By Anonymous
I don’t remember how old I was the first time I experienced an existential crisis. I was too young to know what exactly it was that I was feeling, but I can sum it up broadly with the feeling of absolutely nothing.
Honestly, I felt nothing inside, had no motivation to do anything – even the things that I enjoyed – because I inevitably fell into a deep pit of numbness where I tried to figure out an impossible solution to the unanswerable question: what’s the point?
Trying to answer this question will only lead to further spiralling into a bottomless hole of emptiness.
I remember whenever I had these feelings, I would attempt to distract myself, and figured out two things that would work to an extent: sleeping or writing.
Sleeping was a great solution, as although it was extremely difficult to fall asleep in such a state, it switched my brain off for at least six hours.
Writing was my other solution, as it was a way for me to become someone else and escape into a different world for a while, where I had complete control and was able to create meaning behind my existence.
Looking back, this is most likely what developed into my intense passion for writing. Not only would it provide me with an escape, but I would also write until I had thoroughly worn out my brain – and hand – enough to eventually will myself to sleep. I was lucky to have discovered these ‘cures’ for the ‘crisis’, but sometimes I would make the horrible mistake of forgoing my usual solutions and begin to discuss my feelings with my mother. I first remember doing this when I was about fourteen years old, and I shared my incredibly worrying thoughts about existence with my mum. I must have completely freaked her out with my talk of ‘giving up’ and ‘what’s the point?’ Luckily for me, she was somewhat familiar with the sensation, and since has always referred to it as being in ‘that mood’.
I think I was about fifteen years old when I finally realised that this feeling I often felt was known as having an ‘existential crisis’. For some reason, the name just made it worse, and knowing that so many others experience it daily was terrifying. Why was it that so many people felt the sinking feeling of the inevitable pointlessness of our existence?
Since then, I think I have developed my own concept on the subject (it would be wrong to use the word ‘theory’ here as that indicates vigorous background and scientific research that I have not done, and will lead to thousands of researchers scowling in disgust). The thing is, when you’re a child, more often than not, your parents will lull you into a false sense of security along with the notion that your existence is important. Which, to them, it is. You’re a substance of your parents’ relationship, and they will usually never let you forget that.
So, for the first ten or so years of you life, your whole worldview consists of you, your family and your friends. And this is all you know about, really, because you are rarely exposed to the harsh realities of the world before this age. At the age of ten – or younger/older for some – you begin to become aware of the actual world going on around you, that every person is a part of another family, that links to another.
So while your mother may mean the absolute world to you, to another, she may just be a stranger passing by with a forgettable face.
Is that not terrifying?
Thus begins the unstoppable force of realising the lack of your own self-importance. From here begins the black hole of the existential crisis.
You begin seeing people not for who they are, but for what they may – or may not – have done. Buildings that are falling to pieces or businesses that are not longer being run become beacons of sadness and triggers to the downfall into a pit of nothingness. These things that may have once meant everything to someone or could have possibly been the pinnacle of someone’s life is now forgotten to the world.
When I was sixteen years old, I began to lose myself. My previous hopes, dreams and aspirations fell with me into a black hole of despair, and everything I was faced with led me to think, “What’s the point?” Why bother doing anything if it wont make a difference or an impact on this world, and if it does, so what?
Luckily, at this age, I was bestowed the experience of a lifetime: to travel around Europe with my mother and my sister. We went through major cities booming with important people, and tiny villages that nobody had ever heard of before.
One day, we arrived at a village that was so tiny, it took us a solid twenty minutes to find a person to ask for directions to our hotel (we would have caught the train that would take us right near our hotel, but a train only ran through the village’s tiny station once every three hours. It was basically non-existent.)
We spoke to a person at the local supermarket that we had discovered, who called out to a lady who was walking across the street (who he knew) and explained the situation to her. She then called up a friend of hers (the only taxi-driver in town) to help us out. It was not hard to realise that this meet-up of all of these people that just happened to know each other and all be in the same area at the same time didn’t come down to our extreme luck. It was due to the fact that literally every single person inside the tiny village knew one another by name, and where they would be at that time of the day. Due to this, we were packing our luggage into the “taxi” (which looked just like a regular car) within ten minutes.
It was such a surreal thing to experience, something that you would only find in a cheesy book or a daytime television show, but there it was, happening before my own eyes. After this experience, I began to think about this tiny town that had absolutely no significance at all to anybody except for those who lived inside of it. They didn’t care that their town was so small that hardly anyone had ever heard of it before, let alone visited it, because it was their town. It was their own corner of the world to make their own, and that’s what was important to them.
I guess through this experience, I started to understand this whole ‘point’ thing, and how that nobody’s ‘meaning of life’ is going to be the same as another’s. How we’re all stuck in this world with no map to tell us where to go or when, and we’re all just clumsily walking around until we figure it out, or we don’t.
And while I will still often experience an existential crisis every now and then, they have not once been as intense as they were previous to this epiphanic experience (at least, not yet.)
While I still turn to writing or sleeping to get through these horrible feelings of ‘why’, I have finally put my life back on track to a future that I want to have. Although not all of the details are very clear, and everyday I can feel the pit creeping at the edges of my mind, I understand that the world and its reasons will never make sense, and it never should.
I guess that the point isn’t it? That there should never be one ‘answer’ because some people may be completely content with raising their family in a tightly-knit village in the middle of nowhere, and others may not be able to rest until they can see the change they have made in the world.
And both answers are fine, as well as everything in-between. As long as you know what you want (which you don’t have to know, and may never know, which is completely okay), then you should strive towards your goal/s (big or small) and don’t stop until you have achieved all that you want to. Never let the giant pit of existential crisis eat you whole, because what’s the point of being alive if you’re not really living?
IMAGE: David Gordon Whittaker “Good Day for a Walk”
