1. Laugh at Yourself
I can take the world and myself too seriously occasionally. Seriousness, a glance at the dictionary shows, means earnestness, which itself results from conviction. But to hold a conviction too strongly, to take something too seriously at the expense of humility, is an overestimation of our cognitive abilities.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky knew this. In his Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s nameless anti-hero laments his inability to either understand himself or construct any stable identity. His desires, aversions, and beliefs are unpredictable, and his character is unknowable and inconsistent. Stability and coherence are alien to him. He bemoans that ‘I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect… An intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, only a fool can become something.’
The lesson, found throughout the existentialists, is that there are no certainties in life. We can always find reasons for being courageous one day and cowardly the next, we can wake up one morning disliking a meal we’ve always loved, and our beliefs are always subject to a change as we encounter new evidence.
The rationalist’s search for unshakable reasons for adopting certain beliefs or pursuing ideal goals is ultimately bound to fail. Consequently, Albert Camus likens our lot in life to Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain each day only for it to roll back to down once it reaches the top. Like the Underground Man, self-knowledge, or the satisfactory closure of obtaining ultimate meaning is as inaccessible to us as it is to Sisyphus. Yet we most wake up each morning and push rocks around. Life is absurd (the meaning of which is often forgotten: unreasonable).
Camus’ advice for dealing with this bleak picture is one I didn’t understand for a while. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’ seems as inadequate advice from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century as telling someone being tortured to ‘just deal with it.’
Until one day, when someone was poking fun at something I’d done or said, it occurred to me that when we laugh at ourselves and others, we’re often laughing at the absurdity of something. In other words, we have a flash of insight into the irrationality of an action or a contradiction in what someone has said. Plato believed we laughed at our past selves and the misfortunes of others because it makes us feel superior. Maybe, instead, it keeps us humble. If the certainty of full conviction is unavailable and life is absurd, then we must remember to stare down the barrel of irrationality with laughter.
A good chuckle, then, is often no laughing matter; a belly howl usually signifies something more serious than appears on the surface. It serves as a cover for the tragic, the incomprehensible, the ridiculous. We laugh at taboos, at idiocy, at fear. We found ourselves laughing when my grandad had just passed away because we were sat around stuffing our faces with food. ‘We haven’t lost our appetites,’ someone chucked.
Let me circle us back to where we began. Seriousness is synonymous with conviction, with having good reasons for believing or doing something. But just as a giggle can be no laughing matter, it’s imperative not to take seriousness too seriously. Believing that ourselves and others have earnest reasons – convictions – for acting in certain ways can even be dangerous. It reinforces the idea that we’re doing something intentionally, that a hurtful word that might have been interpreted more generously was meant as purposeful, as seriously mean. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man didn’t know what he was doing, he was ‘many-sided’, wanted to be both loving and kind and triumphant over everyone. I think we can all recognize those contradictions within us.
Acknowledging our cognitive limits and having a chuckle at our own expense is historically, anecdotally, and scientifically good existentialist medicine. Instead of imagining Sisyphus happy, perhaps we should imagine him laughing.
2. Stop Thinking
Like the Romantics, the Existentialists were all in some way commenting on the limits of the scientific worldview. Today, our dominant way of interpreting the world is scientific, so understanding the limits of that lens is essential for a balanced life. The central premise of the scientific method is causation. We search for the repeatable causes of an event to be able to predict it in the future. Humans have always been ‘scientific’ to a certain degree. We search for causation. Planting a seed in a particular place will predictably cause it to grow, for example. We ask what’s ‘causing’ the car not to start, a negative mood, or a problem at work. Modernity, in particular, is a search for causation; the sociologist Max Weber called this the disenchantment of the world.
To use our reason is to search for reasons something is causally happening, but we use reason to attempt to predict the future and make good choices, too. When making decisions we take a desired goal and weigh up the different reasons for taking alternative paths to achieving it. We try, consciously or not, and do this scientifically: if I pursue the goal this way it might cause that outcome. X might have result Y rather than Z.
However, the mind is much less capable that we often assume and can only hold so much data at a time. We often find basic algebra burdensome or feel our minds go blank trying to understand a poorly worded recipe. Have you ever tried to remember what you did on an unremarkable day last week? If we really try to think about them, the variables involved in even the simplest decision-making process are often vast and ambiguous.
