Early Life Crises and Why You Wake Up in the Morning

I'm sure you clicked on this because of the catchy title and not this picture :P

It’s 1:30 pm, and I’ve shut off both of my alarm clocks an hour earlier. The problem is that I’m still in bed. I’m supposed to be at this institution of learning in half an hour. Whoops, nope. 29 minutes now. Rolling my torso around, I plant my face into the pillow and mess up the orientation of my blanket doing so. It’s warm inside my bed, with that nice, cosy haze of trapped body heat beckoning me like a classical Greek Siren to remain inside, immobile, safe. Twenty centimetres to the left of me is the edge of my bed and the entrance to a dark and dangerous world. A world where decisions must be made, where interactions are to be had, where futures are created. But at the same time this is a world which repeatedly strikes you down again and again in the guise of supposed ‘learning lessons’. A world where one’s meaning, one’s ikigai, must be forged out of the turmoils of emotion in one’s soul. With only incidental experiences and notions to guide us, and tools of which our mastery is amateur and novice at most in the carving of the sculpture of our lives. It’s also a world where oats and milk must be made in order to enjoy breakfast. I enjoy it with mango.

So some time later I’m at a lecture on positive psychology. Some stuff about how to have more happiness and better outcomes in your life. The lecturer whines in a voice that’s had many years worth of whining experience, so the effect of her whining is exactly as intended. It allows me to spend the most insipid, uninspiring hour of my life listening to someone who’s probably a regular attendee at Anthony Robbin’s and Dr. Phil’s concer— I mean, seminars, tell me, in a bunch of dot points, how I should live my life in order to become happier and more fulfilled. Thank you dot points.
What the lecturer doesn’t understand is that the aesthetic experience of life isn’t something that can be completely conveyed to us through second-hand experience. If I can’t appreciate life because of deep, ingrained self-esteem issues, because I’ve never worked on myself to develop the skills and talents to explore this world, if I’ve never been able to break out of the ‘me-bubble’ and break past the comfortable, solipsistic existence where my problems, my worries, my unmet needs, my wants, then there’s only so much that a powerpoint slide with 5 dot-points on the characteristics of Flow can do for you.

So what happened between the time of me ‘waking’ up and getting to this lecture? Something which caused the millions of (alright, maybe hundreds of) neurons in my mind to fire in a manner to establish a pathway of thinking that, roughly translated, would yield an amount of motivation that would allow me to overcome the resistance that I had at that moment to leaving my place of comfort and warmth. The question that I want to pose in this article today is if we didn’t have any commitments or necessary demands on our time, why would you get up in the morning? The only reason that I really woke up this morning was because of the social framework in which I had spent the last 18 years demanded my participation at a particular place at a particular time. For me, this was the agreement which I had engaged in when I signed up for a university degree. When we deconstruct this, it’s a very simple agreement. I provide funds to the university and spend time studying material, and they provide me the material and a degree at the end of a number of years. In order to fulfil my part of this contract, I have to wake up and be present at particular places at particular times in order to receive such learning material. Simple.

But this system isn’t something created out of my own intellect and mind. It isn’t an agreement that was drafted by me, written by me, or even thought up by me. It’s an agreement written up by something else. Hundreds of years of modification to the education system by countless senators and politicians, perhaps. Some town planner a number of years ago who decreed that x amount of people need to have x,y,z degrees in order to fulfil workplace shortages in p,q,r industries at locations, e,f,g. You get the idea. Is the system ’bad? I think it depends on how you think. With a great deal of things in life, simple comparisons of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ compress the numerous different perspectives and situations and their conclusions into a single positive or negative connotation regarding something. Doing so weakens our ability to truly understand and appreciate concepts. So in other words, it’s a long way of saying ‘maybe’.

Let’s break down this ‘maybe’. One one hand, there is the argument that a college/university degree is commonly recognized as an important (but not absolutely necessary) factor in attaining and maintaining a reasonable middle-class lifestyle. But lets ask ourselves why we want a reasonable middle-class lifestyle? Each of our reasons will be different, and they may all be equally valid, or the validity may differ from reason to reason. That’s not for me to judge. But what I can offer in this situation is a question. Is the reason behind your wanting of a middle-class lifestyle something that you’ve consciously thought about and concluded is in alignment with your values, or is it something else? Is it a situation where you’ve just done what everyone else has done for the last few years of your life - going to school, attending x, y, z, going and getting a particular degree, getting a job, getting married, buying a suburban house with a swimming pool and three bedrooms, saving up for your children’s college fund, and so on – do you do this because you’ve consciously decided to sit down one day and think to yourself what are the values and principles which are pertinent to your own life, and decided that to do something like this would bring you closer in alignment with these values and principles? Or are you like me and many other people who drift through life. Who never really think to question themselves the why behind what they do. When we don’t go and make it clear to ourselves what our why is, then the motivations in our lives for getting out of our bed in the morning become dictated by necessities which we have unconsciously forced ourselves into as a product of our lack of consciousness as to our direction in life. Ever had the alarm clock ring in the morning and you dread pulling back the sheets because you’re not really that excited or interested in the things that life could bring you today or in the future? I don’t doubt that that is a sentiment that is shared by myself and many other people in the world. Sometimes, I imagine that some of us want something more than just to show off our new watch/ dress/ book/ etc., or to just see whatever new movie some Hollywood directors have deemed appropriate for the particular season we’re in, or to attend a certain number of classes simply to meet a decreed set requirement in order to pass, or so on. I feel that too many of us live our lives in this walking daze, not driven or guided by consciously chosen ideals, but simply existing and allowing life to take us where it may, like ships in the middle of sea without oars or sails to guide our paths. Is this necessarily a ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ method of living life, I hear you ask. And of course the answer is no….t necessarily. I simply suggest that although there may be no difference in validity of one particular philosophy on life and living over that of another, there is a difference in the aesthetic quality of the existence that we experience when we are conscious as to why we choose to live our lives in a particular way, as opposed to when we do things just because we and those around us have never known anything else.

