On Acceptance into the Club
Posted on March 16, 2021 Leave a Comment
Groucho Marx once said he would not join any club that would accept him as a member, a statement as true about club membership as it is about love.
We are all, in different degrees, broken, overwhelmed, petty, vindictive, and shallow human beings, and we know our own flaws with a depth and intensity others could only guess at. Luckily (for them) they will never have to know of the inner turmoil we experience daily; the whirlpools of self-doubt that spiral into self-loathing as we hold a mirror to our psyche and see the fractured and mean person reflected back at us. The notion that another could love someone this deformed strikes us as a bit strange.
We often have a remarkably low opinion of ourselves; one which we believe is all the more accurate the more offensive it is. Yet, as we journey through life, we chance upon people who (with either short-sightedness or exceptional clarity, we aren’t sure ourselves…) see us as someone worth spending time with. There must be something wrong with them, we tell ourselves. We know how petty, angry, divisive and mean we can be; how broken, confused, and demented we are, so what the hell is wrong with this person? Anybody who is crazy enough to love us is obviously not someone we would, or should, ever be with. Anybody who would send us an invitation to attend clearly hosts a club we would not want to belong to.
But, we are likely suffering from a slight distortion of vision. When we begin falling for someone, we can only see the good in them, often contrasted against the bad in ourselves. In what is a perverse psychological projection, we take all the terrible qualities upon ourselves while pushing all admirable qualities onto them. We forget they too are, in their own way, broken. They are not perfect. Nobody is. But, failing to realise this, we hesitate in the face of being with someone, holding onto the mistaken belief that because we are unworthy, any relationship we join would be diminished in quality simply by our presence.
In a way, we do not want the one we love to love us back. So long as we love them, we can escape ourselves. But, the moment they love us back, we are forced to look back at ourselves, and are reminded of the qualities that drove us toward them in the first place. We dislike ourselves, so if someone likes us, it doesn’t mean we are worthy of being liked, but instead, that there is something wrong with them.
Seeing only the devil in ourselves is part of the same destructive mechanism as seeing only an angel in them. We need to keep in mind that the person who likes us and we like back is equally flawed and far from a bad thing, it is an endorsement of how everyone is worthy of being loved.
What matters is not finding someone perfect (because they would be intolerable) but finding someone who accepts your flaws and can have you, in turn, accept theirs. What matters is becoming better versions of yourself in the joint project we call a relationship.
The relationship will be a small club with only two members, but it will be one where each member is highly valued. When we are accepted into this very private club, we should not agonise over how we are bringing down the quality of membership, but rejoice and perhaps even laugh about how lucky we were to find someone who despite our flaws, still wanted us to join.
The Fear of Intimacy
Posted on March 15, 2021 Leave a Comment
The fear of intimacy is debilitating and emotionally crippling and while it is not built into us from the start, it is one’s stoic attempt to manage in the present the heartbreak of the past.
In a sense, it is not a fear of intimacy, after all, intimacy also includes being cared for and loved, and nobody is properly fearful of these things. Rather, it is a fear of the inextricable other side of intimacy: exposing oneself to another and allowing them to traverse, unsupervised, the emotional topography of our hearts, with no promise they will treat the gardens with care and consideration.
We are not born with this fear. It is a (quite reasonable) conditioned response based upon previous circumstances. Perhaps a parent packed up their things one day and never returned, perhaps a partner cheated, perhaps a dark secret confided to in a friend was used as ammunition for bullying in the schoolyard. Sources for this fear are many, but they coalesce around a single point: betrayal. With betrayal, one learns to hold back, wall off, and close up as the only means to defend against future hurts with any certainty.
This may be fine so long as we remain alone enough, taking refuge in our inner world, and receiving comfort from the fact that although we will never feel another’s love, we are protected from ever being hurt.