Last summer, for example, we were deciding whether to buy a car. We live in London, so a car is not necessary, is bad for the environment, and needs expensive parking permits and insurance. Neither of us had driven in the chaotic city before, and didn’t have much desire to, but we wanted a car to escape from the city more, go camping, and there was the benefit of saving fares on train journeys. You often quickly realize that tallying up the pros and cons of even a relatively simple decision like this leaves you as in doubt as before you started. This is not only because there are so many variables (what’s the price of fuel? How expensive would trains be? How likely is it to breakdown and last? How often would we use it to go away? Etc.) and not just because of the subjective difficulty of weighing the variables against each other. Rather, it’s largely because many of the variables are unknown (not to mention the infamous ‘unknown unknowns’), unpredictable, or in the future. Overthinking to no productive end also has an opportunity cost in time that could be better spent elsewhere. Ultimately, as Kierkegaard poetically advised, you must stop thinking, use your instinct, and act.
Using instinct instead of reason is even backed-up by neuroscience. Antonio Damasio has influentially argued that we have ‘somatic markers’ that use feelings and intuition to guide decisions that involve too many indecipherable variables. Instead of consciously deliberating over the options, the unconscious mind will preselect neural data based on past experiences that have made you feel a certain way. Follow your gut is now scientific advice.
What’s the existential lesson? Kierkegaard knew that philosophers were too idealistic, rationalistic, and abstract. He thought that, as much as reflection, life required passionate action. As he would have told you almost two hundred years ago: reflection ‘traps the will and the strength inside a sort of prison’ and ‘trapped air always turns poisonous.’ A lack of action leads to a character that’s ‘cowardly and inconstant, so that it interprets the same thing in a variety of different ways, all according to the dictates of circumstance.’
Kierkegaard used a reinterpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example. The Samaritan sees the beaten man on the road in the distance and at first imagines what a beautiful thing it would be to help someone suffering. But as he rises closer, he overthinks, imagining how dangerous the road is, how the thieves might be close, how the person might think he’s another robber, and instead of helping, passes by.
Instead of overthinking, then, and depending on the complexity of the problem, we should give ourselves a duration of time to reflect, to think about our intuitions, and then decisively and passionately act.
3. Always be Creative
If there’s one thing that unites the existentialists it’s the concept of authenticity. The search for living authentically, the philosopher Jacob Golomb has written, is a ‘protest against the blind acceptance of externally imposed values.’ If human meaning is human made, then our ability to not just interpret, but to create the world for ourselves, and in our own way, is fundamental to living a fulfilling life.
Nietzsche said that all ideas are either adopted from others or created ourselves, and that the former is clearly the most common. We spend parts of our lives watching, listening, learning and absorbing – adopting from others – and other parts doing, saying, acting, and creating – creating ourselves. We should not forsake one for the other. Nietzsche realized that this human potential to create new worlds was a powerful gift. Writing in the nineteenth century in an age of secularization he knew that even our traditionally god-given values could be reshaped to suit our personal and social needs. He argued that we must continually fashion things that had not been there before. As the anthropologist David Graeber said: “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
This might sound daunting. It’s easy to think we’re not creative, or that creativity is for the privileged few, for artists and inventors. Surely most people’s lives are inevitably spent in dull repetition on the factory floor. But there’s creativity in even the smallest of acts. Most jobs and tasks are creative in some way, as long as you’re given the freedom to approach the problems in your own way. As Graeber lamented, soullessly repetitive bullshit jobs that dull the creative spirit are a uniquely modern curse.
In the literature on the philosophy and psychology of creative there’s a consensus that to be creative something must be both original (in some way) and valuable (in some way). However, originality and value are both subjective. A child’s scribbles can be both original and valuable to the child’s development. Furthermore, as the postmodern philosopher Giles Deleuze argued, no event, object, or action is the same twice. Each palm tree is different from the last, each time I utter ‘hello’ it’s in a new position in space and time, in a new context, with different cells and rushes of air. In other words, if everything is original and valuable in some way then everything is creative in some way, too. The trick is to recognize, interpret, and act upon the creative potential.
