Exploring the Human Condition: Our Crisis of Meaning & Why we Suffer
Why it's Never Enough
His Story is Our Story
At first, he was just a comedian, but he wanted more.
He wanted to have his own TV show.
He really wanted to be on TV, and he did that.
Before you knew it, he had the #1 show on television.
He was loved by everyone. People began to adore him.
But something was missing. He decided to have a family, and he did that too.
He had a beautiful, loving family.
Then he decided he wanted to be in Movies, and quickly, his movie career launched into the stratosphere.
He wanted wealth and quickly had more money than god.
Finally, he wanted the impossible: to win an Academy Award for playing a role that was not comedic.
And he did that, too.
Here was a man who was universally loved and had a great family, wealth, and an amazing career.
He had it all, and then Robin Williams killed himself.
He left his dead body for his family to find with his famous last words:
“Goodnight, my love… goodnight, goodnight.”
RIP Robin Williams.
How could this happen?
Why would a man who has everything come home to find an empty pit in his soul so deep that no amount of success, admiration, therapy, or substances could solve it?
What does this tell us about the Human Condition that we are all a part of?
The Human Condition
In a nutshell, the human condition is one in which we live, enjoy, suffer, and die.
Knowing this produces existential dread and many of the problems we see today.
On top of this dread, we have hope that somehow we can fill the void, that by having more, better, and different, we can win the game of life.
We have a deep yearning to live a fulfilling life, and this yearning sings so loudly that we are all but sure that it is around the corner.
That it is possible, that it is real, that if we get the next promotion, buy the bigger house, marry our sweetheart, that we can finally have it.
And so it becomes embedded in our dreams and in our desires and constantly moves us forward making us believe that we are almost there.
But it never arrives.
Even when we get the big house, the corner office and the partner of our dreams and at some point in our lives, like middle age, we look back and wonder if it was all for naught.
The Illusion
The source of our dilemma starts from a young age. Our society has a set of solutions to life. They promise a good happy life if you follow them without questioning them too much or going against the program.
And with this, the majority of us organize our live around what others value. We try to keep up with our peers and look for recognition, validation and success.
In this way, we live by comparison.
It is always easy to see others who have more and better, and we begin to imagine that that’s what’s missing. In the process, we subconsciously confirm our belief that we are not enough.
Feeling that we are not enough means we need to work harder to overcome and win.
We see others who are on a similar track, and we compete with them, after all, there are only so many seats at the top. In our culture, we can make even beneficial things like productivity pathological and toxic.
The more we compete and the more we win, the more we increase our status. As winners we can strut victoriously. We enjoy the temporary wins and then we are on to chasing the next win all the while aware of how quickly it can all vanish.
We see the disadvantaged everywhere. For one reason or another they are failing to keep up in this race. Often they feel that nothing will work for them, that all opportunity is lost, that their life is meaningless. You can sense the despair, their pain and suffering and understandingly many are melting away into their vices and addictions. Even if you don’t care to be rich, you definitely don’t want to be poor.
This entire situation produces a deep undercurrent of fear and anxiety that we are numb to.
Underneath the mountain of anxiety, we are afraid of failing, succeeding, about where our life is going and how it will turn out.
Today, anxiety disorders affect over 40 million adults in the U.S. Now, even talking to a stranger can produce anxiety.
Our entire situation alienates us and produces loneliness.
At the heart of it, we believe that we are in this world alone, where we have to compete with others and win, and if we win, it's even more lonely at the top.
In a world of competition and envy, you can rarely trust others’ intentions. Today, over 60% of adults in the United States report feeling lonely, and Worldwide, nearly a Billion people feel very or fairly lonely.
In our self-obsession, the world around us begins to slowly degrade.
Little by little, things are getting worse, but we can see the writing on the wall, and it isn’t good news.
There is an increase in polarization, political conflicts, and wars, and this only increases our fears and anxiety.
Ultimately, we find ourselves in a world of turmoil and suffering.
We aren’t quite sure of our suffering, how we got here or why we feel this way. We don’t fully know where it comes from or what to do about it, so we try to ignore it.
We bury it so deep, that everything becomes just ‘fine’.
We convince ourselves that this is way things are. That this is the way of the world and if we don’t do it, someone else will.
We go on fully engrossed with our daily lives, being so caught up that our entire predicament is pushed into our subconscious mind.
And every so often, when our existential dread rears its ugly head, we try to deny it.
Even reading words about death, about suffering, about the reality of our situation is to be avoided. It goes against the program.
It makes us uncomfortable, so we push it away, distract ourselves, and ignore the problem. But the reality of our predicament remains.
And much of the time, the illusion works. We forget our situation until the Monster comes out of the Shadows.
The Monster in the Shadow
Ignorance is bliss.
In The Wire, Waylon captures the predicament we are in.
‘He lost a good wife, a bad girlfriend, and the respect of anyone who tried to loan him money or do him a favor. He pawned his Pickup, bike, national steel guitar, and stamp collection that his granddad left him.
And when he was out there, without a pot to piss, and with anyone who loved him or cared about him cussing his name, do you know what he told himself?
Waylon, ‘you are doing good.’
(You can watch the entire scene here)
And if Waylon, a drug addict, can ignore his addiction, something so visceral and obvious, consider how much easier it is to ignore something as intangible as our ‘existential dread.’
In fact, at a root level, Waylon’s addiction and substances are a way of managing the pain and suffering he is experiencing in his life. Substances are a way to suppress our fears and anxieties, to avoid negative thoughts and feelings, and a way to unplug and escape into pleasure.
