existence and aliveness.
Saturday, January 18, 2025
In the early 2010s when my wife and I started dating, we looked, lived, and consumed like hipsters, but claimed that we were, in fact, not hipsters. I only mention this fact because I am about to quote a line from Neutral Milk Hotel, and so I wanted to be sure that you know that I know it’s Millennial-hipster lame to do so, but I must. From the prophet, Jeff Mangum in the eponymous song, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”:
“Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.”
I know that he’s talking about meeting the ghost of Anne Frank in the afterlife, but there’s something so profoundly real for those of us on this side of the life/death divide who hear that phrase and recognize that this is something that has haunted us our entire life.
Imagine a five year old laying in his bed at night, staring at the ink black ceiling, and wondering why anything was here, why humans have five fingers, why do we look the way we do and act the way we act. Imagine feeling the vastness of the universe and how insignificant you are comparatively, and realizing that you will never understand the answer to these questions.
This was me. This is me.
And Jeff Mangum, probably.
It birthed a deep gnaw within me that I cannot shake. I assumed the older I got, the less sway this would hold over me. I hoped that parenting and mortgages and investment accounts would take up enough real estate in my brain and push those thoughts out. I could think of myself a strange child who had weird thoughts about this whole being alive business, but I figured it out.
I have found instead that I think about it more, and ergo, just find it all even stranger than ever.
During some of my most formative years (16-25ish), I sojourned into Evangelical Christianity (referred to as EC moving forward) as a way to blunt the feeling of that gnaw.
The deepest appeals that EC provided me:
- It gave me the answers to those questions (mainly, God did it for his glory, and that was that.)
- It prioritized an experiential approach to facing the deep, dark questions of reality (if you read your Bible, pray, don’t watch porn, you’ll be aligned to the great Creator who, as mentioned above, made all of this.)
My EC experience and departure from it will be explored in a myriad of ways in the future. I bring it up here becuase it was a period of my life where that existential buzzing in my head was quieted. But some of the other elements that come with EC didn’t work for me. To co-opt a Christian phrase, you’re existentially robbing Peter to pay back Paul.
So I left it.
And the gnaw returned with sharper teeth. This time, I knew that it was possible to blunt it again with an existential groundedness of some kind. I just had to find it. I explored other faith traditions, philosophies, the sciences, the arts.
(This was me reading across all this stuff and trying to connect the dots. And I know - this meme is way overused. I don’t care.)
This exploration resulted in an attempt to create a secular version of church; I wrote about trying to create a wisdom tradition for nontheists called The Thick Darkness. I podcasted about nerd culture with a friend of mine, trying to explore meaning through myth and storytelling in comic book movies and TV shows. I started a blog called StoryTemple that was focused more on storytelling as a type of spirituality for writers.
And through all of this, I’ve come to these conclusions:
- One: I don’t believe that there is any inherent meaning to life, that most of it is suffering, and if I had a choice to exist before I was yanked out of blissful nonexistence, I would’ve chosen to stay there.
- Two: Even with the utter pointlessness and suffering of existence, we have ways of connecting to the underlying Is-ness that make us feel alive.
The first conclusion is what I call “existence.” Sometimes the appropriate reaction to the utter pointlessness and suffering of life is to take an edible and mindlessly scroll through Instagram Reels that talk about your Millennial childhood. Everyone else is going to tell you this is “bad” for you and that you should avoid doing it because there are so many other things you can do with your limited and “precious” time here on earth. Don’t listen to them and listen to me instead: there is nothing wrong with this. There is no ultimate judge at the end of time that’s going to tally up the hours you spent doing this. You didn’t ask to be here, and if you just want to exist, then just do it.
The second conclusion is what I call “aliveness." You know this feeling: you have sex with someone you care about and there’s a moment where there’s no you or them. You watch a sunrise over a mountain or at the beach. You sit in a movie theater after watching a brilliant film that’s made you feel less alone in the universe.
This feeling of aliveness happens when we transcend the egoic sense of self (which is a fabrication, anyway) and experience reality through something that, for lack of a better phrase, is oceanic. I don’t know why we do this or why it happens. No one does.
Whatever the reason, it’s part of who and what we are. What all those religions/philosophies/arts/etc taught me is that there are practices we can do to to experience that aliveness. When I do these practices, I tend to feel better. I feel more grounded, connected. The gnawing in my stomach is blunted, and it didn’t require a particular religion or philosophy to get it there. In fact, at the egoic level, I can firmly embrace the pessimism I mentioned earlier, and still find joy in this “thing” we’re in.
The “and” in the title of this essay is really important. I’m not pitting existence against aliveness, telling you that you have to choose to either “just exist” or “feel alive.” This strange human experience consists of both. To borrow the parlance of some of the religious traditions I’ve explored, we can think about it as “dreaming” and “waking.” It’s really common to read that the idea is that “dreaming” is the bad place that we want to escape from. “Waking” is when we realize that all the things we were promised will make us happy don’t. So you do this work, over and over, to “wake” and you tend to feel bad about “dreaming” again.
Fuck that.
You don’t have dreaming without waking, and you don’t have waking without dreaming. They need the other. The same is for existence and aliveness. We’re going to explore some of this aliveness work that we can do. You probably know a lot of them, or have tried some of them out. I’m not breaking any new ground here. What I do hope is that if you read these things, you do so with the “and” in mind. We do the work because we know it can grant us groundedness.
I’m going to wrap this up with a extrapolation of another quote, this time from Isak Dinensen:
“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
Wake up to aliveness a little every day, without hope, and without despair. You don’t need hope, because, ultimately, nothing matters. But you don’t need the despair that the previous statement would imply. We wake up every day and work on ourselves and on the world to try and leave it slightly better than before.
If it doesn’t matter, why not try and leave it better?