For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Life feels utterly absurd to me; I have felt this way for as long as I can remember. Interestingly, it has never bothered me much. I simply accepted it as reality and continued about my silly little routines and performances.
At times, I even find the tension arising from absurdity quite enjoyable: I go through life feeling like a detached observer, watching things happen with intrigue and sometimes confusion, but embracing it all and actively participating regardless. To call out to the universe, receive nothing in return, and commit yourself to life nevertheless — it’s the ultimate act of love, both to yourself and to your community.
Over the past few years, especially after leaving religion, I’ve been paying closer attention to my experiences with the absurd and recalling some of my earliest memories with it. One of these memories involves a universal human experience that is, maybe, the origin of absurdity for many people: the realization in childhood that you are separate from your parents. This is the beginning of the process of individuation, which Erich Fromm discusses a lot in his work. Individuation is necessary for personal growth and one’s pursuit of freedom; it can also be unsettling for a child, whose life up until that point of realization is inextricably intertwined with and dependent on the lives of his parents.
In Lisa Tuttle’s novella My Death, the narrator has a similar realization after her first recallable nightmare as a child. This passage perfectly describes that feeling of absurdity at the beginning stages of individuation:
In the jumbled, fragmented memories I carry from my childhood there are probably nearly as many dreams as images from waking life. I thought of one which might have been my earliest remembered nightmare. I was probably about four years old — I don't think I'd started school yet — when I woke up screaming. The image I retained of the dream, the thing which had frightened me so, was an ugly, clown-like doll made of soft red and cream-coloured rubber. When you squeezed it, bulbous eyes popped out on stalks and the mouth opened in a gaping scream.
As I recall it now, it was disturbingly ugly, not really an appropriate toy for a very young child, but it had been mine when I was younger, at least until I'd bitten its nose off, at which point it had been taken away from me. At the time when I had the dream I hadn't seen it for a year or more — I don't think I consciously remembered it until its sudden looming appearance in a dream had frightened me awake.
When I told my mother about the dream, she was puzzled. 'But what's scary about that? You were never scared of that doll.'
I shook my head, meaning that the doll I'd owned — and barely remembered — had never scared me. 'But it was very scary,' I said, meaning that the reappearance of it in my dream had been terrifying.
My mother looked at me, baffled. 'But it's not scary,' she said gently. I'm sure she was trying to make me feel better, and thought this reasonable statement would help. She was absolutely amazed when it had the opposite result, and I burst into tears.
Of course she had no idea why, and of course I couldn't explain. Now I think — and of course I could be wrong — that what upset me was that I'd just realized that my mother and I were separate people. We didn't share the same dreams or nightmares. I was alone in the universe, like everybody else. In some confused way, that was what the doll had been telling me. Once it had loved me enough to let me eat its nose; now it would make me wake up screaming.
But not all my experiences with the absurd are terrifying, and embracing absurdity certainly does not mean my life lacks meaning. Quite the opposite, in fact: I am free to determine precisely what makes my life meaningful. Morning lattes, solitary walks, reading, laughing with friends, spending time with family, exercise, being engrossed in challenging work, meeting people, experiencing new places — as silly as it might sound, if I consciously decide that these are all meaningful and make life worth living, then suddenly my life is meaningful and worth living. Determining the purpose of my life has always felt this simple to me; I have yet to be troubled by my belief that the world itself lacks inherent meaning.1
Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t struggle with the many aspects of life that are banal, contradictory, hopeless, or frivolous; it doesn’t mean I don’t often wonder if my embrace of absurdity is enough.
Life has felt very weird lately. Not necessarily in a bad way — just in a way that has captured my attention for an extended period of time. I want to share some of that weirdness here, so I’m treating this post more like a diary entry than an exploration of an idea (which is how I’ve structured my previous posts). My thoughts throughout this post are a bit disjointed, and the post feels incomplete. But please do let me know if you have similar thoughts you’d like to share. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this post.
irreconcilable contradictions everywhere
In October, I celebrated my 28th birthday and things have been… weird. Most people who found out about my birthday would joke about how life is only downhill from here, or they would express some fear over their approaching 30s. I would half-jokingly retort that my best days are still ahead of me.