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” Søren Kierkegaard
The Denial
And this brings me to a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine.
We were talking about the ‘Denial of Death’, how our society likes to deny this very uncomfortable topic, and how our fear of death unconsciously directs much of our lives.
Naturally, he denied it!
He said that he thought about death and that there was not much to it. It’s going to happen, he can’t do anything about it, and that was that.
He then added that he rarely thinks about it, and it does not directly affect his life.
And so I asked him about how he experiences life.
“Why do you feel anxious at times?” I inquired.
And as we peeled the union of anxiety on why he felt anxiety at all, it became clear that anxiety was related to danger.
Anxiety alerts us that we might be in some kind of danger. This danger can physically harm us, or it can even be symbolic, like losing respect or being embarrassed. We are wired to avoid danger because danger can lead to death.
In other words, having any type of anxiety is ultimately tied to our fear of death.
This is the level of subtlety and how easy it is to confuse ourselves.
In fact, no one can lie to you or fool you as well or as easily as you can fool yourself. And to know the truth, you must peel the union and dig deep.
Fortunately, modern Psychology can help us gain insight into how we deceive ourselves.
Here below are a few common ways that Egos uses to deny and suppress anything that is deemed threatening, which is fundamentally tied to our fear of death:
Repression: Unconsciously blocking unpleasant feelings, desires, and experiences from entering conscious awareness.
Denial: We deny the existence of the problem and things we are not ready to contend with. We push it into a bucket of “things we should avoid,” and all those things we should avoid inform our Shadow.
Rationalization: We create reasonable explanations for our denials and pretend we don’t care. We justify our irrational or unacceptable behavior, attributing our actions to credible motives without acknowledging underlying motives.
Displacement: Redirecting emotions or reactions from the original source to another, less threatening target.
Beliefs & Assumptions: We hide behind a wall of ideologies and close ourselves in a prison of beliefs and assumptions. We live within our own enclosed shell, which protects us from the outside world and keeps us comfortable.
Sublimation: At best, we channel our unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable or constructive activities, like creating art and music. Sublimation also includes building character, productive toxicity, busy work, being a workaholic, legacy building, and so on. All designed to keep us busy, our mind on ‘what’s important’ and just being, sitting silently with ourselves is avoided.
Mask: Losing respect, being embarrassed, and being looked down upon are major red flags for the Ego, which is always on the lookout for symbolic threats. Evolutionarily, symbolic threats are very important because we live in social groups, and getting ostracized guarantees suffering and often leads to death.
The Mask
Ultimately, all of these techniques are pretenses designed to avoid facing our actual fears. In the process, we inadvertently build up our Shadow and Pain Bodies.
We hide and suppress our thoughts and feelings because we believe that doing so is important and that letting them out can damage our lives.
So we put on a Mask.
To be acceptable to others, we hide our pain, suppress our sexuality, and pretend that everything is just fine.
When we do this, every part of what we deem unacceptable, everything we suppress and deny, creates our Shadow.
By avoiding death, we prevent ourselves from really living.
The Shadow is the part of us that we pretend does not exist.
But it does.
In fact, we judge others according to these same set of values and beliefs. We notice whenever someone else is stepping out of line, behaving in ways we find inappropriate, and in this way, we are projecting our Shadow onto them.
And so, we are still contending with the same core issues, however they are now out there in the world. And the world is now a dark, dangerous place that is full of problems.
And at the heart of the projecting is the belief that there is an ultimate solution to life and its problems and if it were solved, then by extension we wouldn't have these problems.
So we go on trying to figure out and solve our external world, ignoring our internal world.
We try every tool at our disposal, including gaining status, wealth, health, great relationships, and legacy, and it’s never enough.
The pleasure comes and goes, and there is no real fulfillment.
And all the while, our pain builds up. It builds up into our 'pain body,' a storehouse of all of our pain, which becomes like a strong, powerful mini monster.
And as we go on ignoring our demons, they go into the pit of our soul and work out.
They get stronger and stronger and stronger while we get older and weaker.
[In the scene below, from American Psycho, we can see this breaking point, where the Mask comes off and the inner monster shines through.]
The Illusion
The illusion works for some time, but slowing the walls begin closing in, more and more of the world is seeping through until the breaking point.
And in this breaking point, our pain body takes over. The Monster comes out of the Shadow and wreaks havoc on our lives.
The Mask is ripped off and the Shadow is in full force, like a hurricane destroying what is in sight.
For some of us, this might be curling in the corner and crying our eyes out, being sad and depressed, getting into a fight and becoming violent, going on a bender, and so on.
At some point, nothing works. The drugs, the substances, the people, the experiences, the tears, it’s all for naught.
The real dread comes through, and often, the most sensitive and gentle of souls do the unthinkable.
Like Robin Williams, we ultimately find ourselves in a lose-lose situation.
"Do it and you will regret. Don’t do it you will regret. Do it or don't do it - you will regret both." - Soren Kierkegaard
If we don’t try, we will never know what could have been. When we give it our all in an effort to have everything we want, we realize soon enough that having isn’t enough and that we have sacrificed our lives for trinkets, and what we are left with is pure emptiness and meaninglessness.
And in this realization, the despair, the loneliness, and the fear takes over, and we begin to suffer.
All of this comes from a single belief, which is at the heart of Man’s Fundamental Problem.