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When Kierkegaard Goes to an Oasis Concert
Two miles west of my home in Edinburgh stands Murrayfield Stadium. The Scottish national rugby team’s home, Murrayfield moonlights as a major concert venue. Even at that distance, as long as my living room window is open during a show, I can feel the bass and hear the crowd’s roar. As a fortysomething whose musical tastes ossified in the 1990s, I’ve usually heard of whoever is playing—Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Beyoncé—although I don’t know any of the songs. For that reason, the lyrics drift in through my window as a distant mumbling.
This weekend, though, I know the band and back catalogue well enough to make out every word: Oasis, the soundtrack to my teenage years.
In 1990s Britain, Oasis were the musical embodiment of “lad and ladette” culture: swaggering, incurious, inarticulate, up for a good time (“mad for it,” in their words), living to excess, and unburdened by any sense of responsibility to the world at large. To many of us, they were a counterpoint to the introspective, angsty, miserable grunge exported by American musical culture at the time. In our eyes, it looked a lot more fun to be in Oasis than in Nirvana.
Oasis disbanded in 2009. In their heyday, they were courted by politicians to represent the “Cool Britannia” ideal. In 2025, Oasis is touring again, but that Britain is no more. For many, pride in British culture has given way to shame. The 1990s mainstream aversion to moral responsibility has been replaced with widespread censoriousness. Although an Oasis concert in 2000 was certainly inflected with the politics of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, it was a politics geared toward feel-good nationalism, the sort that emblazoned guitars with the Union Jack but ignored whatever else was going on in the wider world. The Gallagher brothers had none of the savior complex that typifies, say, a Bono or a Bob Geldof. Oasis’s songs were more “Where were you while we were getting high?” than “Who’s gonna make it right?”
Nowadays, British music has become differently and aggressively political. It’s a stark contrast between Oasis headlining Glastonbury—the United Kingdom’s largest music festival—in 2004, and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s appearance on the same stage in 2022. At some point between those years, mainstream British culture swapped hedonism for moralism. We gave up on being mad for it and instead became mad about it all.
We gave up on being mad for it and instead became mad about it all.
For that reason, some have received Oasis’s return as the chance to recapture an apparently simpler time. “When I go to a gig,” one new (and young) Oasis fan wrote online, “I don’t want to feel bad about myself, I don’t want to see Palestine flags or get preached at about the climate. I just want music and a good time.” Oasis can scratch that itch like no other. Their return also coincides with a change in the political headwinds. In the next set of elections, British politics is widely expected to make a rightward turn. Times change and pendulums swing.
The 19th-century Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard offers a valuable insight that helps us make some sense of this kind of cultural shift. Human life, he thought, takes place in three stages on the way. Sometimes called “three stages of life” or “three forms of existence,” they are, in essence, three distinct ways to live. These he termed the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious life.
Aesthetic Life: Escape from Boredom
A person living the aesthetic life isn’t particularly bothered by notions of good and evil. Rather, that person is driven to avoid one thing: boredom. Whether life is morally upright or corrupt or whether other people are suffering matters little as long as life stays interesting for me. To prevent myself from becoming bored, I self-administer pleasure.
Why avoid boredom so strenuously? If left to face it, Kierkegaard thought, I’ll be confronted with something far worse: the realization of my despair at the absurdity of life. The fight against boredom masks that deeper form of avoidance.
Examples of that kind of life aren’t hard to come by. Sometimes we see it with shocking transparency. After the Indian Ocean tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, for example, a live TV reporter asked two young women at the Edinburgh New Year street party if it felt strange to be celebrating when 228,000 people had lost their lives a few days before. Arms aloft, the women replied almost euphorically, “We don’t care about that! We’re here to party!”
Mostly, though, the aesthetic life is more subtle. Think of the sports devotees who know their team is funded by unethical overseas benefactors, the fast-fashion addicts who know their ever-changing wardrobes begin in far-off sweatshops, or the serial smartphone upgraders who know their gadgets’ raw minerals are dubiously sourced.
Often, it’s more mundane still. Think of the person who staves off boredom with nothing deeper than different hairstyles or a constant stream of mindless TikTok videos. In Kierkegaardian terms, the lad and ladette culture of 1990s Britain, the culture that produced and was produced by Oasis, was also very much an aesthetic one, as their song “Cigarettes & Alcohol” typifies:
Is it my imagination
Or have I finally found something worth living for?
I was looking for some action
But all I found were cigarettes and alcohol. . . .
Is it worth the aggravation
To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?
It’s a crazy situation
But all I need are cigarettes and alcohol.
Perhaps to the surprise of those who love the aesthetic life, Kierkegaard saw this as the lowest form of life. It depends on the myth that individuals aren’t also part of communities and that we have no duties to other people. Living by that lie, telling yourself that your happiness has no connection to the well-being of other people, also comes at a cost. To borrow a line from Bob Dylan, it asks a man to turn his head and pretend he just doesn’t see: “We don’t care about that! We’re here to party!” To say such a thing is, of course, a self-inflicted injury, a mutilation of one’s own humanity. The only life that can do so is invariably shallow.
