The Antidote for Existentialism and Nihilism: Hope
Despite the cliché, existential crises don’t just occur when you’re 40-50, married or newly divorced, with children, a home, and a cushy job; or when you’ve supposedly reached ‘mid-life.’ In fact, existential crises can happen at any age, even a young age, and they can haunt you more than just once. I can testify to this, having had multiple ‘existential crises’ in my 19 years.
For those who are unfamiliar, the dictionary definition of an existential crisis is: “a form of inner conflict…characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and is accompanied by various negative experiences, such as stress, anxiety, despair, and depression.” It is, in short, an internal catastrophe.
I experience several recurring existential crises in my life, of which usually plague my mind for some indeterminate period of time until I find a way to move on or I simply get distracted by other things. This is probably why they’re recurring, as I continually do a poor job of adequately addressing them when they arise. But I do not blame myself for this, as these crises are often so disturbed, jumbled, and wildly confusing that I cannot even put them into words, or explain my feelings about them in a way that makes sense.
For example, a recurring internal predicament I find myself doused in—typically during holidays, vacations, or breaks, or after some random, unsuccessful romantic fling—is the idea that I will die alone, that I will never find love, and that I’m simply not meant to find a partner. Part of me laughs when I think of it because it seems so irrational, hopeless, and unrealistic; but another part of me feels (and thinks it knows) that there is the possibility that this is how things will turn out for me—that my fear is actually quite realistic and practical.
This fear then leads me to the inevitable existential crisis that keeps me from sleeping for nights on end, making me feel completely and utterly hopeless, depressed, and as though life has absolutely no meaning or purpose whatsoever—that I have no meaning or purpose.
Over the years—with the help of therapy, medication, time, and other vivacious forms of healing—I’ve learned how to work through these nihilistic thoughts and seek after things and people that remind me of how wonderful, beautiful, and meaningful life really is. In other words, I stop trying to discover my so-called ‘purpose’ and instead create my own. In this way, I maintain a healthy balance between existentialism and nihilism; because, as we know, that healthy balance—that gray area—is key.
The most difficult part, though, is working through the unknown of it all. It’s quite a bit easier to recover from not only an existential crisis, but frankly anything—illness, death of a loved one, loss, heartbreak, or any sort of hardship—when you have something to keep you going; for instance, religion. When you are religious everything is already laid out for you with the promise that everything will be okay. You have heaven or nirvana or reincarnation or an afterlife to look forward to, in which everything will be absolute—all conflict resolved, all imperfections perfected, and all the nonsense of human life adjourned. How much more hopeful someone who believes in God, religion, faith, or spirituality can be during such dark times!
But when you’re not spiritual, when you’ve come to the realization that nothing is guaranteed, or when you don’t align with a particular religion, well, you’re left with only yourself and the facts: that we don’t know when our life will end or what will happen when it does—that once you die, it’s over, as far as we know.
This ugly realization is paradoxically both depressing and enlightening. Now, not only does nothing matter, but at the very same time, everything matters! And then comes the overwhelming, obsessive, and domineering sense of anxiety and panic…
You find yourself saying: “Well, what am I to do with my life now?!” You want to conquer the world, see and do everything, be the best version of yourself you can be (whatever that means); but you also want to just give up, to let go of everyone and everything in this life and fade gracefully into eternal oblivion. Because that’s all life is at the end anyway, right?
I love the way Dolly Alderton puts it in her memoir Everything I Know About Love in the chapter “Tottenham Court Road and Amazon,” where she writes:
“When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy ‘when I grow up’ and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be” (Alderton 167-8).
Image credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/21955116927478854/
And yet, I still find myself tormented by the many stupid, ridiculous, pointless, and endless pressures of society to be a certain way—to look a certain way, to behave a certain way, to think a certain way, to eat, sleep, breathe, cry, laugh, walk, talk, and exist a certain way. I so badly wish I could break free from the chains of society, tear off the restraints of adulthood, and vanquish in thin air. Travel far away, someplace where rules and regulations, ethics and morals, wants and needs, are unheard of. Be free of a human mind, a human body, and a human heart that pulls me in every direction. In other words, I wish I were an amoeba. Or a rock.
