An Existential Climax
I’ve always taken a humorous or mocking approach to an existential question. It’s something that would have bothered me for all of 10 minutes or so before it became something for me to make fun of, because it was barely anything worse than a moment of doubt and I couldn’t really take that seriously for too long. Most of the time I would wake up in the middle of the night and think “what the fuck am I doing with my life?”, but it was the middle of the night so I’d be back to sleep and dreaming in no time. Sleep is an awesome thing to do with life; I remember being upset about having to sleep as a child and now I can’t get enough of it (literally).
It was interesting to experience a darker side of this recently, where the first thought to enter my head as my sunrise-imitating alarm clock lit up was “my life is meaningless, what am I doing with it?” My life is meaningless… that’s one way to start a Monday morning! Unlike the other times it completely floored me, made me depressed, and no matter what I did to bring myself to the present the question lingered. Like a torturer forcing their prisoner to give them an answer that they genuinely don’t have, my mind was begging me to tell it what it wanted to hear and it wasn’t pretty or even remotely truthful.
No wonder they call these things crises. Jesus.
That feeling lasted three full days and now I’m curious about how it feels to look into such a crisis from the outside, because it feels like I have a much more honest answer for myself. Why was I so convinced that I wasn’t living a meaningful life when there are plenty of people grateful for what I bring into their lives? No one is forcing me to do anything I don’t want to do, so it’s not about resenting the fact that I’m depended on some times. And it doesn’t make life meaningless either, it just reveals that I have a hard time accepting the reality of it.
And what about envy, that intense feeling of longing for something you don’t think you have? Life isn’t meaningless because I miss the people I love so dearly, because I live so far away from them, or because I’ve not been as spontaneous and free-spirited as they’ve been. Sounds like I’ve had a hard time accepting the love and the deep connection because surely the most beautifully meaningful thing in our whole existence is love, and it doesn’t require a close proximity or a certain relationship status to truly love someone.
What’s funny with this is how easy it was for me to flip the existential crisis on its head and turn it into an existential climax (climax feels like an odd word to use for this, but it gives it an unusual charm). “My life is so full of meaning! what am I doing with that?” One sentence later and I’m right out of a bleak future and back into the wonderful present, and there is so much goodness in it.
The benefit here is that it makes it so much more rewarding to take a look at what you’re doing, what you want to do, and how it all fits in with your values and whatever it is that gets you out of bed. For me, that is being myself, my true self, and doing whatever it takes to bring more of that to the surface because I really love so many of the things going on in my life, and the people in it who are mind-blowingly amazing and could give anyone a renewed faith in humanity. So when I look at what I’m doing with that in mind I might still have similar answers to the negative version of the question, but the difference is that those answers will be positive, fun, spontaneous as opposed to reactive, and present-minded.
It’s still perfectly normal for a dying personality to question its increasing irrelevance in its owner’s life. It’s not bad for the original crisis to have happened because a negative mindset will see less and less meaning and purpose in a positive life. At the same time, it’s important to realise that the decisions you take in such a state of mind are not really going to be made in your best interest; they will be in the interest of perpetuating a cycle that gives your negativity a reason to live.