In Either/Or, Kierkegaard argued that the person who never moves on from the aesthetic life fails to become a person in the proper sense. Lacking a rich, substantial identity that endures come rain or shine, your life is simply a constant urge not to be bored. Nothing more, nothing less.
Ethical Life: Doing the Right Thing
While some never leave the aesthetic life, others move on, embracing what Kierkegaard saw as the ethical life. Rather than centering life on yourself and your fight against boredom, the ethical life is focused on others, on notions of right and wrong that matter far more than whatever you or anyone else finds interesting or pleasurable in any given moment. The ethical life prizes the community over the individual and is burdened with a sense of duty.
Sometimes, examples of this are also shocking in their transparency: Think of Just Stop Oil activists throwing soup on Van Gogh paintings. To a mind convinced that history objectively falls on right and wrong sides, the great drive is to make sure you fall on the former—although this too, Kierkegaard saw, was a way of staving off despair. Destroying a priceless artwork is also a kind of self-inflicted injury, a nihilistic assault on the beautiful with no magical power to guarantee any particular outcome.
Like the aesthetic life, though, the ethical life is largely more mundane. We see it in people who choose to marry rather than have casual relationships, who commit to a career or a community, who want to promote sustainable fashion or feed the homeless or liberate the oppressed. Kierkegaard saw the ethical life as a higher form than the aesthetic life. To live for your neighbor is better than to live only for yourself.
And yet, he argued, a life with nothing higher is ultimately also tethered to despair. Why so? However hard you try, the world’s problems only ever increase. For every fire you put out, a dozen more appear just beyond your reach. Even with vast resources, the world is chaotic and unsavable. The longer you go on in the ethical life, Kierkegaard observed, the more you’re hit by the “infinite resignation” that the gap between how the world is and how it ought to be only ever grows. Bring your soup to every art gallery you can, or feed it to the destitute, or cook it at home for your children. Regardless, your ethically intentional life will only ever make an imperceptible dent on the world’s problems.
The longer you go on in the ethical life, Kierkegaard observed, the more you’re hit by the ‘infinite resignation’ that the gap between how the world is and how it ought to be only ever grows.
What should you do when you realize this? You might despair. After all, you cannot save the world. You can try to mask that sense of futility through an ever-deeper commitment to your chosen cause, or by trying your hardest to dwell on the small wins. Alternatively, you might become cynical, angry at a deceptive world that locked you into futile moral purpose. Or, like Cypher in The Matrix, you might decide your old aesthetic life was better than a discouraging but good fight. And so, to your old life you return.
Generations can also make that kind of shift. The move from Oasis to Thunberg at Glastonbury was a cultural recalibration that gave up on the aesthetic life in favor of the ethical life. And now, Oasis’s resurrection, the call for “music and a good time,” suggests something like a reversion. If that’s where mainstream British culture settles, it’ll only do so for a while. Eventually, again, people will grow weary, yearn for more depth, unable to look away from the sufferings of their fellow humans. And then the pendulum will swing back. The ethical life will return. A new Thunberg will arise and tell us to be ashamed of ourselves, which we will be until the despair becomes too much. Then the pendulum will swing again, and again, and again.
Religious Life: Living in Light of Eternity
However, as it does so, Kierkegaard saw, Christians need not swing with it. The aesthetic and the ethical are only two of the stages on the way of life. There is a third, and highest, way to live: the religious life. In it, a person takes a leap of faith into God’s arms.
Kierkegaard’s way of understanding the religious life was idiosyncratic and complex. An essay like this can do it no real justice. However, the following is worth saying: In his vision of the religious life, we see an attempt to explain that Christians live in the light of eternity, which casts the aesthetic and ethical lives under a distinct shade.
Unlike the aesthetic life, the religious life has no instinctive aversion to facing suffering and paradox. The religious life needs no such numbing agent for the human condition. It isn’t afraid to swim into those deep waters, troubling as they are. Unlike the ethical life, though, the religious life doesn’t ultimately flounder in those depths. This is so because the religious life makes ethics subordinate, rather than absolute. It connects ethics to something beyond it, something transcendent. It casts the totality of life on God himself. And with that comes a new way to live in a world shot through with despair.
The religious life makes ethics subordinate, rather than absolute. It connects ethics to something beyond it, something transcendent. It casts the totality of life on God himself.
Two miles from Murrayfield, the encore is almost over. Seventy thousand voices now serenade the city with “Wonderwall.” Surprised by my sense of nostalgia, I wonder what Kierkegaard might have made of it. I think he would’ve found it all quite absurd—although in an existentialist philosopher’s style, rather than as a moralistic prude. The sound of his laughter would have joined their voices in the evening air.
Sitting beside me is a more earnest figure: my 10-year-old son, a budding guitarist who strains to hear his chosen instrument in the distance. Looking at him, I’m struck by the pendulum that can only carry him back and forth between the aesthetic and the ethical, from Noel Gallagher to Greta Thunberg, from vibe shift to vibe shift.
Thank the Lord, I tell myself, that there’s a third way.
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