The confrontation with meaninglessness
Only one thing can break us out of the Loop of pseudo-meaningful normality: a confrontation with meaninglessness.
Only this can power us to go on a crusade for genuine human meaningfulness.
This book explains step-by-step the journey through the valley of the shadow of meaninglessness and the gift that can come out of it – a more meaningful you and a more meaningful life.
If you are ready for it – if the timing is right – this will be the most important book you will ever read.
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Extract
When the Loop breaks…
When the Loop breaks, it is experienced as a breakdown, a breakthrough or a break out. Meaninglessness breaks through the Loop. This may manifest as disillusion, confusion, sadness, depression, disenchantment, despair….
This is a time of major opportunity.
It is an opportunity to turn the course of your life from pseudo-meaningfulness to something deeper and more profound but…
Wriggling on the pin of meaninglessness
Sadly, for most people, the confrontation with meaninglessness becomes not a turning point but something to be desperately endured until it can be reclassified as an aberration.
– John A. Sanford, The Invisible Partners, p.9.
People will try to outlast the meaninglessness… hanging on by their fingernails, hoping it will pass. Or they will reach for a band-aid: a pill, a bottle, a hobby, an obsession, a cult. This is what Phil Connors did. He wriggled on the pin of meaninglessness, desperately trying to find something to fill the void: food, sex, theft, falling in love, anything…
If the person undergoing a confrontation with meaninglessness is unlucky, a friend or relative will point them towards one of those weekend quick-fix courses run by success gurus. There they will be injected with platitudes and psyched up to go back into the world with renewed fanaticism to win at the game of pseudo-meaningfulness.
This is what our Egos want to hear: that the game of pseudo-meaningfulness is winnable. All you need is to take a weekend out of your pseudo-meaningful life to get equipped with some new tools and then you can become A WINNER. And your grand prize is… wait for it… wait for it… a successful pseudo-meaningful life.
Not just an ordinary run-of-the-mill pseudo-meaningful life but a successful pseudo-meaningful life.
Gee wow. Get excited.
New improved pseudo-meaningfulness
Some readers will be confronting meaninglessness right now: anxious, depressed, confused, tired of the artificiality, hungering for a real understanding of life and its purpose. Perhaps you, valued reader, found your way to this book because you were already in such a state.
Some readers will find that this book has propelled them into an unexpected confrontation with meaninglessness. Oh crap, this really is about me and my life. As one reader of a far cruder draft of this book said to me: “It was like you’d been following me around for the last five years.”
Meaninglessness forces you towards a horrible truth: I don’t know everything. I don’t know enough. I haven’t got all the answers. My life isn’t enough. I’m not enough. There has to be more to me than this act I put on to fool other people and myself. There has to be more to life than this… There has to be more to me than this… There has to be more to life than this… There has to be more to life than this…
You may start on a search for books and courses and teachers that hold out the hope of guiding you out of the valley of the shadow of meaninglessness. With rare exceptions, these books and courses and teachers will attempt to “help” you by trying to make you better at leading a pseudo-meaningful life. Listen to me and I will inspire you with the confidence and drive to achieve your pseudo-meaningful goals… Read my new book, listen to my DVDs, and you will have all the tools you need to become a success at pseudo-meaningfulness… Do this course and it will dissolve the inner blocks that are stopping you from enjoying and succeeding in your pseudo-meaningful life. Do this course and I can make you into a more powerful and empowered and successful Phil Connors.
New improved obsessions! I’m going to have success no matter what it takes and no matter what I have to sacrifice.
New improved selfishness!! From now on, I’m going to insist on getting what I want.
New improved Ego!!! I now KNOW things. I now know more than those poor benighted people who don’t know what I now know.
New improved tyranny!!!! I’ll steamroll anyone who gets in the way of what I want.
New improved sycophancy!!!!! I totally embrace this teacher, this guru, this cult.
And – for a while – this new improved pseudo-meaningfulness may work… sort of… Reading that guru’s book, listening to that New Age teacher, doing that self-improvement weekend may give you a sense of an essential element of human meaningfulness that has been lacking in your life – a sense of inner growth and progress. And that excites you… and your excitement at that spasm of inner growth is transferred to the teacher/writer/cult: He is so great. She has empowered me. I’m going to conquer the world. I now know everything I need to know for the rest of my life. I’m going for it. I’m going to succeed. I’m going to have it all!
Time passes… maybe a month… maybe only a couple of weeks… you drop back to your old level of discontent. What’s going on!!!??? I had all the answers. My guru gave me all the answers. I even declared to my friends: “I now know everything I need to know for the rest of my life.” I was sure I had the magic key to the kingdom of pseudo-meaningfulness. Maybe another weekend workshop will prop me back up…
Leo Tolstoy was one of the greatest novelists of all time. Even the other great Russian writers of his day were in awe of him. His name will live forever immortal amongst the greatest novelists of all time. Do you think you will ever achieve anything of that magnitude? Yet Tolstoy had a titanic confrontation with meaninglessness.
…I began experiencing moments of bewilderment; my life would come to a standstill, as if I did not know how to live or what to do, and I felt lost and fell into despair…
Or when thinking of the fame my works would bring me, I would say to myself, “Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Moliere, or than all the writers in the world – and what of it?” And I could find no reply at all.
The questions would not wait, they had to be answered at once, and if I did not answer them it was impossible to live. But there was no answer.
I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.
– Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, pp.28, 29.
The existential band-aids are out there. If you want them, you’ll find them pretty easily. These band-aids will assure you that they can make you into a success at pseudo-meaningfulness.
Or you could shoot for something else. You could shoot for a genuinely meaningful, authentic life. But that is not a weekend workshop. If what you want from life is new improved pseudo-meaningfulness then you are reading the wrong book. There are plenty of “success” coaches out there: plenty of psychologists, counselors, leaders of workshops (etc) who think it is their job to patch up you up so they so that you can be shoved back into the pseudo-meaningful world even more determined to be a success in it.
Hey, it’s what I used to think. For a couple of years, I thought the purpose of inner personal work was to blow away the inner garbage that was stopping me creating the external life I wanted. Get rid of the inner blocks and then I’d manifest the external life I wanted and then I’d be happy.
Hey, it was what my teachers at the time told me.
But then I made a pretty obvious conceptual leap. Sure, I should keep doing deep inner work… but not to have a better outer life so then I’d be happy. Rather, I should do deep inner work to have the inner life I wanted. Then the outside world would do what it would do. I thought personal growth was a stepping stone to life but it is life that is the stepping stone to personal growth.
Socrates said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
I would say: “The unevolving self is mere existence.”
This is the unique human trait: the thirst for inner evolution. Other animals don’t have it. Only humans.
Often this thirst for inner evolution is distorted into the pseudo-meaningful thirst for outer “growth”. We want to see our bank account grow. Or our “career” grow. Or our stamp collection grow. Or our cult grow. We derive an echo of satisfaction from that external growth. But real human meaning only comes from inner growth.
So how do we turn a confrontation with meaninglessness into something meaningful… a more meaningful life… a more meaningful us?