The fear of intimacy results in behaviours that are – perhaps unknown to those who do it – seriously self-sabotaging. Having been let down in the past, those fearful of intimacy construct walls of emotional obscurantism. ‘Nobody will breach these walls and assault my heart again’. Lacking a history of genuine and reliable love (as those fearful of intimacy often do), they do not recognise it when it arrives, and are drawn to undermine it, if only to prove to themselves that the love was not genuine or reliable in the first place.
To their credit, these tortured souls understand the inherent ambiguity of existence. Nothing is promised in advance. People may accept us as a flower, or throw us away like a weed. There is no way of divining the future. As such, they have made a choice (which we may agree or disagree with) that the candle is not worth the wick, and have declined the invitation for intimacy, if only to protect themselves from its more disastrous potentialities.
Those fearful of intimacy should not be berated for being cold, distant, or seeming unloving. Well, we could berate them, but that would only draw them further into themselves. What they need is the same thing that we all need, just perhaps with a gentler touch. They need to be shown a love that is steadfast and reliable, a compassion that is unwavering, and a tenderness that reflects the precariousness of their situation.
It requires a lot of courage (after many life lessons to do the opposite), to open up and let someone else in. That alone is an act of incredible bravery worthy of the highest honour in the pantheon of achievements in one’s life. When this courage is lacking, we can be there to provide the support and affection that was sorely missing earlier and help someone take the first tentative steps outside their personal citadel, and to reconnect with others.
Talking to Strangers
Posted on March 12, 2021 Leave a Comment
It may seem counterintuitive, but talking to strangers about our deeper issues offers an opportunity to be candid and honest in ways we are unable with those whom we know well. Unlike friends or families, beyond first impressions, strangers do not have any idea about who we are, how we should act, or the types of thoughts we are meant to have or things we are meant to say. In a way, in the presence of a stranger, we can be unambiguously ourselves.
Of course, there is a time and place for this. It wouldn’t be appropriate or helpful to unload childhood trauma on the cashier at the supermarket but it would be appropriate with a psychologist. Part of the value of a psychologist is they are, to use Adam Phillip’s term, a ‘familiar stranger’, an alien to your inner world and therefore, capable of seeing you with fresh eyes. Our parents will see us through the lens of an entire lifetime of development and maturation. Our friends will see us through the lens our particular social dynamic and the certain masks we wear. But a stranger has no history, no preconceived notions, no box to put us in. They can, perhaps like no one else, really see & listen.
Unlike a parent or close friend, the stranger offers a particular kind of solace because, paradoxically, they do not really care about us. Rather than a weakness, this can actually be a strength. Uninvested in your day to day life, the stranger can give advice entirely free from any emotional attachment, sense of duty, or fear of offence. They do not need to tip toe around issues only a family member would know, or decline saying certain things because it may be hypocritical. The beauty of the stranger is precisely that they do not care and this affords them a quality of honesty and straightforwardness which is always in short supply.
Lack of intimacy is a privilege. Because they are a stranger, they have no reason to be personally invested in our emotional state. There is an opportunity, at least, for things to be said, not because they are nice but rather, because they are true. The stranger can say things without fear of resentment or vengeance, as only those without a future together can. The lack of time too, is a privilege.
In a world increasingly self-same, striking up conversations with strangers may yield some unexpected fruits and expand the horizons of possibilities. Opportunities to have meaningful conversations about deeper issues with strangers would be on a first date (freeing yourself from the banality of small talk), with a travelling foreigner, with someone sitting alone on a park bench, a lonely and perhaps despondent soul (for they always have something interesting to say) sitting alone at a bar, and of course, with those most well trained strangers who know how to simultaneously be intimate and distanced: psychologists.
Against Exceptionalism, Or, In Praise of the Ordinary
Posted on March 10, 2021 Leave a Comment
Our culture exalts the lives of often quite remarkable people. Musicians who have sold millions of albums, Nobel scientists who have developed new genetic editing technology, athletes who have become the fastest, strongest, or most gymnastic; authors who have written best-selling books, or a businessperson who with skill and acumen, has become the richest person in the world. Our society is quite bereft of images that glorify the ordinary.
