"This Unsettling Feeling Follows You Into Adulthood"
by Thomas Oppong
"Leo Tolstoy was famous, wealthy, happily married. And the father of 10 children at 50. His masterpiece, "War and Peace", was getting a lot of attention. And "Anna Karenina" was almost done. By every external metric, he had succeeded at life. By 1875, he had reached the peak of his writing career and fame. But he couldn’t bring himself to keep living it. He plunged into an existential crisis. He began hiding ropes so he wouldn’t hang himself from the rafters of his study. Tolstoy stopped going hunting because carrying a gun felt like a temptation. He described it as a sudden stoppage of life. His inner clock simply stopped ticking. He was left with one very important question. What is it all for? “I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it,” he confessed. “It was as though I had lived a little, wandered a little, until I came to the precipice, and I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin,” he wrote.
Existential crisis is a beast. It comes in many forms. It’s not always depression, though. An existential crisis can be a problem of sight. You see the process of your life with brutal, terrifying clarity. You realize that… Philosopher Albert Camus called this realization “the absurd.” “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm - this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”
But still, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. When you were young, life feels like it’s full of potential. The future may not always be in your control. But excitement came easily. A new video game, a road trip with friends or a weekend hanging out with your best mate. These things had meaning. The world was a puzzle you were just beginning to solve, and every new piece was a revelation.
The mystery was in the solving. As an adult, experiences are not the same. You have responsibilities. A lot of it. You arrange to meet a friend for dinner at cost. You talk about work, maybe minor frustrations of your week. You laugh at the right and wrong things. The food is good. The wine is better. You go home, and suddenly you are aware that you have performed the ritual of a social life without being completely there for it. The feeling is not the same. The excitement is off. This is one of many existential crises of meaning. The realization that the career, the relationships and the status have not given you what you expected. As you get older, you can have more money, stability and even more freedom. But you begin to see through the adult routines of work, earn, pay bills, consume, maintain, repeat. The struggle of adulthood is managing the consistent suspicion that none of it matters.
As a child, you are protected by time. You have decades ahead of you, which makes life’s open-endedness feel like freedom. In adulthood, time shifts from an open horizon into a shrinking hallway. You notice your parents ageing. And your own body changing. You realize that choosing one path means closing the door on a hundred others.
The feeling of meaninglessness doesn’t go away. It changes form. Psychologist Carl Jung observed this mid-life transformation when he said, “Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presumption that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”
The thrill of getting what you want is not the same excitement you used to have. You are comfortable. But your inner self is not awake enough to enjoy what you have. You can’t shake off your personal questions. You’ve probably tried to find answers for questions like “is this it? You try to find the words for what you feel. You are not lost. You know exactly where you are. You could say you feel “bored,” but it’s not that simple. Could it be that you are mourning the loss of a version of yourself from your past? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote about Dasein, or “being-there.” He argued that our fundamental anxiety is about the feeling of being “thrown” into existence. You did not ask to be here. You are just here.
And you are responsible for building meaning out of a pile of experiences. So you try to build. You go to work. You sign up for gym sessions. You read the books you swore you would read. Every new activity or experience is a new promise. You think, “this will be the thing that fixes it.” The gym is fun for a month. The work conversations become a habit. The books get read. But the feeling persists. The activities are meaningful. But they are not the meaning. And this is where it gets hard. This is where the feeling reveals itself as a form of depression. But you can’t be depressed, right? You are a high-functioning adult doing life right. You are“fine.”
Except your spirit is low. Even that still can’t fully explain what you feel. You can only say, “I am tired.” Tired of the effort of pretending the sky is blue when you know it is a void. You are looking for something you can’t put into words. This is the most frustrating part. You would fix it if you could name it. You would go out and get it. But you don’t know what it looks like. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised a young poet “to live everything.”
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer,” he said.
This is brilliant advice. But is the hardest thing to do. To live the question is to sit with your existential crisis. It is to stop trying to fill the void with meaningless activities. Or the magic pill of a new job, new partner or new city. Can you bear the feeling of missing something, forever? Of course not. But you can’t completely solve it either. There will always be more questions than answers. You look at your parents. They are in their sixties or seventies. They seem content. Do they feel it? Or did they just get better at ignoring it? I’ve never asked my mother if she ever felt a sense of dread. Maybe I should? Over the years, she’s become good at feeding her soul with christain spiritual content. Is this a deflection? I’m older now. And I’m starting to understand her more. She keeps telling me the answer is spiritual growth. But it’s not the only fix for me. It’s not cease-questioning. I will always have more questions than answers.
I’ve read enough existentialism that’s probably taking me on a very different path in life. Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Man is condemned to be free.” We are responsible for creating our own essence. There is no pre-existing meaning. Everything shouldn’t happen for a reason. You are responsible for making life work for your specific life. You find this terrifying. You would rather someone told you how it ends. Or rather, be handed a blueprint. But there’s no rule book for doing life right. You have to write your own story while you are on stage. The feeling that you are not doing life right will always be there. Is it a sign of the freedom to be? I don’t know. freedom. Maybe it’s a sign of infinite possibility becoming finite reality. But it’s not a flaw. Or sickness to be cured. It is a sign of consciousness. It is the price of being awake. The ritual, routine or the ordinary process of your life is life itself.
The feeling of emptiness is the feeling of being human. You will never find the thing you are looking for because it does not exist. And you will spend the rest of your life learning to share a house with that part of you. You will make tea. You will go to work. Spend the weekend with your family. You will feel time is running out. You will feel the old, familiar crisis. But you must keep going. The weight you carry is a side effect of consciousness. It means you can construct your next reality, day by day, through deliberate choice. The unsettled feeling may never completely go away. It might sit in the back seat for the rest of your life. You will keep looking, even though you know there is nothing to find. That is the unsettling feeling. It follows you into adulthood. It follows you into middle age.
It will follow you to the end. And the most human thing you can do is to stop running from it. Turn around. Face your inner conscious self. Acknowledge it. Then make yourself a cup of tea. It gets easier. It never gets better. But it gets easier. But the “why” stays. In fact, it grows stronger as you age. But you’ve got this."
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Free Download: A little light reading from Tolstoy…
Freely download “War and Peace”, by Leo Tolstoy, here:
Full screen recommended.
Tchaikovsky - "1812 Overture" (Full choral with cannons)
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