we stop feeling entirely. We will unplug. And we will return to life.
Instead, I fear that instead of losing ourselves to doomscrolling social media, we will all turn into chatbot AI junkies.1
I see an overlap of ideas I’ve recently been thinking about, this concept of releasement along with my thoughts that maybe I don’t need to optimize my productivity, and, of course, my philosophy of recklessness.
What underlies these is a refusal of control along with a willingness to step into uncertainty, to act from desire or intuition rather than from calculation or fear. In my book, I am critiquing the emotional will-to-safety where Heidegger critiqued the technological will-to-order. The emotional will-to-safety is the modern, self-protective logic that brings risk management as the overarching approach to finding romance and building love.
Heidegger says that releasement doesn’t mean mere passivity; it’s an active letting-be. Similarly, my recklessness isn’t a naive self-abandonment but includes reckful awareness than true intimacy requires exposure and risk. In either case, you must walk a razor’s edge:
- Too much willfulness, and you fall into control and calculation
- Too much surrender, and you lose your agency and your discernment
Heidegger urges that you seek to encounter Being without reducing it to utility, without using it instrumentally. In promoting reckless romance, I urge that you encounter other people as well as yourself without reducing the relationship to security, validation, or narrative closure. This letting-go is based on a return to presence, a way of being more fully alive, responsive, and attuned to reality (Heidegger’s Being, not objective reality, but our conscious experience of the world).
Heidegger critiqued the technological perspective in his 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” He writes technology isn’t just a collection of tools or machines but rather a way of framing and understanding the world (Gestell, “enframing”). It treats everything — nature, other people, even ourselves — as resources to be used, optimized or controlled.
This, of course, prefigures what Byung-Chul Han writes in The Burnout Society, that in an achievement society achievement subjects incorporate master and slave in themselves. The master directs the internal slave towards higher and higher production and achievement, earning more and consuming more and seeking ever-more social validation for their efforts.
Heidegger considers this the deep crisis of modernity and the supreme danger, that we alienate ourselves from Being itself. We no longer experience wonder, reverence, or gratitude only function and control.
Releasement is the counter-move.
Important to note: Heidegger was a Nazi. He joined the party in 1933 shortly before becoming rector of Freiburg University. As rector, he gave speeches endorsing aspects of the regime’s ideology, speaking of Germany’s spiritual destiny and using phrases that aligned disturbingly with Nazi rhetoric about leadership and destiny. He never publicy recanted his Nazi involvement.
He apparently seems to have believed that National Socialism might offer a spiritual renewal — a way to overcome the alienation of modernity and restore an authentic relation to Being. He thought the movement might reform German education and culture, freeing it from both technological materialism and the superficial liberalism of the Weimar era.
He was ultimately both anti-modern and anti-Semitic, as the publishing in 2010 of his private philosophical journals showed.
I find useful ideas in Heidegger’s philosophy, but I keep in mind the context of his life when interpreting them or taking from them. Heidegger did not address ethics or think of individual others; he was concerned with being itself (Sein) and being-there (Dasein), human existence. This oversight was addressed by Levinas, his Jewish student, who broke with him during World War II. Levinas, counter to Heidgger, said that philosophy’s frist question should not be “What is Being?” but “How should I respond to the Other?”
I see in the Heidegger vs Levinas evolution something similar to Sartre and de Beavoir. Heidegger and Sartre did not attend to the other or how to ethically relate to them while Levinas and de Beauvoir moved beyond a solipsistic focus on the self to an ethical attention to others.
Perhaps every philosophy begins in solitude with a wondering “who am I?” and “what should I do?” but ideally matures towards a focus on being in relation. We move from self-assertion and authenticity to care and love.
- I’m personally off Facebook and Instagram, still scroll Reddit and Twitter, but spend increasing amounts of time with ChatGPT, learning about philosophical topics, planning dinner, or doing Tarot readings about my life. ↩︎