A READER WRITES: “your blog has made me question my very existence. i wake up in the morning, and if it's a weekday i leap from my bed to start the working day. i love my job (even though i am paid well below the average for what i do), i love the people i work with, i love hearing stories about the minutiae of their lives. is there something wrong with me? it seems everyone else hates their job and feels it's dispiriting. please can you help me hate my job so i can be cool like your other readers.”
BB SAYS: Thank you for your wonderfully thought-provoking letter.
It sounds to me like you are currently experiencing what the philosopher Heidegger called Angst or Existential Anxiety. What did Heidegger mean by this?
According to Heidegger, human beings are conformists – we cannot stand being different from the norm. We cannot stand distance from the crowd. We are all zombies who just do what one does. We do what our society and culture expect us to do. Even rebels and “non-conformists”, says Heidegger, are just conforming to society’s idea of what a non-conformist should be. He says “We flee from the crowd as one flees from the crowd”. We go about our everyday lives as if we are sleep-walking - we rarely if ever stop to ask “Why am I doing what I am doing? What is the point of all this? Why am I living my life like this?”
According to Heidegger, when we stop to ask these questions we realise that there is no point to what we are doing, and that there is no reason why human life and society are structured the way they are. We see that human existence is groundless and absurd, that it is devoid of real meaning and significance. At moments like this, we experience guilt, death, dread, and falling – in a word, we experience Angst or Existential Anxiety. This is what you are now experiencing.
How can we respond to this Existential Anxiety? According to Heidegger there are essentially two ways to respond. The first way is to flee back to the crowd. To become a conformist. To try and deny the meaninglessness and insignificance of human life. To embrace what Heidegger calls the “they-self” – our public self, our public role, where we behave “as one does”. This is the inauthentic way to respond to Angst.
But there is another way: the authentic way. To respond authentically involves embracing and accepting one’s Angst rather than fleeing it. It involves taking ownership of one’s Existential Anxiety. It involves facing up to the meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence. According to Heidegger, if you do this you can live an authentic life – you can radically change your way of being in the world. WHAT you do will probably not change very much, but HOW you do it will change radically. You will no longer expect to get any real meaning or significance from what you do. You will embrace the absurdity of it all.
Does this sound depressing? No. According to Heidegger, people who live like this are joyous, alive, playful, spontaneous and free. They see through the bullshit. They often retain an ironic distance from what they are doing, because they know that what they are doing is essentially meaningless and absurd. They embrace what Heidegger calls “the saving power of insignificant things”. They feel no need to always be productive or efficient. Instead, they can enjoy activities that are non-productive and inefficient – activities such as drinking wine with friends, or hiking in the hills, or running, or philosophising. These activities are joyful and free precisely because they are inefficient and non-productive. A person who responds authentically to his or her Angst becomes existentially liberated, and free to respond to his or her situation in new and inventive ways. Such people have taken ownership of their lives – they live authentic lives.
As I re-read your post and deconstruct it, I think I detect a certain level of irony in what you are saying. This suggests to me that you have high levels of authenticity. You are one of life’s free spirits. In short, you are a really cool person, just like everyone who reads this blog.
Do YOU have a problem? Leave an anonymous comment, or send your problem in confidence to brianbarrington@gmail.com
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