A heaviness descends as life gets more existential by the
passing of years. The bliss of childhood comes from not having any
responsibilities, and an unlimited earnestness and easiness to live life
according to one’s passing interest, now sports, now sketching. Aging into
teenage years, one becomes more definite, more attuned to one’s likings and
preferences. How those preferences come about is not so obvious and requires a
lot of psychological insights and study of the individual. The age-old question
of nurture or nature comes into play: what parts of our growing personalities
did we bring by birth, and which ones did we impart from the surroundings we
grew up in. Certain aspects of our surroundings and the effects they might have
on us is undeniable. For someone born after the iPhone and the ubiquity of the
internet would have different taste and traits than someone born in the 1990s,
pre-internet, pre-technological penetration. But something remains innate to
each and everyone of us? Can we all be scientists, comedians, intellectuals,
sportsman? Is the feasibility of becoming any of these, regardless of the
external conditions, equal for everyone? Or does something inside, a part of
us, foretell, or provide the prospects of us becoming a certain intellectual or
sportsman? The question of whether we became what we could have, must be left
out here since it would involve the conditions grew up in. My point being, that
as we grow out of our childhood, and then teenage years, we become more
specific, predictable, more aware and guided by the complex web of external and
internal influences that we call personality.
It should go without saying that what we do is mostly what
we prefer to do, whether it is something we recently discovered, or have become
habitualized into doing. It is also a given that we have certain things in our
lives in the growing up years that we have to do: to go school, college,
tuition, religious classes, language centres and so on. Moreover, those must do
tasks cover most of our lives, by which I mean our days. As the great Marianne
Moore pithily wrote, ‘How we live our days is how we live our lives’. We only
get to explore little of what we like, and thereby have little insight into how
forbearing those activities or hobbies might be for us in the long run. But
while the education we go through is essential for making us able to attain the
basics of literacy, that same education might squander our capacity for
self-awareness, introspection, exploration, and an idea of who we might like to
be. We become inevitably involved, and dangerously so as well since we don’t
realize it at that time, into a process of getting up a ladder of grades,
learning to memorize things that we might not yet understand, and learning to
depend on institutions and teacher to always be our guides, without any better
judgement from ourselves. This inability to anchor what will eventually become
our own lives has a very severe and debilitating effect once we grow up.
Once in the twenties, one has made some friends, possibly
broken one’s heart, and have only started to taste some of that freedom one so
dearly sought in the teen years. It only means that one’s engagements increase
in number, as one moves from a family-centred life to a friend-centred one.
Therefore, one’s attention towards one’s inner life shrinks even further,
resulting into a life that is lived on external stimulants. Not that there is
anything wrong with it, after all that’s the norm; we live our lives on
external queues. But what one dearly misses out on is personal development,
something that is so important in leading a meaningful life, a life that has a
reason to be. But the sad as well as good news is that not all of us become so
existential about life. Most of us are okay, and remain so, with doing just
what life requires, from one age into another. Living on default becomes a
natural order of things, where life under capitalism leaves little room for
what appears to be needless and unproductive ponderings about the purpose of
life or more immediately, one’s resolve for living it well. Financial
requirements force us to get a lengthy period of education, followed instantly
by getting a job and pursuing on one’s career. Building a family comes next,
and occupies the next twenties years or so: to marry, have kids, and get them
into adulthood. From this viewpoint, only the very latter years of life might
beckon us towards looking inward.
There’s nothing wrong with leading a life of such normal
prospects. Most of us do, and not all of us are cut out to be philosophers.
Besides, great meaning can be found in leading a life that might appear
tranquil on the outside: whether it comes from doing a job that meaningful for
others and you, loving your wife and caring for passing parents, raising kids
and seeing them become good individuals. But what I am pointing towards here is
a more existential, if less popular, way of living where the normalcy of life
doesn’t come easy for you. Your mind is tuned to exploring the vastness of life
and the possibilities that lie therein. It could be through any field, this
exploration, be it the sciences or arts, but the ultimate aim is to live a life
as if it were meant to be something more, something bigger. And those few of
us, which I’ve quantified from a general perception as well from my own life,
go on a journey of life that’s much richer, arduous, difficult, and eventually,
hopefully, fruitful. It is not comparison that I am trying to reach at here
between these ways of living, but a study of different lives, and how one might
differ from other.
The unbearable lightness of being, also known as boredom,
falls in the camps of the existentialists than, say, ‘the normal people’. There
isn’t a clear line between when a person is existential or when he is normal,
for the lack of a better word. What makes the distinction however is how they
live their lives when the life itself doesn’t seem to be all that engaging.
