The finite nature of our existence begs the reach for significance. But in that pursuit, we scroll past a life of meaning that is right in front of us. We distract ourselves by saying what we are doing is important. When, in fact, most of what we do is insignificant. Is really sending another tweet really going to be the peak of your work? Instead, we can do things we think actually matter instead of doing the things we are told we are supposed to care about.
Colloquialism is the linguistic style we use for casual conversation. We do this because it requires less brain power and shows the invisible power of how things are done around here.
The problem is, that our left brain is so literal, it can understand the subtle art of language. It doesn’t understand that when someone is laughing hysterically and says, “This is killing me.” That it isn’t actually killing the person.
And so, when our boss sends a text saying, “We need to talk.” Our alarm bells can’t help but go off.
What we say effects how people react. When the conversations are more crucial we are careful in the words we use. And when we are casual with our language, people will in return perhaps not understand what it is you are actually saying.
This now-famous phrase first appeared in George Eliot’s 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss. The protagonist, Mr. Tulliver uses the phrase in discussing Daniel Defoe’s The History of the Devil, saying how the book was beautifully bound.
Ironic. A concept so easily understood and yet so difficult to master. Because humans are all wired to make snap judgments in assessing the danger to keep us alive. However, ideas are not harmful and are not actual real threats of danger like a swinging bat to the head. Yet, we struggle to listen, and in fact, turn off when hearing something different from our worldview. In fact, we actually experience pain, and as a result, choose to ignore such information.
We rather not go through such forms of transformation because of the amount of change it would require.
It’s a subtle art form. The reason is that we struggle so much to hold the space to listen to conflicting opinions and ideas. We have heard all our lives that we shouldn’t discuss religion, politics, or controversy at the dinner table. Teaching people to not hold space for others in the process. Ironically, we reinforce this idea that we can only have a strong relationship if we talk about the things we agree with. I think this is all wrong. What we should do is decide which level of conversation is appropriate for this situation. Level 5 can be deep intimate conversations about the most controversial topics. All the way down to Level 1 which is talking about weather and sports. Superficial to controversial can be viewed as a spectrum. We don’t need to have Level 5 conversations with people just cause they are family. We can decide and dictate based on where relationships are at in the moment.
Logotherapy is psychotherapy based on the belief that the search for meaning, even amidst misery and suffering or through the worst conditions that can be imagined, can constitute a potential solution to human suffering. Pioneered by Victor Frankl, who wrote one of the most influential books of all time, Man’s Search for Meaning provides us the playbook for making sense of all this. Frankl who spent three years in four concentration camps, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering III, and Türkheim, survived and related his experiences in finding meaning.
When there is a path of hope, everything in our lives gets better. Suicide prevention work is all rooted in this. We realize the struggle is the struggle, but it is also realizing that you get to decide what to do with it. We need something to care about whether it is people, art, dignity, connection, joy, suffering, a cause…Finding meaning helps us create values to live our lives.
To stare into the void and try to make sense of all of this, it’s absurd as philosopher Albert Camas has called it. The absurd lies in the juxtaposition between the fundamental human need to attribute meaning to life and the “unreasonable silence” of the universe in response. Humans are a walking contradiction trying to find meaning in the meaningless. Camus compares the absurdity of man’s life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. The essay concludes, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
While our instant gut reaction is to say, “My life is better than pushing a rock up a hill,” how is it any different pushing a rock up a hill or sitting in traffic, paying taxes, going to a bull shit job day after day, dealing with the pain of our bodies failing us or the heartbreak of loss? It is all absurd. Even the fun stuff. We climb mountains because they are there not because we have to. Pushing a rock up a hill is no different. It is equally as absurd as anything else.
Camus argues that we can instead imagine Sisyphus as happy. That he can reminisce on the struggle on the way down. The struggle is the struggle. Camus writes, “From the moment of absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. Individuals should embrace the observed condition of human existence while also defiantly continuing to search for meaning.” In essence, once we recognize our own absurdity and accept it, it frees us to find our own meaning.
Nihilism is the philosophical belief of extreme skepticism. It is the tension created by how we want the world to be and how it appears to operate. Nihilists in general reject fundamental aspects of human existence such as knowledge, morality, or meaning. Many nihilists see humanity playing out in their own self-interest and are often plagued with the knowledge of seeing the worst outcomes that will eventually play out. It
Nihilism was first recorded in the 5th century B.C.E in the Theravada, Buddhism’s oldest text. Philosophers such as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Søren Kierkegaard pushed the movement forward as a counter to the church and further developed concepts such as rationalism and leveling to the point of losing one’s identity. In the 1860s the Russian Empire experienced a major wave of nihilism. In fact, the Russian word nigilizm meaning ‘nihilism’ came from the Latin word nihil which means “nothing.” As documented by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism had swept through the western frontier. An interesting quote from EP Goodwin, a missionary from 1880 remarks, “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx.” This all cumulates in 1882 when Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead.”
