Being a Grown Up
— Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
I recently spent a week on retreat up in the San Bernadino mountains. On the opening night, a teacher defined wisdom as “being grown-ups about our existential condition.” At first that felt like an attack – surely I’m not being childish – but after sitting in silence for a week, letting those words run their course through me, I started to see some aspects of my own childishness.
Namely: like children, we grasp at this-or-that explanation of our existence to make ourselves feel secure. Explanations of this nature are comfort blankets for our existential dread, tools that help us navigate our deepest fears.
Our need for security is our inheritance as animals. As we grow up, we develop the confidence and capacity to work with the unknown, to handle insecurity.
Our hope is that the Final Answer of the Universe will be ultimately fulfilling. But freedom lies not in the answer, but in the question:
Will knowing the meaning of life actually help?
I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.
I’ve spent much of my life agonizing over questions like this: what’s this all for? Why are we here? Our place in the world is ambiguous and confusing, and I needed help navigating it all.
I hoped primarily to find something definitive, regardless of its contents. I was waiting for the universe to unveil to me its telos, to lift the curtain on a grand mechanism. Everything would be clear, concrete, unambiguous, and most importantly, secure. There must surely be a ground, it cannot be turtles all the way down. I’d finally be able to get on with my life because at least now it had a point.
But that hasn’t happened.
The primary reason for this is that for me, “purpose” was a crutch, a tool to attempt to govern the inherently chaotic. I mistook the meaning-of-life for finding meaning-in-life. The latter being the focus of the work of folks like John Vervaeke and David Chapman, among others. The latter is important for happiness and wellbeing – it’s what people most often reference when they say they’ve had a “meaningful life” – but it was not the primary concern for me. The existence of that sort of meaning seemed too obvious to dismiss. You can feel it in your chest when something in life is meaningful. To call time spent with friends, the excitement of a child, or the tender care of a loved one “meaningless” is cruel and a denial of the obvious.
I was far more concerned about the meaning of life, as if going through a whole lifetime without uncovering its innate purpose would be a waste of breath.
I was scared. Scared that without a meaning-of-life, my life was not worth living.
Camus: “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.” From The Myth of Sisyphus
My biggest fear was being a stranger in the world.
My fear of being a stranger was rooted in a naive assumption: that other people had figured it all out and I hadn’t. I grew up in a religious tradition that supplied its own answer, and so by that metric other people did have it figured out, albeit with an answer that I found inconclusive.
Meaning-of-life, framed as a form of social cohesion, becomes a tool, a means of justifying one’s own existence. Underlying this is the insidious notion that one’s existence requires justification, that the purpose of a life is to create a life worth living. “Feels like I’m sinning when I’d be seeing the light / Cause now I’m working on this living just to rap about life / That’s some backwards commitment” – Jonwayne, “Out of Sight” What I most wanted was not actually meaning but rather approval, a justification of selfhood so deep and so true that it could never be questioned.
But that justification will not be found. Such a search is just a snipe hunt, a neverending chase for something over the horizon. Once we achieve this or create that or get just a bit more money or recognition or power, then we’ll have enough control to be untouchable. It is the mind clawing its way to utopia and coming up empty.
Meaning-of-life is a metaphysical claim, that at the bottom of the cosmos there’s some ground floor, something woven into the fabric of the universe that is the Universal-Good or Purpose. To attempt to answer such a question requires omniscience, and yet we are mortal: a question of that magnitude is so broad as to be unanswerable. It’s not explicitly in these lists, but it’s in the same vein as what many Buddhist traditions refer to as “the imponderables” or “unanswerable questions.”
Our task is not to determine the meaning-of-life at the bottom of it all. Much ink has been spilled trying to find these answers, but this is a distraction.
Rather, our task is to acclimate ourselves to what is true, to put down childish distractions and to take responsibility: to be grown-ups.
You can liken the process [of awakening] to a gradual descent out of the tumult and the gridlock of your personal world into the free space of the unconditioned. It’s rather like lowering oneself down a rope. You have to know how to do that. It’s a matter of holding on to something you trust – even though it seems like a thin strand – then letting go a little bit and trusting the downward movement.
“Childish” in this sense is not derogatory. Children are plenty capable of learning and comprehending complex topics and learning to take responsibility. But one of the most striking aspects of childhood is what pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott termed the “transitional object”: dolls, blankets, or any other object used to provide comfort and reduce anxiety in unique and uncomfortable situations.
Transitional objects ease the child towards independence, helping distinguish themselves from their primary caregiver. They’re a natural part of growing up. Even adults often maintain a “comfort object” that provides a sense of safety, like favorite photographs, weighted blankets, or objects from their childhood.
But much of being a grown-up is not finding things that bring us comfort, but rather growing our ability to handle insecurity. As we develop, our capacity for handling new and diverse situations increases – we take care of a family, become more involved in community, or take on more complex work projects. And as we build that capacity, our need for transitional objects often subsides.
In this way, meaning becomes another higher form of transitional objects in our adult life. We take on new challenges and meet higher-order needs – the need for community and recognition and so on – that become harder and harder to guarantee through sheer force of will. Transitional objects are, at their core, illusions of safety. While they’re valuable tools to help us regulate, they’re still a marker of fear, something we can always control even in the darkest of circumstances.
How then do we build our capacity for insecurity? We let go of the known, little by little, finding more and more safety in wider and wider degrees of freedom.
This will be uncomfortable: our body and mind will pull out all manner of response to prevent insecurity and to continue the march towards security. Shedding the conventional boundaries of predefined selfhood, of a conventional life-meaning, requires doing something new.
In order pick up something new, we must first put down the old. We cannot graft our neurosis out onto the world, but rather must see clearly the boundaries we’ve accepted and find new ones, wider ones just past the edge of our comfort zone.
And we must do this again and again, putting down all our transitional objects and embracing new freedoms.
Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.
In this constant state of letting go, we find a balance: confidence in what we know and compassion for the unknown. Others around us, we see, are on the same road, just going at their own pace. Some join us on our journey, and for that we’re grateful. For others, the road ahead is frightening, and for them we’re compassionate, for we know their pain.
Meaning, here, becomes not so much an unanswerable question; it’s simply irrelevant to the project of living. It’s a million miles away. Because here, right here before us, is the joyous freedom to be.
And in that joy, we find our freedom in wide open space. We are redeemed not by living a definite purpose, but by freeing everything else. I find resonance in the words of my childhood pastor, the words that rang in my ears every Sunday morning:
“And by the love of God, you have been redeemed, and you are being redeemed. So go in peace.”