We also live in a society that thinks and speaks of itself as a meritocracy. The underlying assumption is that there are no barriers to self-fulfilment and realisation. With enough hard work, determination and ambition, anybody can become anything they want. If we try our hardest and (in a properly capitalist circumlocution) ‘invest’ in our ‘human capital’, we too can become exceptional human beings like those we see on TV shows, movies, and magazines.
A society focused on exceptional people, combined with a meritocratic myth, merge to instil in people a belief that they must become exceptional and if they cannot, it is entirely their fault.
We will find articles in the news about the student who achieved the highest year 12 score in the state. The journalist will detail their hard work, determination and ambition as values to be held up for emulation. Of course, that student was incredible and beat immense statistical odds to achieve what they did. But it is no more impressive (or rather, impressive in a different way) than the student who studied just as hard, worked a part time job to support their family, and achieved a reasonably good score that allowed them to enter university to study a course that will land them their dream job.
We will praise the Nobel Prize winning scientist who developed breakthrough technology. But, we will overlook the thousands of men and women who work tirelessly in the background, doing the tedious and tiresome work over months and years laying stepping stones that allowed the new technology to come into existence. Their work was indeed ordinary, but without it, something extraordinary would not have come into existence.
We have deep seated beliefs about ourselves that we must become exceptional. According to the message of our society, it is not enough to work a good job that pays well and is mildly satisfying; we must rise to the top of the ladder and become the boss. It is not enough that we have shelter; we must have a grand house with marble benches, enormous columns and a spiral staircase. It is not enough to have modest savings that will tide us over in tough times and give us the free time to lounge lazily in the sun; we must work tirelessly to the point of sickness to build savings, invest, use equity to develop a portfolio and build massive riches. It is not enough to travel to a local waterfall or a desert and enjoy the serenity of cascading droplets or the solace of an empty plain; we must travel to exotic places, sail on yachts across Croatian lakes, or rent luxury suites in Milan or Paris.
Of course, not everyone can do this. But rather than recognise this ludicrousness of the belief system, we embrace a far easier (and more painful) mindset: shame. We feel inadequate being surrounded by such wealth, luxury, and exceptionalism. ‘It could have been me’ we tell ourselves, ‘if I had just worked harder, made smarter decisions, or knew what I did now’, ignoring the statistical improbabilities one has to defeat in order to be truly exceptional. The fact is, exceptionalism is simply not a possibility for most of us and that certainly is not a bad thing. If we can embrace the ordinariness of our existence, we may come across a certain peace and tranquillity that is achieved only when we stop trying so hard, like a cat lounging on a couch in the sun. It is perfectly ordinary, there is no striving to be anything exceptional, and how at peace and happy does the cat look?
We do not need to be exceptional in order to be satisfied because we do incredible things all the time. We may never enter the Olympics, but, in our own way, we compete in the Olympics of everyday life. Feeding, clothing, and taking care of children and ensuring they grow up to be well-rounded and happy individuals is an incredible feat, as is mustering the energy to get out of bed, brush your teeth, and do some work if you are feeling incredibly depressed and want to lay in bed all day. Keeping the house in reasonably good order while juggling the demands of work and friends is something to be incredibly proud of, even if it doesn’t land you on the front cover of Forbes. Montaigne writes,
Storming a breach, conducting and embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor belying yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare, and more difficult.
Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.
Well ironed sheets, a bountiful veggie patch, and attending university while working and taking care of the house are not glorified like first place in the Australian Open or rising to the rank of CEO, but they are no less difficult or deserving of respect.
Vermeer is challenging us to think differently. Perhaps success is a small garden on a quiet street. Maybe all we need is shelter, warmth and the company of people who love and care for us. The buildings are empty because life plays out in the lives of people, not things. The Little Street praises the ordinary. There is no splendour, no grandeur, no bombast. There is only a scene of a simple, yet beautiful thing, called ‘life’.
