despair
My whole life has been a struggle against despair. Or at least, a large proportion of it beginning from when I became a teenager and up until recently. It sounds dramatic, but that's not my intention. This is the most accurate way to describe it.
It is unclear exactly why this pattern of being began but I believe that rather than the specifics of my case, it is more illuminating to understand why anyone despairs at all. And as I have written about on my blog, despair is an existential condition.
The purest form of despair does not actually lead to suicide. It is a denial of life, but not an acceptance of death. Despair does not desire death. And that is what I found to be true about myself. I wondered sometimes why I never tended towards suicide. Perhaps, it was because somehow, I knew that it wasn't a solution to despair.
Despair is an emotion that does not just concern your own being. It concerns Being. Being is not just the totality of everything that is; it cannot really be grasped by words but it describes the phenomenon of Being itself. Why is there something rather than nothing? This question interrogates being.
Despair is a reaction to Being, which reveals why suicide does not solve the problem. In order for suicide to be a solution, you must sincerely believe that your own death would annihilate Being itself. You must be a solipsist of some kind. And solipsism is a view that is untenable.
So what exactly is despair? It is a consciousness of the absurdity of Being. It is an awareness that Being has no cause, has no creator, and has no end. That is all it is. But this seems like something that ought to be true for everyone, so how does it happen that most people are not in despair?
I am finally beginning to break out of that struggle against the absurd which I believed would last my whole life. And that is the realization of freedom. I am free to be anything I wish. I may become conscious of the absurd but that does not mean I have to be in despair. Perhaps I wished to believe that there is no choice in the matter because it was too bold of an act. But now I realize that even in the face of the absurd I can choose not to be in despair. And suddenly, the color returns to the world and all is well again.
It sounds ridiculous, no? It is akin to telling those who are depressed to just "be happy." But that is ultimately what this amounts to.
We are in the habit of believing that when despair creeps up on us then we have but no choice but to be in despair. But even in that moment when we sense it seeping into our awareness we can simply choose to not be it.
Of course, there is often what we observe to be a breaking point. Someone who has been struggling for a very long time may one day break, and seemingly fall spontaneously into the depths of despair. We like to phrase it as if the burden just became too much for them to bear, as if they had no choice. But that is incorrect. It is rather that at that moment, faced with everything that person decided to finally be in despair.
It is like how Sartre said of the person who is being tortured, that there is no breaking point. There is no point where you cannot help but submit, it is always a choice. A choice under duress, no doubt, but a choice nonetheless. In that case, it is a choice to do a certain action, to fess up the whereabouts of your comrades. But more fundamentally, we are always free to choose how to be.
And it is that freedom which allows us quite plainly to say "No" to despair. Certainly it requires a certain strength of will. It requires a will that when faced with difficulty or suffering can say "No, I will not despair." But the point is that at any moment we are completely free to do so. You might want to believe that there was no choice but the despair but that is always untrue. You always choose to be in despair or to not be.
Understanding this, I realized that there is no struggle. If anything, we struggle against our own beliefs and habits. This is what the Buddhists call karma, and there is much to learn there. It is said that even a cave that has been in complete darkness for millennia is brilliantly illuminated in an instant when you light a torch. The same can be said for karma. It is not something that needs to be extinguished over thousands of lifetimes. Enlightenment now is enough.
So far, we are led to think that this defiant freedom is active, that it is something that must be willfully enacted. But that is not true. Freedom is our mode of being.
That seems to contradict what I said earlier that we are free to choose our being. But that is misleading. Our being is that of freedom. It may seem in certain moments that we choose to be one thing or another, but the very fact that we can choose to be a certain way one day and another the next, shows that our fundamental nature is a freedom.
This is what is meant by the Zen Buddhists when they talk about the Mind and compare it to a mirror. The mirror displays a seemingly endless array of objects; in one moment it reflects one thing, and it seems to become that thing. The next moment it is something completely different. And yet, it is always untouched by what it reflects.
Sartre explained this by saying that "Consciousness is always at a distance from its objects." It is the same idea, but I prefer the Buddhist version here.
And now I realize that in many ways I have known this all along. There have been moments where I spring out of a deep depression in one single instant, and always it has been due to the realization of my own freedom.
I remember one instant where I snapped out of despair by realizing that I am free to become anything I want to be. That I can learn any skill I wish to pursue. That I can create my own possibilities. On the surface that is what the realization was, but fundamentally what I was doing was being free. I was choosing not to be in despair.
A footnote on depression:
I do not believe it is a choice to experience to symptoms of depression, just like it is not really a choice that when we jump we should fall back down, or that we feel angry in response to being done wrong. But it is a choice to be that which we experience. Remember, we are fundamentally the mirror. The mirror reflects everything but is untouched by all of it. We get sucked into depression when instead of seeing those feelings as being reflected on the surface of the mirror, we mistake them for our own being and choose to be depressed.
It is a difficult distinction to draw, but I fully believe it is true.
A second footnote on self-improvement:
Often, when I was confronted with the prospect of despair, I would embark on a self-improvement journey of some kind. Whether that meant trying to learn to draw, to learn an instrument, or to improve my physical fitness. And initially, it would feel great, and I would feel as though I had a new purpose. But eventually, the routine and the expectations I placed upon myself would begin to feel restrictive and I was faced with despair again.
The power of self-help lies not in the actual results, or even the process, but that it lets us become aware of our being as freedom. At the beginning of learning something new, we are embolded and inspired by the conception of ourselves as pure potential, as being free to be anything. But halfway through the process we begin to find that rather than making us free, our own expectations of what we wanted to become now weigh us down.
That is the lie of self-help; you do not need to put yourself through some kind of training or hard work to become that freedom.