Squashing the Existential Dread
On a cold fall day, my mother lay curled in bed reading; sobbing, I ran into her arms. I didn’t cry often as a kid (can’t say the same about adulthood, though), so after seeing my tears my mother was concerned and wondered who hurt me. While trying to simultaneously pacify and get to the root of the problem, she asked, “What’s wrong, beta?” Through uncontrollable sobs I whispered, “I’m not doing anything meaningful with my life.”
Looking back, I can only imagine the experience for my mother. An eight-year-old telling you their life isn’t meaningful. Isn’t that the age when you’re supposed to be obsessed with SpongeBob Squarepants and Shin-chan? Questioning the purpose of my existence became an annual event: every year, my mother and I would come up with techniques for me to overcome this feeling. This made me invest time volunteering, picking up new skills, and learning sports. As I was mostly occupied by my extracurriculars years passed by with the nagging feeling of purposelessness in the back of my head, dulled but not forgotten.
Every day, I’d read a quote I taped to my wall which read, “There is something only you can do, no one else, there’s a place only you can fill and no one else.” I’d read this every day, waiting for the day I found this place, this experience.
Fast forward to freshman year of college, I did not know what major I wanted to pursue or what I wanted to do with my life. All of a sudden, I was plunged back deep into the recesses of my existential dread. What was I doing with my life? Was I living a meaningful life?
Until, one day, my brother sent me an article about compassion. It sounds funny to say this out loud but in my nineteen years on Earth, I had not yet been introduced to the term compassion. In the post, Om Swami defined it as, “a conscious act, a gesture of love, of care, of charity, you do with the sole intention of helping the other person.”
In his post, he shares a story that sparked something in me, it goes as follows:
An elderly man was taking a stroll on the beach one morning. Ruthless tidal waves of the night before had pushed out many creatures to the beach, notably, the starfish. There were thousands of starfish lying on the beach, not all were dead. He felt sorry for the state of affairs but continued with his walk, for, there was nothing he could do about it, he felt.
A few meters away, he saw another man, younger, more a teenager, childlike, bending down, picking something and throwing it in the ocean.
“What are you doing?” he asked, somewhat amused.
“Oh, I’m saving these starfish. Sun’s gonna be up soon and they’ll die as the waves are receding.”
The old man chuckled and said, “There’s miles and miles of beach, it’s littered with tens of thousands of dying starfish. Your saving a handful won’t make any difference.”
The young one reached out to another starfish, picked it, tossed it back in the sea, and spoke, “It made a difference to that one!”
The essence of this story is that to be useful in this world we don’t have to change a million lives, we just need to help one person.
This post propelled me on the path to discover more about kindness and compassion. I began reading books by St. Augustine, Oprah, Deepak Chopra, and Swami. From them, I learned that showing love, compassion, and kindness to those around oneself can help eradicate the feelings of purposelessness from one’s life.
In tandem with reading these authors, I decided to take a course on existentialism. My existential dread was sucking me in so deep, that I knew I had to understand it to overcome it. In class, I read the work of Satre, Nietzche, and Heidegger. Essentially, existential dread arises from us believing that we are meant to live this life just for ourselves.
Now that I understood what I was feeling and why, I felt better but not ‘cured’. Often, I still felt purposeless. On reflection, I realized I was volunteering and doing other “compassionate tasks” but I wasn’t practicing compassion on a daily basis. It is very easy to show a stranger compassion but harder to show it to yourself and those you interact with every day. I always had this misplaced idea that I have to do a grand gesture to “Be the change [I] wish to see in the world.” I was the old man in the aforementioned story but I had to learn to move towards being the teenager.
Over the course of almost four years, I’ve slowly learned to do just that and with every act of kindness and compassion, I’ve noticed my existential dread reduce. Those hours I spent curled in bed feeling my life was useless has been replaced with an honest reflection on how I can continue to contribute to the world. In today’s world, I believe we often feel that only grand gestures matter. Educating 10,000 children is what matters, we forget that we have to start from somewhere; we have to start with one. This is beautifully summarized in one of my favorite couplets from the prolific poet Kabir which I learned in middle school:
धीरे-धीरे रे मना, धीरे सब कुछ होय,
माली सींचे सौ घड़ा, ऋतु आए फल होय |
It translates to: We need to start slowly because even if the gardener waters her plants multiple times every day, they’ll only flower in their season. Similarly, as we begin to sow the seeds for the changes we wish to see in the world, they too will arise. We can’t sit and wait for things to happen but instead, slowly work towards making them happen. We shouldn’t believe that our efforts don’t matter if we aren’t helping millions of people for if we all help just one person, this world would be a happier place.