An ordinary life can be properly rich and rewarding if we adjusted our perspectives and saw, not a failure to be exceptional but instead, a life with its own treasures and precious memories. If we can realise that our lives do not lie in the stratospheric heights of the exceptional, we may gain deeper comfort and satisfaction from simpler things: a night in listening to a favourite album, a cup of hot chocolate by the fire, or a simple yet tasty meal prepared with love and tenderness by a kind and charitable housemate.
Mental Health & the Myth of Exceptionalism
Posted on March 9, 2021 Leave a Comment
We generally think of narcissists as those who consider themselves exceptionally talented, beautiful, or perfect beyond reproach. The narcissist, in this formation, believes themselves to be incomparably extraordinary. They are, in their own eyes, what others should aspire to, and those who fail to meet their high standards (which, by definition, only the narcissist can satisfy) deserve criticism and rebuke.
This is, however, a very narrow interpretation of narcissism. Broadened, narcissism can entail the singularity of one’s perfection, but also the singularity of one’s deformity. To put it another way, the other side to narcissism can be described as the exceptionalism of one’s pain. In this dimension of narcissism, we fall prey to the crippling belief that we are the only ones who have ever felt this way, that nobody will ever understand our pain, and that what we are experiencing is so unique, particular, and exclusive that it would be a waste of time to try and communicate it to others.
This flagellating mentality is centripetal, drawing us away from the very thing that would allow us to heal the pain that afflicts us: the company of others. In a way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we believe others will not understand so we keep our pain to ourselves, thereby denying others any chance to discover what is wrong, and thereby using their ignorance as proof that they cannot understand. The curse of thinking ourselves exceptional is that we create the conditions where we must go it alone; Atlas carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders alone.
By keeping silent, we compound the pain of mental illness with icy cold isolation, separating ourselves from what would potentially be the best remedy for our toxic exceptionalism: the company of other people.
By opening up, we would find that our friend too has gone through a terrible breakup, the loss of a parent, the revision of self-worth in the face of an academic or business failing, and we might even learn of a problem they have never shared that would put our own problems into perspective.
We are all scarred, bruised, battered and damaged in some way and should not mistake an inability to see pain in others as proof that it is not there. Opening up does not necessarily guarantee we will heal, or we will even feel much better, but it will help put our problems in perspective. We will learn that our suffering is not a curse bestowed exclusively on us, but is the unfortunate lot of human beings. We will also learn a vital lesson that we should draw on for the rest of our lives: we are not exceptional and that is not necessarily a bad thing. We all suffer, but, with the company of kind, caring and compassionate friends, we do not have to suffer alone.
Being Vulnerable with Friends
Posted on February 24, 2021 Leave a Comment
One of the more pernicious side effects of our mediagenic age is how one dimensionally perfect the lives of individuals appear to those on the other side of the screen, prompting feelings of fear and self-loathing from onlookers at how few fabulous parties they attend, scenic landscapes they visit, and beautiful people they are surrounded by.
Echoing Zygmunt Bauman’s sentiment that in our consumer culture, we are both ‘the commodity and the travelling salesperson’, in the fleeting quest for ever more likes, ‘friends’, and followers, individuals strain to appear supremely popular, beautiful and fun, if only for the validation of invisible others whose thumb movement on a screen carries the eschatological weight of the Roman emperor in the Coliseum.
At its core, this behaviour is an expression of a deep seated social belief: others will like us only if we are the funniest, coolest, or prettiest (or any other superlative one can conjure) person. Our relentless tidying up when company is over, our changing out of tracksuit pants and thongs when going out, and our putting on a false smile when friends are around all bear a striking similarity to Instagram influencers and Tinder users: they are examples of hiding our less-marketable qualities in the understandable but sorely mistaken belief that people will only like us for our accomplishments and despise us for our flaws.