When the rug has been pulled it is only natural to follow a path of self-destruction. To numb the pain that is felt. The betrayal that people feel when everything they are taught is fiction. As a result, values begin to fall. One by one everything that was once held sacred and dear simply seems pointless when staring into the abyss of the universe. As physicist, Brian Cox has pointed out, “Paradoxically whilst we are definitely physically insignificant—the Earth is one planet around one star amongst 400 billion stars in one galaxy (The Milky Way) amongst two trillion galaxies in a small patch of the (known) universe. So we are definitely small. You can’t argue with that. We’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms, some as old as time. The other ones, everything else other than hydrogen in our bodies, is made in stars. All cooked over billions of years. And we are in this pattern that can think so suddenly as the great Carl Sagan said, ‘You have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself which is us.”
Nietzsche’s great insight was this: If you kill all your established values you will in effect destroy your whole existence. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives … What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” The answer to this great contradiction, this great problem of establishing meaning and existence, and confronting nihilism is to transcend it. It isn’t the elimination of value systems but to replace them.
On March 11, 2020, the world was turned upside down and the great machine we call capitalism came to a grinding halt as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a Pandemic citing 118,000 cases across 110 countries. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s Director General sat in front of a microphone announcing to the world, “This is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector.” Indeed it did.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the pandemic came in during a period of high tension in politics. President Donald Trump was three years into his controversial presidency. Across the world, different types of degrees of shutdowns took place. In a race against time, scientists around the world worked around the clock to develop the world’s first mRNA vaccine in the fight against COVID-19. In a record time of less than 12 months, vaccines began to be distributed. Slowly things began to open back up. By then, the damage had been done. Party lines, politics, ideology, and theology had divided the country. Many people died. And every relationship was looked at through a lens of how you voted and whether you took the vaccine or not.
Something else emerged during this time of “The Great Pause.” People were looking around examining their lives wondering what they were doing with their lives. The death of George Floyd sparked The Black Lives Matter movement onto center stage. Highlighting the injustice minorities face. But also, after vaccines were distributed and people were asked to come back to work, many hesitated. Obviously from a personal and public health, but many were wondering, “What’s the point?” Why return to what anthropologist David Graeber called, “Bullshit Jobs.” Not only that, why risk your life for such a thing!
Since then, we have seen droves of workers “Quiet Quitting” when employees continue to put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs but don’t go the extra mile for their employer or workers and we also saw workers join “The Great Resignation” movement. The working class had been exploited enough. For many decades now, the working class has been exploited to benefit the few. If you work a job long enough, it isn’t hard to see that the people who actually produce and do the labor don’t actually get the profits. This has been systematically engineered for over 100 years in the making.
Cognitive scientist and scholar, Douglas Hofstadter, asks the difficult question, How does the “self” come out of things that don’t have a self? In other words, how do all these primitive things that make up all of us such as carbon, proteins, atoms, and molecules—how do all these things go from meaningless to developing into an entity that can refer to itself? How do you get to “I” when all the stuff we are made up of doesn’t have meaning or self-awareness? You probably have heard the famous phrase from Rene Descartes who said, “Cogito, ergo sum” which means “I think, therefore I am.” How does one get there built upon things that seem to have no meaning whatsoever?
Hofstadter wrote a difficult book to undertake this question called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that dives deep into this question. What he first saw was take the simple math equation of:
2 + 2 = 4
But these are symbols that we have all agreed upon and assigned meaning to. There are lots of ways to show the exact same thing. For example:
— — p — — q — — — —
Or you can look at it through Set Theory
∃ x ∀
Which simply means “there exist” and “x” “for any”
The point is that there are so many ways to interpret the basic math problem of 2+2. In mathematics, however, there are ways to have these formulas such as the ones listed above that can self-reference themselves much like how atoms and proteins form together for humans to refer to themselves.
At some point, you will have to confront the fact that you are afraid and you are not going to be better at any of this. Perhaps it will happen sooner, perhaps later but somewhere in your 30s for most, we will be just old enough to start looking back and see what you used to do. This only amplifies as you get older. Ever so slowly things will start to be taken away. When this begins, there is a sense of loss that you will not be that person anymore. When we focus on what was, we can’t help but grieve.
There is an alternative. You can also start focusing on the things you can do because of the choices you make to walk away from. The more possessive we are the harder it is to accept. That life is impermanence. We are only here for a time. What a gift.
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