Most self-help is bunk. At best, it's watered-down, decontextualised philosophy that relies on factually dubious, cherry-picked anecdotes about anonymous white-collar workers with names like John or Cathy to sell its utility as a panacea for all of one's individual problems. At its worst, it's vague woo-woo that can actively harm the individual who takes it as gospel (a la The Secret). With that said, there is one quote that has stuck with me from the broader self-help milieu; attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." Like all pithy sayings, this is actually a paraphrase from a passage in his journal:

"It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards."

Søren Kierkegaard

Now, I don't want to get into my own banal observations about the nature of *life*, but listening to Vegyn's The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions always puts me into a pensive and reflective mood, even now, after having listened several times through. Reversed piano loops, spacious reverb, a slight lo-fi crackle on a recording of the serenity prayer - all of these elements come together to form an atmosphere of a dream. There's a fading in and out of consciousness. A half-remembered memory of people you don't know anymore. The album has a feeling of reverence, like a church hymn. A warm speck of light in an abyss of cold.

Perhaps what I'm getting at is this overwhelming feeling of smallness. An existential despair that we have all felt at some point. To rationalise your life in the retrospective is to exert a modicum of control over what is, at its core, unknowable chaos. The important part is not that 'life can only be understood in reverse,' it's that life can be understood at all. This album, to me, is this feeling. It's a hope that things turn out okay, even though the future is unknowable. It's a warm feeling of achievement, of looking back at your life and appreciating the simple fact that you've made it this far. But it's wrapped in a cold outer layer, a stoic acceptance of the existential despair that we all come to terms with - one way or the other.