We are all guilty of a paradoxical and hence, conflicting mentality: we believe that others like us only for our gifts and talents, and would turn away at the first sight of the muck beneath. Yet, at the same time, we long to have the worst parts of ourselves cherished, not because we think that our flaws are great in of themselves, but because they are part of what makes us human, and we do not want to pretend to be something we are not.
What allows people to get close to each other is the extent to which they drop the façade and reveal themselves in their gloriously flawed nature. Of course there is danger in this. We could be mocked, taunted and rejected for showing an unflattering part of ourselves; but the reverse holds true, we could also be praised, encouraged, and embraced for opening up and sharing some fundamental truths about ourselves. To be vulnerable is not to necessarily provide any useful information about oneself, or to expose one’s deepest secrets. It is, instead, to give something away, something precious and more valuable than anything to be found on the stock market: the key to one’s dignity and self-respect.
With proper handling, it is this key which opens the door to others and creates meaningful relationships, more than a clean house of a beautiful photo ever would. What makes friendship (unlike Facebook friends or Instagram followers) rich and rewarding, is not that our friends are perfect, but rather, that they trust us enough to share the parts of themselves that, in the wrong hands, would lead to emotional devastation, yet in the caring hands of a friend, makes one feel loved and accepted.
Jiddu Krishnamurti On Images & Relationships
Posted on February 23, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘All our relationships are really imaginary’, writes Krishnamurti in his collection of talks titled Freedom from the Known. ‘That is’, he continues, they are ‘based on an image formed by thought’.
According to Krishnamurti, we rarely see each other as we are now. We have memories of what someone likes and dislikes, things they have said to us and done to us, how they have moved us or failed us. We bundle these collection of memories, feelings, and intuitions about a person and say that is who they are. But this is, at most, who they were. Of course, who we are is based off who we were. But, this is almost irrelevant. To the extent that we see the person in the present through what they were in the past, we are engaging them through an image of them, rather than as they are, right now.
Naturally we don’t see each other at all as we actually are. What we see is the images we have formed about each other.
These images, he notes, are what ‘prevent us from being in contact’ with each other and that is where problems arise; because, people change.
When I say I know you, I mean I knew you yesterday. I do not know you actually ‘now’. All I know is an image of you. That image is put together by what you have said in praise of me or to insult me, what you have done to me – it is put together by all the memories I have of you – and your image of me is put together in the same way, and it is those images which have relationship and which prevent us from really communing with each other.
Imagine a scenario. You have been with your partner for years. When you first met them, you were very attentive to their every thought, observant of their every movement, thoughtful of their every need. You had no image of them, so you took it upon yourself to be as attentive, observant, thoughtful, and aware as possible. However, the years have passed and you have settled into a routine; routine questions, routine answers, routine offers, routine responses. You stop trying to get to know your partner because you believe you already know them.
But people are always changing. The change that is almost imperceptible from one day to the next takes on enormous proportions over the years. Maybe she now enjoys knitting. Maybe she doesn’t enjoy it but is curious and would like to take it up. Maybe he wants to learn a new language. Maybe, even though he has never shown an interest in it before, he would like to travel. You may not notice this. Or if you do, you say to them ‘that’s not like you’ or ‘don’t be silly, you don’t like those kinds of things’. You put them back in their box. Their interests and desires no longer conform to the image you have of them and you refute them. You see what is happening here? What you know is an ‘image’ of who they were, a collection of ideas, feelings, sensations, thoughts and memories of the past. But they are not the past! They are there, standing in front of you, in the present, with present ideas, feelings, sensations and thoughts that you cannot possibly be attentive to if you are living in the past.
The person they are, right now, is not something you can experience if you are constantly living through images of who they were. The image, therefore, interferes with reality. If we are to be in direct contact with anything, whether it be a painting, sunset, or a person, then we must let go of our prejudices, assumptions, and pre-conceived ideas – that is, our ‘images’. Only then will we come into contact with something as it is, and not as it was, or how we imagined it to be.
