You believe there is something? she asks. I try to, yeah, Ivan answers. Some kind of order in the universe, at least. I do feel that sometimes. Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it’s just chaos, and there’s nothing. Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognise patterns when there are no patterns. I don’t know. I’m not explaining myself very well. But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.
— Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 24, 2024)
Sometime in 1993, as I walked along a street in my hometown, Carndonagh, County Donegal, Ireland, a car pulled up alongside me, triggering sudden dread. The window came down, and I was met by the dark, inquisitory eyes of my father.
“Why aren’t you at Mass?” he asked.
I see myself, fierce and lean in a Slayer T-shirt, bristling with the rage of the nihilist. I longed to escape the claustrophobic small town and the towering shadow of the Catholic Church. For once I was impelled to tell the truth. “Look,” I said, “I have no faith. I don’t believe in God anymore and can’t go on with the pretense.”
I was met with an imprisoning silence. But what my father said next astonished me. “OK,” he replied. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
But that young atheist soon recognized his error. Where there is human being, there is human spirit. The feeling of aliveness. The staggering complexity of personhood. The fundamental dignity that each person seeks in a cosmos that cannot know them. And where there is human spirit, there is the pursuit of meaning. If you live in a post-faith world, as many of us do, the question of our intrinsic meaning must be confronted. How are we to define our suffering? What might give our lives significance within an unresponsive universe? To begin this conversation, one must truly encounter the self. […]
The essential self is calling always for our attention, but its voice is stifled by the slam and tumult of modern life. Its voice cannot be heard amid the babel, and it is silenced entirely before the infinite scroll of the smartphone. I have been meditating for one-third of my life, and this essential self seems to me an aspect of mind that is somehow higher, wheeling soundlessly in a private sky. You must stop and look up in order to find it, although in times of crisis it has been known to swoop down and hoist you off your feet with its talons. […]
Today, life lived on the hamster wheel of distraction has created an absurdity within the grand absurdity of existence. Many people live with partial minds not even conscious of the problem of meaning. We are no longer alienated from the world, but alienated from ourselves. We should beware a culture that has exchanged meaning for information. When conversation with the essential self grows silent, pathology is invited in. We slouch about at a loss for something we cannot quite explain. A malaise sets in that is despair without the knowledge of despair. Some unseen, unaccountable pain must be assuaged and we grow consumed by anger and cast about for blame. The irrational erupts from within and seeks a target in society. The shadow of the irrational is now everywhere about us. […]
That which takes wing inside us must come to perch, but that which takes flight in fog and storm grows lost. Deep beneath the vast economic and political failings of our age there lies a spiritual crisis, a tectonic shift beginning to quake and tear at the bedrock of our ethical societies in the West. The modern age has created a religious problem that can no longer be answered by religion, nor can it be addressed by the current faith in techno-science. We live in an age that fears silence and does not contemplate the true cost of this fear.
Almost nothing is worse, then, than realizing that your life itself has become boring. Perhaps you have at one time or another concluded that your work is drudgery, your hobbies humdrum; that even your relationships are superficial and unsatisfying. Each day reminds you of the one before. What is there to do?
One obvious answer is to run away, to throw out the old routines and connections, and find new ones instead. But maybe the solution to boredom is the exact opposite: not to seek a new life, but to go deeper into the one you have. This is exactly what the Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard advocated. When life becomes tedious to you, he argued, you don’t need to look outside for something to shake up your malaise. You need instead to look inward and find what’s missing within your own heart and soul…
According to Kierkegaard, when we first find life boring, we seek new delights…This is the time, usually in early adulthood, when people are most open to new experiences and opportunities. For some…“the aesthetic” might encompass a more innocent sort of experience—a hobby such as travel, say.