Yet another paradox of living is that to live is both a gift and a curse. And in the same way it is a curse, it is also a gift—and vice versa. For to truly live is to see and hear and taste and touch and smell; to feel, to hurt, to want, to need, to fail, to win, to love, to be born, to die, and to do it all over and over and over again. In this way, life is like a double-edged sword.
So, as much as I appreciate and love this life I was given, at times it can be hard to see it as a gift, especially when I come head to head with something really difficult.
To me, inner peace is the ability to maintain a calm, balanced, and hopeful state of mind even in the face of stress, madness, and chaos. It is like a tree that remains firm and solid through a storm; though it realizes that it may lose its leaves or a couple of its branches, it will not fall because of how strong its roots are. Inner peace doesn’t mean that everything is working out for you, or that everything and everyone around you is collectively harmonious; it is simply a state of being that allows your internal self to remain steadfast if and when you are faced with adversity.
But what does inner peace have to do with an existential crisis? In my experience, the only thing that has gotten me through any and all of my existential crisis moments is inner peace. When life presents me with hardship—both internal and external—maintaining a sense of inner peace allows me to keep going, because it reminds me that the only thing I can do is keep going. In a way, inner peace asks us to relinquish control—to let go of needing to know and understand everything and learn how to be okay with things not being okay. Most importantly, it requires us to be comfortable with the unknown—a task which most of us cannot (or will not) do.
In my eyes, an existential crisis is oftentimes the offspring of awareness, which itself is usually born out of adversity. These crises are what proceed once we’ve accepted some reality and realized the truth of a certain situation. We then ‘wake up,’ or become aware of something we were ignorant about before.
As they say, ignorance is bliss; when you are unaware of the brutal truth of something, it’s easier to be an idealist, a romanticist, or a dreamer, and to see the best in everything. But when you’re not ignorant, when you’ve gained some newfound awareness about something you simply cannot forget about or hide from your conscience, you become a realist, a nihilist, a pragmatist—seeing, whether you wish to or not, the (seemingly) ugly truths that lie beneath everything in life. You’re left wondering if you’d rather lead a simple and happy life of ignorance, or a harsh and depressing one of consciousness? Like most things in life, I don’t believe we have to choose between one or the other. What I hope to do is reside somewhere in the middle: someplace where I am both aware of truth but also living life happily. In other words, I want to be both a dreamer and a realist.
This is easier said than done, of course. For instance, if I’ve come to the realization (as I did when I first had my existential crisis about love) that I may not fall in love and find my ‘someone,’ I might feel restricted from living a happy life; because love is such a vital, important (if not, the most important) part of life, so living a life without it might seem pointless. This is where the more idealistic attitude comes in handy. Instead of falling into utter despair based on this possibility, what I can do instead is retain a little hope: the perfect antidote for both depression and overconfidence. It is important not to confuse hope with having high expectations, as the latter is merely a projection of what we want or think we need, while hope is the acceptance of what is, while still believing that good can come. There are no negative side affects to hope, so long as you use it in moderation and with good intent. As the fabulous Emily Dickinson puts it in my favorite poem “Hope is the thing with feathers”:
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.”
Furthermore, as the last two lines say, hope is a wonderful thing because it asks nothing of us in return. It is free, and it is always there within us—we just have to pay attention to it. Dickinson writes of hope as something that keeps us “warm,” which in my eyes is a metaphor for the feelings of safety, comfort, and peace it brings us. Even in “in the chillest land” or “on the strangest Sea,” it can provide us with the comfort of knowing that whether or not things work out the way we want them to, whether or not we have answers for all things unexplainable, and whether or not anything really matters, things will be okay.
So, with hope in my heart and mind, as much as I may be a nihilist, I am equally an existentialist. As much as I see absolutely nothing mattering in life, I just as well see how much everything matters. No, I don’t have all (if any) of the ‘answers’ to life’s questions and uncertainties, but there are things—like love—that I know to be true. I can choose to put my faith in these things in order to live the beautiful, meaningful life I hope to live. As Nietzsche so perfectly puts it:
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
With Love,
Brinn W.