On Forgiveness
Posted on February 21, 2021 Leave a Comment
With our prodigious minds, we can recall fond memories throughout our years: birthday parties surrounded by friends and families, the first time we fell in love, the day we received our first A+. But, it is the irrevocable fact of life that one cannot have pleasure without pain. Just as we have fond memories filled with joy and happiness, we likewise have ones filled with pain and suffering.
We remember the nasty things said to us, done to us, and suffered by us at the hands of others: the bully who put us in chokeholds, the peers who taunted us about how we spoke, or the inattentive mother who turned a blind eye to our pains.
In all likelihood, we may never have forgiven others for what they did. We have held on to the hurt, in the process stopping ourselves from finding peace. In order to free ourselves from the self-imposed bondage of memory, we need to share one of the most precious gifts of the soul: forgiveness.
Just as we cannot fight fire with fire, we cannot extinguish the egregious hurt others have committed against us by holding on or deflecting that hurt back. Instead, by cultivating humility, patience and understanding towards those who have hurt us in the past, we allow ourselves the opportunity to forgive. Other people are – as we know all too well about ourselves – flawed, impaired and damaged. Rather than misanthropy, it is recognition that nobody is perfect in every way. When we remind ourselves of this, the fact that we have been hurt by them becomes more understandable. We can show forgiveness in the hope that others will do the same when we (inevitably) experience our own moments of weakness.
Yet, we hold ourselves to different standards than we hold others. To forgive others may be difficult, but one of the most monumentally difficult tasks in life is mustering the necessary kindness and affection to forgive ourselves. We are, unfortunately, often our own harshest critics and strictest moral teachers.
We can find the space in our hearts to forgive others, knowing they can sometimes be petty, impetuous, and almost incorrigibly blind to how their words or actions affect others. Yet, we hold ourselves to a different (and impossible) standard. We tell ourselves that we cannot be this way and that we must be (although we might never say it precisely this way), perfect.
When we withhold forgiveness from ourselves, we continue living in the past. We never move beyond what we have done, and we continue to allow these things to define us. The petty arguments we started in our last relationship, the time we kicked up a fuss when we were made to wait 20 minutes (even though they had a very good excuse), and the bitter breakup because we were unfaithful; are not seen as unfortunate errors that have given us an opportunity to learn, but rather as irrevocable stains of our character that will never wash away.
It would be wise and therapeutic for us to apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others. We are, just like everyone, prone to faults, missteps and mistakes. But these do not define us any more than they do others. Rather than immutable statements about our flawed nature, our past misdeeds should instead be seen as unfortunate but somehow necessary moments that have given us the opportunity to reflect and grow. In doing this, we can finally begin to forgive ourselves and nurture the most important and long lasting relationship we will ever have: the one we have with ourselves.
On Suffering in Silence
Posted on February 18, 2021 Leave a Comment
Almost everywhere we turn we are encouraged to express ourselves. Social media platforms extol us to share whatever is on our minds, advertisers promise their products will manifest our deeper-selves and reveal them to the world, our employers inform us we can ‘speak up’ about any issue without fear of reprimand, our friends remind us that we can tell them anything, and freedom of speech is one of our most cherished and highly valued freedoms. Despite all this (or perhaps, in spite of all this), we shut up (or shut down) those parts of ourselves that aren’t beautiful or readily marketable out of fear of rejection, judgement, or misunderstanding.
As with so many psychological problems, this likely has its roots in childhood. The parent who tells their child ‘you are driving me crazy’ or ‘you will be the end of me’, or who, perhaps, is going through enough problems of their own that the child sees that their own trouble would only add more weight to an unbearable load; sends a sometimes clear and other times implied message to the child to keep their sufferings to themselves.
