Couldn’t Be Me: What do we owe the world?

Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.

Opening this column to all types of questions seems to have convinced people to come to me with their deepest, toughest existential quandaries, which is both fun and exhausting.

If there’s a theme this week, it’s individual responsibility — the responsibility one has to themselves, to the kind of life they want to live, and, as an extension, to the world. Responsibility is admittedly a murky subject. The making of oneself is a lifelong endeavor, which means that knowing one’s place and obligation to the world is equally long.

Of course, I can’t tell people who they are or what they should be, but hopefully I can help them come to a starting point. At the very least, I can point them to life’s most essential reading material.

[Editor’s note: Questions have been edited for space and clarity.]

James:

I’ve recently left my deeply religious childhood, and in the two years or so that have passed, I’ve been struggling with what I consider my “discovery” that almost every social convention our species has developed is a result of our evolutionary instinct to survive. I haven’t decided whether the step in that process that led our primate minds to figure out that we actually exist and are alive is a cruel Nihilistic curse or not. But I do think the idea that the universe’s indifference to our existence means that life is whatever we make it is enough for me to escape Nihilism itself.

If life is what we make it, I think that means that we have the freedom to go against the coding, to pursue happiness that isn’t a byproduct of fulfilling instinctual, evolutionary needs. In principle, I feel like I shouldn’t get married or have kids one day, because those would tie me down to the conventions I thought I was free from.

But I’m also lonely. I’ve never been in a real romantic relationship. I have a bunch of friends — really great, close friends who care about me — but I feel like I’d be a lot happier if I eventually found someone to spend my life with. I may be wrong, and it’s probably deeper than this, but it feels like a lot of the loneliness I feel would be easier to deal with throughout the course of my life if I found a significant other and eventually a spouse.

I think this might’ve been a rambling, long-winded way to ask what you think about the idea of balancing living within the bounds of what you consider truth and what will make you happy.

CBM:

It’s understandable that your first reaction after leaving a certain world is to rebel against the conventions and beliefs of that world. We all do it. That reaction — to try and become the opposite of what you’ve been raised to be — is part of growth.

I feel that you’re misunderstanding the concept of freedom, however, at least in this realm. That confusion seems to be the root of your frustration. Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean “to go against the coding, to pursue happiness that isn’t a byproduct of fulfilling instinctual, evolutionary needs.”

Sure, that path should be available, but freedom isn’t directional or oppositional. Freedom means having knowledge of your choices, and being able to choose for yourself what life you want to live and who you want to be.

To lead an intellectual life you need to be aware of the traditions that have driven your life. One should question the reason and history behind everything one believes. You should decide whether you believe certain things because they are true, or because you’ve been taught that they should be true. And then ask yourself whether you want certain things to be true because they justify who you are and what you want the world to be.

But freedom away from religious conventions doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to oppose marriage, love, and having children. Or distrust the latter two because there’s an instinctual imperative behind them. That would suppose that you are in battle against yourself, and I detest the idea of existence being so war-like.

What you need to do is to take stock of the available knowledge you have of yourself. Interrogate your past and present as much as you can, and determine the kind of person who you want to be. But you need to know everything, including those instinctual desires, — and even spiritual desires, away from the Church.

From there, you can build yourself from the ideas that you see as true, and you can abandon those you don’t. That does not mean that love, marriage, and children should be dismissed because you distrust your instincts. If that is how you’re driven, and you believe that a happy life for you could include those things, then there’s no shame in pursuing them.

The idea that a true intellectual is someone who can remove themself from the wants of the body and heart as much as possible — stoicism, essentially — is folly. Even Marcus Aurelius was a failure in that pursuit. You are a human being. Rather than detach yourself from human experience, I think it’s better to make yourself vulnerable to the totality of life.

At the same time, if you do pursue a partner, don’t do so purely as a cure for loneliness. That’s a dangerous game. You may find yourself just as lonely with someone else, or so attached that your partner struggles to be their own person. As Nietzsche said: “The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”

Be happy and fulfilled with yourself first, but keep yourself open to love and its possibilities — to not need another in order to be whole, but to enjoy that partner for all that they are, and as they are, if you do happen to find them.

Anonymous:

I know you answered a question very similar to this one in the column last week, but I just need to say it. Everything in the news recently with the Amazon burning and just how obvious it is nobody in power cares about climate change has completely debilitated me.

I’m finding it impossible to enjoy anything or have any fun with the knowledge of what’s coming. I’m going through the motions at a job I used to really enjoy. I’ve lost a lot of motivation for my goals for the future, because there might not be much of a future. It’s the dominating thought in about 95 percent of what I do. I basically just exist at this point, other than some isolated moments of happiness that never last because of how defeated I am with the situation.

Is there anything you can offer me? I know you can’t change the science or the facts, but do you have any advice that would at least help me get back to functioning? To enjoy whatever I have left in this life?

CBM:

I have answered this, but I will again because I do find these questions interesting.

My initial reaction to this is: what made you think that it is your individual burden to shoulder the problems of the world? As heroic as it seems to be worried about the state of humanity, and to be thrown into despair by how bad everything is, there’s a hint of egotism in the idea that you are responsible for or so touched by all the suffering of the world that you’ve been driven into disinterest in life.

Even Jesus and Nietzsche can’t compete with that, though I think Kierkegaard would roll his eyes at such nihilism. You’re not Atlas. The first step is ridding yourself of the idea that it is your burden to carry the world, and then find things within the range of your person that you can affect.

The cure for nihilism is a committed life. What I think everyone who is in the state of despair needs is to plant a metaphorical garden.

Audrey Hepburn said, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” Rather than being consumed by all the bad things, you need to redouble your efforts in committing to the world and its future. You need to find all the things you love, all the people you care about, and decide what you can do, as an individual, to better the present for them and give them a chance to exist in the real and metaphorical tomorrow. You need to put your hands in the dirt.

Letting yourself be driven to inaction is easy, I would say it’s the more comfortable of the two choices here. The world and its people needs individuals who care about them, and that care has to be shown through action, engagement, and imagination, and not through abstract concern from a detached state of being, so that that we can survive the present terror — and if we can’t survive it, so that we can make the world as it is better for those who are suffering.

If you want to enjoy what you have left of life, you have to commit yourself even more to the things you love. To the people you love. To the world that you love. The biggest waste of the small moment you have in this world is to worry about how short that time is and let that knowledge dull your experience and perspective. There’s no benefit at all.

What that small time should give you is a renewed appreciation for how precious everything is, and if you want to help save all of those precious things, you have to trade that nihilism for love.

Gabriel:

What are some good books to read?

CBM:

I don’t know if I can answer this, since each person’s tastes are different, and you really should try to find what you like through trial and error.

That said, I recommend reading and rereading every bit of “Calvin and Hobbes” you can.