Autism and a Brief Existentialist Meditation
The meaning of life as a neurodivergent individual
TW: Discussions of suicide and anti-filicide
I present you with a thought experiment.
Before birth, you are in an ethereal or even an astral dimension as you are about to take form. As you prepare to sign your birth contract that will immediately send your soul to Earth, your guide tells you the following:
”Before you sign this contract, I want you to remember what you are taking on by deciding to be born. You will be entering the world of time and space. There is scarcity on Earth. There is physicality. You will only have five senses in which to engage yourself with the world. Here, on this plane, you do not need those senses.”
“You will not manifest something you want there just by thinking about it, as you would be able to do if you stayed here, and you cannot travel instantly to places just by thinking of being there. Nothing will come easy where you are going — on the planet Earth. It is known as one of the roughest neighborhoods in our galaxy. Other humans will mistreat you. Whereas communication is telepathic on this plane, you will have to communicate in many different ways with others if you leave for Earth. People will often misunderstand what you have to say, and you will inevitably misunderstand other people.”
“Your body will have many needs, and you will have to attend to them constantly. The body will continuously need food, the need for the excrement of solids, the elimination of liquids, medicine, and sex, and it will have to remain neurochemically balanced for your mental health. Your body will be far from perfect. You can quite easily acquire a disease on Earth by just being around other souls, or your body may turn on itself and cause you much misery. For many years before you leave the Earth, you may even forget who you are in your current life. Rest assured that this is quite normal.”
“Here, you don’t have a body on this etheric plane. You have none of these needs in your current form. This will change the moment you enter the Earth plane. You will always need a place to live, which will be challenging because no one will give this to you. Earth is also filled with catastrophes and calamities which do not happen here. Are you sure you want to do this?”
But before you say “no” to your guide, they add this to their pitch to sweeten the deal…
“It does not sound very tempting to go to Earth, young soul, from what I have said thus far. I admit this to be true. But please know that you have been to Earth many times before. You have been man, woman, atheist, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and every other religion that exists on the planet Earth. You do not remember much of any of your 2,232 lives there. While there, you experienced love, raised children, had grandchildren, and tangibly changed the world. In some of your lives, you were not such a great character. But you control your destiny this time. You could become as great a person as the Buddha or Joan of Arc. Going to Earth is like being an avatar in a video game. You won’t be there forever, and you will learn a lot. So what do you say? Do you want to sign your birth contract?”
Assuming that this is how things work (which I am ultimately making up from my imagination, so please do not take it literally), I am unsure what my decision would be. Would I come here? I honestly do not know.
Albert Camus
If one had presented the imaginary dialogue I invented to Albert Camus, he would have told them to stop being delusional. No pre-birth dialogue would ever have occurred because this assumes the Universe has a plan. For Camus, life has no inherent meaning in and of itself. To our friend Albert, the very fact of being born is a complete absurdity. Camus’s example of this has become memeified over the years by the Myth of Sisyphus. The Myth of Sisyphus, as discussed by Camus in his philosophical essay of the same name, is a story borrowed from Greek mythology. Sisyphus, a king known for his deceitfulness, is condemned by the gods to roll a massive boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he reaches the top, forcing him to start over. This eternal, futile labor symbolizes a profound existential crisis. Many would say this futile act describes the way some of us feel in our daily lives.
For Camus, the ultimate question of philosophy is whether it is worth staying alive. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Camus rejects suicide as a solution to the absurdity of life, arguing that recognition and acceptance of the absurd, much like Sisyphus’s acceptance of his fate, allows for a life that is rich and meaningful despite its inherent meaninglessness. This defiance and joy in the face of the absurd becomes a rebellious act of freedom and a reason to keep living. In other words, by living, we are giving the middle finger to the powers that be (if there are any) who would throw us into this absurd situation of being born by living as good of a life as we can despite it. Think of Lieutenant Dan on the boat during the big storm in Forrest Gump and his “battle with God” after losing his legs. He says to God defiantly…” You call this a storm?” as he bravely confronts the storm and finally makes peace with himself.
Or when Truman of The Truman Show says to his creator, Christof, as he is trying to drown him at sea…” You’re gonna have to kill me!” and then mocks Christof by singing…” What do ya do with a drunken sailor?” as he tries to sail his way to freedom en route to Fiji. That is us, says Camus. We are rebels fighting against the absurd life we were born into. And there is honor in that. We are all rebels by the nature of living.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The pessimists and existentialists were not complete life-deniers. Schopenhauer, one of the most unhappy dudes ever, generally feels that life is not worth living. But on his “good days,” Schopenhauer would concede that life allows us to meditate on the beautiful aesthetic and artistic life where deep contemplation can lead to a higher state beyond the torments of our world. Despite the personal desires and suffering we carry around with us, Schopenhauer sees artistic and even some intellectual pursuits as a form of solace we can find while on Earth. While Schopenhauer agrees with our hypothetical spirit guide, who said there is plenty of suffering on this planet, he values meeting this suffering with compassion, ethical living, and empathy.
But this does not mean Schopenhauer sees life as inherently valuable. If anything, for him, we have blind evolutionary forces known as “the will” that Schopenhauer sees as an involuntary mechanism built within ourselves that he would do without if he could. It’s insatiable and can never be satisfied. It foreshadows Freud’s concepts of the unconscious and the id. One can quickly see how Eastern religions and philosophies of India and Asia influenced Schopenhauer to view “liberation” or “moksha” — being free from the cycle of birth and death as the ideal by denying our implanted will.