As we grow up, we continue bottling up, and therefore perpetuating our suffering, so as not to annoy the people around us. We smile, appease, and do what we can to keep those around us happy; a poor compensation for an inner happiness we cannot have, or believe ourselves unworthy of. In this sense, we aren’t nice, but instead, scared. Our friendliness is not borne from choice, but from a fear of making others upset, just as we did our parents when we were younger.
What we need is two things. Firstly, we need to recognise how we do not want to speak up because we think the people we hold dear will find us broken, inept, and unworthy of their time; that is, we need to see how scared we are people will reject us for who we are beneath the thin veneer of false cheeriness we have carefully cultivated over the years. Secondly, we need to develop the courage and insight to open up and see that the people around us really care, and are here to accept us in all our hues; not just our best, but our worst too.
Just as we silently suffering around others, we also suffer silently within ourselves. Echoing Paul Goodman’s 9 Types of Silence, there is the ‘noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination’ a ‘loud and sub-vocal’ inner monologue of self-hate which drowns out the quiet whisper of the better part of ourselves that says ‘there are others here that love you and are here for you’.
There is another silence, the silence of absence. It is the suffering that has never been registered as suffering. It is not silent because it does not speak, but because it is not heard. When we act tough to avoid feeling pain, or run away from intimacy to avoid being hurt, we dress these up as acts of maturity in a turbulent and contradictory world. The suffering here is silent because the suffering has been dressed as pragmatic realism. If it is never registered for what it is, it cannot be acted upon properly.
Developing into the best versions of ourselves we can be demands that we begin to investigate and reflect on who we are and how, without our knowledge, we perpetuate our own suffering. Following this, we must then muster the necessary courage to share our suffering with those around us, knowing that they truly love us and we do not have to suffer in silence anymore.
Living In the World vs. Being Lived By the World: Martin Heidegger On Being an Authentic Self
Posted on February 17, 2021 Leave a Comment
It seems like a preposterous thought. How could I be anyone other than me? Of course, you can’t. But that isn’t exactly the point Heidegger is making in his hefty work, Being & Time. Heidegger asks us, ‘how much of you, is really you?’ And to what extent, following Krishnamurti, are we ‘second-hand people’, copying, mimicking, and absorbing the opinions and beliefs of others?
Heidegger likely saw many things in his time that we see in ours: people following the trends, wearing whatever clothes are in fashion, watching the top rated films, and expressing the popular opinion on topics of religion, politics and law; people relinquishing their childish qualities because they must be more ‘mature’, ceasing creating art and getting themselves a ‘real’ job, and denying their sexuality in order to conform to what society deems ‘acceptable’.
Ignoring the violence done to self-esteem, the problem in living this way, according to Heidegger, is we are not being true to ourselves. The unfortunate reality is that all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, are not completely true to who we are, and the task of our journey through time is to work on being the most authentic versions of ourselves we can be.
Our culture has a story that there is such a thing as one right way to live. It is often implicit, not explicit; not said loud enough to attract attention but whispered to you by your parents, advertisers, peers and politicians. Our desires, wishes, and beliefs, therefore, are brought into line with our culture’s expectations.
In turn, we adopt a way of being in the world that in large measure is determined by what they want. They want you to dress, talk, act, and live in a certain way. They want you to work a 9-5 job, pay your taxes, buy a house and retire at 60; wear a suit if you are a man, a dress if you are a woman; purchase commodities and be a good citizen. When we conform to what they want, we experience a certain ‘tranquillity’ for obeying the dictates of culture. We are told we are doing the right thing as the culture gives us an approving pat on the back. But this tranquillity is really tranquilising because you are putting yourself to sleep and becoming an expression of them, not of you.
