We Are All Lost

Ben Shapiro - Second year neuroscience student at Western University

Just as a preface, everything that I claim here could very well be nonsense. I am writing my own feelings. If you disagree, it’s all good. I just want to bring this up in case anyone feels the same way (and I have an inclination that a lot of people do).

I have the most common but least talked about mental illness there is. One that doesn’t really warrant a diagnosis or label. It’s likely that almost every person that I meet in my life has, and still is, grappling with the same thing. These simple facts don’t make it any less serious.

Everyone has probably asked themselves “Who am I?” and most probably come up with activities that they fill their time with, people they associate with, and things that they’re interested in. But take a second, and really ask yourself that question. When you strip away all of your interests, your memories and experiences, your friends and family, your skills, who are you? When you look into yourself and think “what is it like to be me?”, what do you come up with? Don’t feel bad if you don’t know. Most people spend their whole lives trying to figure this out, including me.

I’ve been struggling with my own identity my whole life. For most of what I can remember, I’ve been like a chameleon - adopting the various shades of whatever friends or current trends I happen to be surrounded by at the time. I do this because I’m searching for something. I’m searching for that one version of “me” that will finally allow me to be happy and satisfied with who I am. It always bugged me when people told me to just “be myself”. That seemed like quite a difficult undertaking to be expressed so nonchalantly. I have always thought, “if I get this thing, I’ll finally be happy”, and then once I get it, whatever fleeting pleasure fades and I’m left back where I’ve started. We’re all looking for this sense of undying well-being, this “happiness”.

I’ve put a lot of thought into these kind of struggles recently and here are some of my tentative findings. Take them with a grain of salt because as you’ll soon read, I really don’t know anything:

• No one knows what they’re doing. Everyone is thrown into this world with no context at all and is expected to trust whoever is guiding them when they tell them how the world works. Each of the people who contributed to how the world works right now was in that exact same place at some point. That leads me to my second point.
• Everyone is pretending. Do you know those times when you feel nervous, scared, sad, angry, or you have no idea what to do and you just pretend to everybody outside your head that you’re all good, that you have it all figured out? We do it so often in our daily conversations that we don’t even notice. So much of what we say is for the purpose of molding other people’s impressions of us. Think of every time you’ve done that and realize that we all do the same thing. Everybody is pretending that they have everything figured out which makes everyone else feel bad about the fact that they don’t.
• We create contingencies on our own happiness. As I said before, we’re always telling ourselves that if we do this thing, get into that program, get that girl/boy, we’ll finally be happy. We tell ourselves that our happiness is contingent (in other words; our happiness depends) on these external factors because we don’t know where else to look for it. We need to realize that life is, in essence, unsatisfactory. That is, we will never be eternally satisfied. Once we come to terms with the fact that every pleasure that we can have - whether it be a great meal, an awesome song, a trip to Australia, or a meaningful relationship - is subject to the law of impermanence of the universe. Nothing is permanent, and we need to be okay with this if we’re going to move forward in finding our own purpose here. We need to find happiness in that impermanence, to be okay with nothing and then accept with open arms any bonuses that come after that. These pleasures aren’t trivial. They’re great. But change is a rule of life more than it is an anomaly.

Now, I say all of this while fully acknowledging the fact that I don’t really know anything. It’s one thing to read and understand this advice however it’s completely a different story to internalize it. I personally have a ton of trouble applying this to my day to day life, although I’m trying. I just keep reminding myself of these ideas as much as I can. But if this post has given you something to think about or if it made something click for you, then I’ve accomplished what I’ve set out to do. Do what you feel like doing. Be happy with less and also be happy with more. Remember that things tend to work themselves out because there’s no scenario where things aren’t worked out. We’re all lost, and that’s fine.

I Campout because we’re all still trying to figure it out.