But then I would realize that many in my age cohort are starting to experience their first taste of death — sickness that consumes their parents, tragedies that take their friends too soon — which means my time to experience death is also certainly coming. I don’t know how to handle that inevitability, but I guess no one does, so at least I’m not alone in that.
I’ve never been happier with who I have developed into as a person: I’m rediscovering myself post-birth control, I’m comfortable with the fact that it’s impossible to be universally liked, I’m honing my values, I’m more accepting of worldview shifts.
At the same time, I’ve never been more uncertain about my future. I’m living in a city that likely won’t be my permanent home, but I’m forced to treat it as if it will be: buying furniture, getting attached to specific places, agonizing over the need to be part of a community, finding comfort in my routine. I feel heartbreak whenever my friends leave this city, as if that won’t be me one day. I’m becoming more established in my career, but I don’t know what’s next.
Every single one of my friends is at a completely different point in his or her life: married, engaged, in an established relationship, in a new relationship, in their third situationship this year, single and happy, single and bitter, in an unhappy relationship, divorced, recently broken up, experimenting, given up, hopeful once again.
Also: earning twice my salary, earning half my salary, still in school, back in school, working a job they hate, working a job they love, shifting careers, starting their own companies, quitting the corporate life, living with their parents, living with roommates, living alone, living with a partner, renting, buying their first house, battling mental health crises, finally flourishing.
Every day, people everywhere are freaking out about corporate deadlines that are made up, elevating the blood pressure of everyone around them, slowly creating a stress-induced decline in our national life expectancy. These deadlines are entirely made up! But these made-up deadlines are part of larger, real, complex, and essential systems that are at the core of a functioning society. I can’t reconcile the two — especially when I’m mid-panic over yet another made-up deadline.
There are wars, pandemics, mass shootings, and avoidable sufferings all over the world, but we’re constantly told this is the best time in history to be alive.
People’s actions consistently contradict the outcomes they want. If they do manage to get what they want, they find ways to push it away.
Love consumes our lives but it’s nearly impossible to describe the feeling adequately. No amount of art, poetry, movies, music will ever give the feeling of love any justice. Even the word “love” feels insultingly simple. And why is it that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen or heard or experienced can be considered just “okay” by someone else?
It’s weird how much you can understand someone based on just a glance. Right? How odd is that? That you can lock eyes with someone and communicate what feels like a lifetime’s worth of emotions and conversation in just a second? What is that?
Then I remember that all of the situations I described above apply to those who are much older than me as well, and I wonder if life ever stops being weird. I’m told it doesn’t, and I’m okay with that. I think the tension these experiences create is what keeps life interesting and worth pursuing.
committing to life regardless
‘I conclude that all is well,’ says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings.
It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
People’s commitment to life in the face of incomprehensible suffering has always astonished me and given me hope. There are examples of this stubborn zeal for life and collective will to live all around us, but they don’t get nearly enough praise.
I’ll end this post by sharing one of my favorite examples of this:
In 1849, Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to death by firing squad for being a member of a secret utopian society that was accused of conspiring against the emperor Nicholas I. Dostoevsky and the other members of the club were read their death sentence, given the cross to kiss, had swords symbolically broken over their heads, and tied to pillars and blindfolded. However, mere moments before their execution, the group was granted a reprieve from the emperor.
After the mock execution, and before his real sentence of four years in a labor camp, Dostoevsky wrote a letter to his brother describing his renewed passion for life:
Brother, I am not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter — this is what life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered into my flesh and blood.
Yes, it’s true! That head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders. Memory remains, and the images I have created and still not molded in flesh. They will leave their harsh mark on me, it is true! But my heart is left me, and the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember, and this is, after all, life. On voit le soleil! Well, goodbye, brother! Do not grieve for me. . . Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of spiritual life throbbed in me.
We should all be this passionate about life. The trials we face shouldn’t cause us to despair; the deafening silence we endure from the universe shouldn’t discourage us.
Life can be beautiful, if we decide it is.
Of course, when I was religious, faith in and servitude to God were at the top of my list of things that gave life purpose. But this never overpowered my feelings of life’s absurdity, and it never detracted from the meaning I ascribed to everything else on my list.