It is reminiscent of the surgeon I discuss in the transformation from ‘individualism to blessedness’ in Australia Inc. The surgeon lives in the penthouse of a luxurious building in an exclusive suburb. He plays squash with ‘important’ people, attends the ‘best’ restaurants, and wears ‘proper’ clothes. On his bed is the finest linen, on his body the finest silks, on his tongue, talk of the finest wines. Assured of safety, security, liberty and freedom, he contents himself with the pursuit of personal gratification. Yet, the surgeon is a superficial man. He has rank, title, power and prestige. These, the surgeon thinks, makes him who he is. He has never questioned whether wealth and power is the right path or what would make him truly, deeply happy. He has not asked whether his title and rank are statements about him, or whether they are arbitrary signs and values society has accorded to him. In short, he has not asked what makes him, him. Thomas Mann sets this out perfectly in his novel The Magic Mountain,
An individual is one who takes upon himself an understanding of what is moral and who monitors his own conduct. A man who depends upon blessedness is one who relies upon God and his representatives to define morality and enforce it. He is a child of God – a ward who would not dream of claiming personal responsibility.
The difference between being an ‘individual’ and being ‘blessed’ is a reflection of the difference between I and they. The surgeon allows society to decide how he should live. Failing to think it through himself because it is too hard, or just so easy not to, he is an expression of them, but so little of what he does is an expression of him.
Being authentic does not mean doing something nobody else does or actively doing the opposite of what society says you should do. You may very well wish to be a police officer and obey the road rules, two common enough occurrences in society. But being authentic means you are a police officer not for rank or prestige, but of an inner desire, perhaps, to serve the community; and you obey the road rules because you see the value in driving safely, and not because you mindlessly do what you are told. Being authentic does not mean being utterly unique, it means being original, in the deeper sense that what you feel and what you want springs forth from yourself.
One of the greatest barriers to becoming authentic is the belief that we already think we are, engaging in all forms of intellectual gymnastics to hide from ourselves how alienated we have become. You might say ‘I really do like Nikes, I think they are cool’. But, it was they who put the idea in your head that there can even be such a thing as ‘cool shoes’. Alternatively, you might say ‘I believe there is nothing wrong with eating meat’. Have you investigated this for yourself? Or have you listened to every peer, parent, politician and advertiser who told you that? Your belief may be genuine, but that does not make it authentic. We try to justify decisions that have really been made for us, not by us in order to rescue a sense of agency and self-determination.
Consider a man who, not knowing what he wanted to do when finishing school, followed his parents’ advice and became an electrician. He never wanted to be one, however, the pay is good, the work is secure, and his colleagues are kind. He feels like something is wrong, that he is not living according to who he truly is, and instead, living out a life somebody else planned for him. All the outward signs (prestige, wealth, power) indicate that he is living correctly and on the right path. This, Heidegger notes, is where our ‘descent into groundlessness’ is interpreted (wrongly) as an ‘ascent’ into living correctly and ‘concretely’.
The friction between what I want and what they want manifests itself ‘with primordial, elemental concreteness, in anxiety’, the anxiety this man feels every day when he goes to work. Anxiety reflects deep down, things are not settled and that outward success is no compensation for inner poverty. Anxiety appears when we imagine the possibility of what life could be against the actuality of what it is now. In that space, a negative void reminds you that you are not living how you want to live. Anxiety is, in a way, a sign of your own authenticity, of the part of you that says ‘this is not what I want at all’. To ignore anxiety is to silence part of who you are and therefore, to further tranquilise yourself and continue living for them instead of you.
Being authentic requires us to ask a question we may have never considered, or once gave up on because the search for answers was too difficult. We must ask: Who Am I in its deepest and most profoundly existential dimension. What do you want to do with your time? What brings you satisfaction? What do you want from the world? What do you want to give to it? These questions are difficult and for many of us, simply unanswerable, because for so long we have allowed them to decide, we have no idea about what we actually want. The agony and anxiety caused by these questions are an indication, not of a problem, but that for the first time, you are trying to find a solution.
If we can approach the question of ‘who am I’, and its counterpart ’who do I want to be’ with the patience, empathy, and critical attention they deserve, we may come across entirely novel and different answers to questions we thought we had answered long ago, and in the process, begin the arduous and never ending journey of becoming more authentic versions of ourselves.