I find this profound. If the meaning to life is to be found anywhere it’s in our creativity as a species, and innovation can be found in even the smallest and seemingly most insignificant of actions. Each one of them moves the world forward in some way.
Martin Heidegger thought that if we ignored our potential to fulfil our individual uniqueness we’d live with an existential guilt-ridden anxiety. The solution is to live as uniquely as possible, to make our lives irreplaceable in the same way that a unique artisan shop contributes to a small town and would leave a void if it closed. We can’t all be singular great figures, but we can perform singular great actions.
4. All of our projects are connected: treat them like rocks
Sartre’s most famous phrase – ‘existence precedes essence’ – is the ultimate invocation that who we are is defined by what we pursue, what our projects are. A project can be anything: a piece of work, a friendship, a hobby, or a character trait. For Sartre, we don’t see the world objectively; we interpret it through the lens of the projects we are pursuing. We each take different things from the same photograph, the same film, the same conversation. Sartre’s famous example is the crag that looks different to the climber, the geologist, the farmer, the miner.
One consequence of this is that the rock climber doesn’t only see the rock differently to the hiker but will listen to music in a different way, think about food in a different way, and pursue other projects in different ways, too. Each project is connected, and it’s often surprising how the adoption of or interest in a new project can have cumulative effects on others.
This is where meaning is to be found; in the connections between our projects. A song means something to me because I once used it effectively in a video I made; a beach means something because of a family memory, a rock means something because a friend climbed it, we learn a new language to travel but it unexpectedly teaches you something about your own language. Reflecting on the connections between things is as important is reflecting on the thing itself. If we search for rhythm and rhyme in our projects meaning becomes, deeper, broader, and more fulfilling.
Nothing makes sense to us without the meaning we apply to it. For Sartre, the world presents itself to us in its cold, hard ‘facticity’. But freedom only makes sense up against ‘situations’ and challenges. The rock climber’s freedom only makes sense up against the brute ‘facticity’ of the rock. Scaling boulders of increasing difficult expands the meaning of freedom. Every project, whether you know it or not, is a rock. If I have a negative feeling, I can objectify it, think about it as out there, in the world to be wrestled with, to be analysed, climbed, and conquered. Nietzsche said that ‘what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other.’ For me, thinking of life’s suborn challenges as rocks that are fulfilling to scale is a more optimistic take on the traditional existentialist interpretation of life as suffering.
5. Switch off Autopilot
If we all look at the world and our projects in a unique way and we all have an urge to be authentic and creative, then we must embrace the idiosyncratic interpretations we have of the things we absorb and learn. How is this possible?
Take reading. I often read too passively. I’ll sit for hours at a time consuming strings of words and making highlights and notes but then grow frustrated with how little I could recollect. Two things are as important as passively completing a task: memorizing and reflecting.
Kierkegaard was interested in how a seemingly objective truth passively learned could be interpreted subjectively. It’s one thing to learn geometry but it’s another to then apply it to your life and the world around you. For Kierkegaard, there is no such thing as knowledge that is entirely objective, everything has its subjective component. Consequently, once you’ve learned and absorbed something it’s equally as important to assimilate it, to reflect on what it means for you, to apply it to practical problems and relate it to the other things you know. Kierkegaard said to ‘understand and to understand are two different things’ and he called the second mode of understanding ‘double reflection.’
The second reflection is not passive, it combines new ideas with old ones, it thinks about the practical and personal use of what you’ve just learned. It’s more difficult but it’s more fruitful. You can’t read how to ride a bike, you just have to do it. Double reflection means embracing our own interpretations, our own quirks and oddities, and acknowledging that we all see the world differently. It also encourages humility. Socrates described himself as a midwife; he believed you couldn’t simply teach someone, you had to encourage them to give birth to knowledge, like a plant in its own soil. Nietzsche wrote that ‘There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity”, will be.’
We often try, especially in this age of information, to consume as much content as possible. But it’s worth reflecting and re-reflecting and re-re-refecting on what we learn. I try to make a handful of fundamental notes about each topic I cover and make sure I return to them frequently, reflecting on a short comments I’ve made. Repetition is key. Better say one thing confidently and uniquely, than many things poorly and unoriginally.