So where does this tension-filled, somewhat vague crescendo of an article end up going? Is the author going to tell you what he believes is a workable remedy to the conflict which he has just exposed? Yes. But if you really want to know what I think, go and read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha right now. At this moment. It’s a book that’s about 100 pages and the words are printed really big because it’s the book that old people and literature majors enjoy reading in their spare time (sorry old people). If I have managed to encourage at least one person to read this masterpiece, then I can rest happily.
But if you’re like the majority of people who don’t read these things, here’s the TL;DR version, albeit with my own spin tacked onto it. Siddartha is a story about a Brahmin’s son trying to seek enlightenment and nirvana. Nirvana is, for those who may not have been exposed to the concept, the idea that you’re free from suffering in the world. Sounds like something pretty cool. I wonder if it comes in the form of a cheap Chinese import that they sell on eBay. Unfortunately for Siddartha, he can’t find someone to sell him (well, actually teach him) how to attain Nirvana. He goes around to different groups of people promising him enlightenment, and at every group of people – the Brahmins, the mystics, Buddha, and so on – he is disappointed, for he finds himself unable to achieve Nirvana. Eventually he gives up on his search and engages in the hedonistic lifestyle, having sex with women and bearing a child. He lives in the materialistic urban world for a while before rejecting this as well, and finally spends the end of his days with a guy who paddles a raft back and forth in a river. And it is here that he finds Nirvana.

What causes him to find this Nirvana? Is it the stillness of the trees and the flow of the river in the forest? Nope. He’s already tried that stuff and it didn’t work. By this time, he’s also got a son who pretty much hates him and who runs away from his father, and by all measures of conventional living standards, his life would be pretty shit. Like, WHO article-worthy shit. However it isn’t. What Hesse attempts to argue is that it is the conscious experience of the various manifestations of the different forms of human existence that allows one to attain peace, understanding, and fulfilment. We can’t achieve happiness and meaning and fulfilment through a single activity alone - rather, we must go through each of the stages of our lives, accept that at that time they will not bring us peace, enlightenment, or happiness, but also know that in the end, when we look back, we will be happy, have profound insight, and understand the world and ourselves because we have experienced the things that we have. It is the individual experiences of the multiple facets of life over a lifetime that will eventually bring us peace. Siddhartha needed to spend time sleeping with hot women and being disgusted at the inherent hedonism of doing so. He needed to spend time learning the ways of the mystics and being disillusioned when he realized their weaknesses and flawed nature. He needed to go through all of these experiences in order to be able to obtain and aggregate his cumulation of experiences and attain understanding of himself and the world. Perhaps that’s what we also need to do. Perhaps it is in those very days where you struggle to find your purpose that you are actually in the process of finding yourself.

In the beginning of this blog post I expressed cynicism towards the popular psychology of today – the idea that happiness and contentment and meaning can be compressed into a few dotpoints on a PowerPoint presentation talking about ‘flow’ and getting ‘in the zone’. Popular psychology like this appeals to us because it’s a quick-fix, fast-food, band-aid-esque instant application that says ‘use these 5 fabulous tricks and you’ll instantly know how to feel better about your life and your life’s meaning’. The thing is although this can definitely help, what a lot of these preachers of McAdvice may miss is that the concepts that they are teaching – being in the moment, self-acceptance, etc. – are merely the superficial expressions of an individual who has lived their fulfilling life and experienced all which they need to experience in order to find their meaning. We cannot confuse cause and effect – people who’ve done a Siddhartha may act in the ways expressed in the dot points, but not all people who follow the ‘5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Health and Wellbeing Today’ (also featuring ways to get slim for summer AND yet another uninspiring interview with someone we don’t give a shit about, going by with the initials Kim Kardashian), are going to have that life experience to back it up. And that’s the kicker.

So the take-home message of what I’m trying to say here is this. Those days and moments in your life where you question yourself; those times where you wonder why you go through the same old routine day in and day out; those days when you struggle in finding the meaning of it all – this kind of stuff is okay. Dare I say it might even be necessary - necessary to the development and manifestation of the peace which you may be searching for. Getting out of bed each morning is much easier if we allow our present struggles to work as a stepping stone towards the peace and understanding which we seek. Why should I get out of bed this morning? Not because I need to work towards x,y,z because someone other than myself thought it should be so, but because each day is adding to the wealth of experiences which will one day allow me understanding and peace and happiness and all that jazz.