While a normal person might go out with friends, spend idle hours of the phone
doing nothing significant, the existential would be sick worried about the unbearability
of such empty time. The approach towards time is a reflection of a person’s approach
towards life in the grander scheme. How one spends a day reflects how one accommodates
to a live a whole life. Therefore, for the normal people, passing away these
empty hours, whenever they come (which I assume is less often, or either they
don’t feel the gravity of it as much) is not as much as problematic issue as it
might be for an existentialist. The normal person in life wants to be what he
or she already is, a normal being with a normal life hoping for a normal life. The
existentialist is burdened by the existentialist freedom that he has been cursed
with, since he or she is always responsible for what they do and what they become,
or choose not to. We are condemned by our choices, or as Sartre put it, ‘We are
our choices’. Then, the idle hours present a snapshot of how unbearable such
lightness might feel: one is but compelled to make do, to involve in something –
even more arduous, to involve in something meaningful.
Kierkegaard’s analogy of a passing train with life explains perfectly
the limitedness of people living in the present, but always hoping for desired
results in the future. Kierkegaard says that just as someone is unable to step
off a running train to able to look at it, so is man unable to step off from life
and study it. Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.
Then, living it the present puts us a great disadvantage where we hardly ever
know what course of action would be best for us in the long run, and we usually
make a pathetic use of our, indeed limited and finite, time on this planet.
There’s a line in Lil Wayne’s brilliant song ‘Mirror’ that says, ‘Look at me
now, I can see my past’. The privilege of lessons and wisdom comes only through
experience – the experience of having lived a life that shall never return. The
present is less generous; it demands action with little of wisdom or lessons,
that one might need to the future course of action. But if history repeats
itself, and if there is nothing new in the world than the history we don’t know
yet, maybe a glance back in life is all we need to make cautious, sensible
decisions for the time that is lying ahead – gnawing at us with its possibilities,
and mocking us for our burden of choosing.
Where does one’s age fit into this existential journey of
making life bearable by filling in the hours with what we can only guess to be
fruitful in the long run. As I mentioned before, growing up presents us with
more freedom that we lacked, and ironically desired, in the earlier years of
our life. The friend-centred life is amazing at first, but soon enough you run
into problems of what my teachers, and I too, call ‘the practical life’.
Friends continue to be the lifeline of one’s life as it gets more tumultuous by
the years. Family demands, and the social or peer pressure, puts us in a tight
spot to continually prove our worth and goodness, in a series of life-consuming
activities that, unfortunately, mostly fail to bring any meaning in our lives. Living
seems like a debt we pay for a life we never applied for. Yet friends lighten
things, brings a communal strength to one’s bearings, and helps us see our good
sides no matter how nasty life gets. A romantic partner, however, is certain when
it comes to its objective goodness added into life. A broken heart is an
unhealthy thing to carry around in your twenties, yet carrying someone you so
recklessly love and is equally loved back by, without any side knowing any
better, can dangerously distract you from the serious matters of life creeping
up on you. It is only too late, when the relationship finds itself into the
bonds of marriage, that one realizes life can still be cruel, despite a ‘romantic
permanence’. But the sad reality is, as compromisable as the latter case seems,
it usually the broke heart that one remains with at the end of a relationship
rather than a bonded marriage. A broken heart, then, is a serious indication of
you messing up things when you really want to do good, if you want a stable
start in the ‘practical life’.
Loneliness, on the other hand, doesn’t sit well with someone
in their twenties either. Whether it is that they’ve heard of love, as La Rochefoucauld
wittingly said, or that they start their search for a romantic partner after
the pronouncement of their loneliness by the coupledom of their peers – people at
this age tend to fall in love, or want to fall in love. But while loneliness
might be extremely painful and an inhabiting emotion the longer it sticks with
a person, the positive consequences of, this otherwise, essential loneliness is
highly attractive. An adolescent must suffer from loneliness if he is to understand
himself, the life that he has led, leading, and will lead, and most importantly
how does he exist alongside others, what makes him is own individual. The compulsion
of making do, if one is of an existential nature, amplified by loneliness, often
marks the beginning of someone become themselves. It is not only the age of discovery,
since one has but very little to discover, but an age of forging oneself in
light of what finds in the darker corners of loneliness. It is an age of
looking inward, and feeling the need to embark on a mission of filling it in
with something lasting. Instincts are usually our best guides, and if not, then
exploring is the best way to making fate happen, where you strike against what
you feel like you should be doing for your whole life.
The problematic, depressing, and unsavoring nature of making
do has a lot of unforeseeable advantages on its other end. The key is to start doing
what one eventually makes do. Originality, or if you don’t like this work like I
don’t, then individuality, self-awareness, and becoming your own person usually
comes at a cost of living some existential years, facing up to the
meaninglessness of life and its ordinariness, and then making something out of
it, anything that you genuinely abide by and love. I will close this otherwise
meandering, but hopefully pointing journal at times, with a Victor Frankl
quote: ‘The meaning of life is to give life meaning’.
November 17, 2022.