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger’s association with the Nazi Party and his role during the National Socialist regime in Germany is a complex and controversial aspect of his biography. And yet, he has a concept that is so important to this discussion that I must point out one of his ideas despite his past.
Heidegger says that this conversation with our spirit guide before coming to earth never could have happened. For Heidegger, we were “thrown” into the world without a clear purpose or direction. Heidegger calls this “thrownness” because individuals find themselves in a world not of their own choosing, with predetermined social, historical, and cultural conditions. Yet rather than say life is not worth living, Heidegger would tell us that examining our “thrownness” can provide us opportunities to discover who we are. He feels that meditating on our mortality, finitude, and limits can help us construct meaning in our lives. There’s truth to this. Would we want to live forever? Living forever would mean working forever, which would also mean having to support yourself forever, etc. Who would we be without death in our lives? Would we view our choices as being as precious as they are if there were no boundaries to them? Heidegger says that as beings-thrown-in-the-world without our consent, our choices gain significance with the clock always ticking towards death. We cannot start living until we contemplate our finitude in its fullness because the truth of our existence is that we have to face death, just as we met birth. And this realization gives greater depth, richness, and dimension to our lives that otherwise might seem meaningless if life went on forever.
David Benatar
Of course, not all the pessimistic philosophers feel that life is worth living. One of the most prominent living proponents of this way of thinking is Benatar, and he is an anti-natalist. For Benatar, there is no moral justification for having children. Benatar feels that when parents bring children into the world, they know those children will experience harm, and without the unborn child’s consent, this harm cannot be justified. Pain is bad, and pleasure is not necessarily good, according to Benatar. Life is harmful to Benatar in that we experience more pain than pleasure, and some of the things we think are ‘pleasures,’ such as addictions, end up causing pain. Coming into existence always brings with it misery and suffering.
Yet Benatar does not endorse suicide because of how it would affect those who are bereaved in our absence.
This is not to offer a general recommendation of suicide. Suicide, like death from other causes, makes the lives of those who are bereaved much worse. Rushing into one’s own suicide can have a profound negative impact on the lives of those close to one. Although an Epicurean may be committed to not caring about what
happens after his death, it is still the case that the bereaved suffer harm even if the deceased does not.
So, is life worth living for autistics?
If there is an answer to this question, it must come from within. I would encourage autistics to say “yes.”
But many autistic parents have tragically decided on behalf of their autistic children that life is not worth living. It is commonplace to read stories of parents of autistic children trying to kill their own children or fantasizing about carrying out the act. Some do it as a “mercy-killing,” as in Of Mice and Men. According to the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN)…
In the past five years, over 570 people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents, relatives or caregivers.
On Friday, March 1st, the disability community will gather across the nation to remember these disabled victims of filicide — disabled people murdered by their family members or caregivers. You can sign up to be a Day of Mourning Vigil Site Coordinator here.
We see the same pattern repeating over and over again. A parent kills their disabled child. The media portrays these murders as justifiable and inevitable due to the “burden” of having a disabled person in the family. If the parent stands trial, they are given sympathy and comparatively lighter sentences, if they are sentenced at all. The victims are disregarded, blamed for their own murder at the hands of the person they should have been able to trust the most, and ultimately forgotten. And then the cycle repeats.
We have all been thrown into the world. But autistics are the ones who get to decide what to make of their lives, not their parents. My heartfelt and most profound feelings are that all autistic individuals are priceless beings by no other virtue than being born. Autistic individuals have only one person they need to prove something to. Themselves!
But I know this can sound like trite advice. I will be the first to admit that life has not been a cakewalk for me, and I have had some form of privilege that others have not. Autism does not make things easy. I have experienced some horrible things in my life that I would not wish on my worst enemy. I have autism, anxiety, depression, PTSD, a learning disability, and some chronic medical conditions, in addition to a boatload of trauma.
Being in a pre-birth realm and knowing that I would go through all of this in life, it is impossible to imagine the choice I would have made to come here. It is possible I would have passed.
But now that I am here, I want to be the “rebel” Camus spoke of. I want you to feel like that rebel, too. I have passions that I want to explore further, and I still want to make a difference. I pine for the days when the criminal legal system adjudicates those with mental illness and developmental disabilities who are not a threat to society differently and more compassionately. And it excites me to work on these challenges, even if they will not be systemically changed soon. I hope you feel that you also have reasons to be here.
We all have our unique forms of privilege — even autistic people. I was watching a TikTok video yesterday where an autistic person said that they have been ostracized all of their life because they are so intelligent that whenever they correct anyone, other people hate them for it. Their way of masking is to dumb themselves down. While I realize how this can be a genuine problem for an autistic person, I think that is a pretty nice problem to have. I cannot just pull knowledge from the ether and command my tongue to become an orator on the spot, primarily because of my problems with demand recall — or episodic memory issues. My brain freezes on the spot, even if I know something.
Many autistic people who are reading this article have more significant and lesser challenges than me. Competitions of suffering are never productive, but we acknowledge our privilege today to be sensitive to others with more significant challenges. Wherever we stand on the spectrum of challenges and privileges, I wish for you to feel good about who you are as a person. Forget the expectations placed upon you by your family and society. Your self-determination and autonomy mean you get to call the shots and determine how to make this life singularly meaningful to you.
The life will end someday. This defined boundary gives me both comfort and urgency. What we put off today may not be actualized tomorrow since no day is promised. Define what is important to you in your own life, and make it happen. Your goals, your way.