This is fine for a while. For many, though, this consumerist approach to living eventually comes to seem trivial—and, ultimately, boring. “Is this all there is?” you ask yourself. At this transition to the next stage, you need to shift from treating life as an act of consumption to becoming part of a process that creates deeper experiences. You need to “get inside the machine.” …
The worst advice you can give to people trying to find themselves is to look within. That presumes a person is like an onion, with layers of social selves to peel off to get closer and closer to the inner core, the true self. The idea is that if you sit in a room with yourself and focus on yourself, you will get in touch with the “real you” or self-actualize the “real you.”
People who try this sometimes find there is no “real you,” or they just make up a bunch of stories and poses about who they think themselves to be.
That’s because a person is not a closed system that can be studied in isolation. A self exists only in relation to something else, while perceiving something and interacting with the world.
It’s more useful to conceive of a person as an artist. On the journey toward becoming themselves, artists often begin by copying some predecessor whose work they admire. Early on, the Beatles copied Buddy Holly and other artists. Countless writers started out by trying to copy George Orwell or Toni Morrison.
We’re mimetic creatures. We learn by imitating what excellent others have done before us…
Everybody is like that in a way. Everybody is grabbing from the world bits and pieces of thought and fashion that they can mishmash into their own personal way of being. The more sources you borrow from, the more interesting your self is likely to be…
“A man with few friends is only half-developed,” Randolph Bourne observed. “There are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot even discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open them.”
Gradually, out of these interactions a self emerges. This is the hardest phase. You can pile up myriad influences. You can pile up performances. But eventually it all has to cohere into a distinct way of perceiving the world, a distinct way of expressing yourself in the world.
This simplifying process can make a person’s voice more powerful and focused. Zora Neale Hurston went back to her hometown Eatonville, Fla., as a setting from which she could express what she wanted to say about life. For his second Inaugural Address, Lincoln went back to the Bible to get the cadences and truths he needed to express his point of view.
Everybody who is writing a book or making a presentation or being a person in the world has to eventually wrestle with that cohering question: What’s the core here? Or as Miles Davis put it, “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
So what’s a new possibility you’re inspired by?I love your questions. You’re pushing in the really important way. Here’s what I think of: I see the disarray. I see the broken power structures. I see the damage and the pain. I also see people tending to that. At the heart of some of these national-level or community-level conflicts, there is space to move below the radar and start stitching together relationships and quiet conversations at a very human, granular level. We’re going to work on quiet conversations that will not be publicized. That feels to me like a power move in this world…
A lot of people worry about finding their calling. Do you have any advice for them?I’m very aware that in this culture, in the 20th-century world, we’ve diminished the idea of a calling to mean your job title. I think there are many callings in a life. I want people to liberate the idea of their calling from what they’re being paid to do for a living. Your calling may be something that you do that gives you joy but that you’re never going to get paid for. It may be certain relationships that you’re holding that are primary. Being a parent or being a child, being a friend, being a neighbor, the service you do in your community. It can be how you show up through your day, how you treat strangers. You can play an instrument. You can write. It’s the things that amplify your best humanity.I don’t think I have to define that, because we all intuitively know what it is. I talk so much on this show about Rilke —
I know where you’re going:“Living the questions.”Yes!The notion of living the questions in a world that is in love with answers. I’ve been reading Rilke since I was in Berlin almost 40 years ago, what I feel coming back to our world is this idea that to do justice to a question means that you cannot rush to an answer. What you’re called to do is hold the question itself, dwell with the question respectfully, and love the question. Live your way into the answer. If you hold a question, if you’re faithful, the question will be faithful back to you.
OK, what was the last thing that blew your mind?For me the last two years have been one seismic event after the other. That experience of the ground shaking beneath our feet and that happening to every person on the planet — that is what all of our spiritual traditions tell us is the reality at any given moment, and it’s what our culture gives us a million devices to deny. But there it was: We are fragile. Civilization rests on something as tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies. We were reminded of that. And living in Minneapolis whenGeorge Floyd was killed. The West Coast caught fire. Our political fragmentation that we’ve been walking into for such a long time. We havea war in Europe.We pretended like capitalism triumphing would lead to a moral universe. It just goes on and on. It’s all before-and-after now.
