Existentialism

The world is in chaos.  You don't have to watch the news for long to see the struggle everywhere you turn. How do we make meaning from that? How do we process or handle all the chaos we see around us? It can be really overwhelming sometimes.

I look to philosophy and spirituality to help me deal with a chaotic reality. Philosophy, specifically existentialism, says that the experience has no inherent meaning or value of its own. Spirituality says to refrain from judgment of the experience. To me these two things are very similar. When we refrain from judgment we don't impart a meaning on the experience without first consciously considering what the meaning should be. Spirituality offers us a valuable speedbump in our rush to judgment of people and experiences. 

Existentialism says there is no wrong interpretation. It is completely up to the individual to decide what the meaning is. The analogy I've used for a long time is of two people sitting beside each other watching the same movie and coming away with two very different interpretations. How does that happen? Judgment. Are either of them wrong? No. Both are correct because the movie and judgment are entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Making meaning out of the chaos these days often means just letting people make the meaning whatever they want to make it without trying to correct it. Trying to correct it is what causes the fights and the problems. Inevitably people question how society can stay together if there is no cohesion or agreement when it comes to our judgment of experience. I don't believe we need religion, morality, or even agreement to create a cohesive society. Shared resources are enough of a reason for people to stay in a group.  We can't live too far away from a gas station and a grocery store because we need those resources, whether we like that or not. The ability to be fully independent in western society is not readily available to everybody. Most people will have to maintain some sort of a connection to a town or a city (aka a society) in order to survive. Building society around resources instead of shared values, beliefs, and ideals is a more stable model for coexistence.

The argument for creating societies with shared values is that we need connections with people not just stuff. People want to be surrounded by others who are like them. This is how we feel acceptance and belonging. When we project acceptance and belonging outward it offers us pain because typically, particularly these days, it is not reflected back to us very often or very well. Acceptance and belonging are hard to come by. They have become seemingly scarce - a consequence of the chaos. It means we have to find acceptance and belonging elsewhere. To me, that means we find them in animals, art, music, nature, or within ourselves. We stop looking to other people for those things and we create them for ourselves in our own way. 

The fracture that we're witnessing in society is because we don't have shared values anymore. We have not been able to shift our focus away from trying to hold society together with the same glue we built it with. What we need to understand is that the glue has gone dry. It is time to find new glue like shared resources to build around. The chaos has partially come from not being able to agree on what values we should be building on. We no longer have agreement and in fact, we have so much disagreement, that agreement is seemingly impossible. The more we try to force agreement, the more fractured we become.

Society is only going to get more chaotic, more fractured, more broken, and more difficult to participate in. Finding ways to create connection within yourself or with external things that are not human will be to your benefit. It will allow you to create a sense of stability that may be difficult to find in the very near future. The fractured pieces of society still want relationships with each other and so the argument is actually the thing that's keeping society together for the moment. That is going to change rapidly and the fight to hang on is only going to become more painful.

Existentialism and spirituality offer us acceptance of what is. The fracturing doesn't have to be all bad because it will offer a sense of peace in time. The fighting will stop. There will be a lot of learning that comes through all of these experiences. Existentialism offers acceptance because it doesn't tell you to focus on the problem you perceive. It doesn't tell you the experience is a problem at all. Existentialism just says that the experience is - nothing more. What part of the experience you put your focus on is up to you. Since there is always a positive meaning to be found in the chaos, existentialism gives you permission to go look for the positive. Judgement does not give you permission to do that. It focuses you squarely on the problem and tells you to stay there until it is fixed. Judgment will keep you stuck while existentialism will free you to focus on finding something helpful in the chaos.

Judgment requires a very conscious approach if you want to stay out of the trap that it can create. You have to pay attention to the judgment that appears and then be willing to question and/or change it once you're aware of it. You have to consciously decide to accept your own judgment or not. Most people just don't pay that much attention to their own judgment. They accept it as truth without question and then they push it onto other people. That's how we end up fighting with each other. Judgment is typically a very unconscious reaction to experience.

Existentialism is painful without consciousness because it creates a complete lack of purpose and meaning. There is a sense of futility and hopelessness that comes with existentialism if one is not able to create their own helpful meanings from their experiences. Existentialism doesn't offer any judgment, it asks us to create the meaning. If we perceive everything as painful or we just see the problems in everything, in a sense its our own judgment sabotaging us which makes life feel hopeless. To use existentialism effectively, we have to navigate away from focusing solely on problems and actually do the work to make helpful meanings from the chaotic experiences by becoming aware of our unconscious judgment.

The bottom line is that experiential meaning is a choice. It is not pre-determined at all. We decide, whether through unconscious or conscious judgment, what the meaning of the experience will be. We can make that meaning harmful or helpful.  Unconscious judgement says all marriages are happy and all funerals are sad. Conscious judgement offers the awareness that not all marriages are happy and not all funerals are sad. It opens up the possibility that there is more than one way to see an experience. Trying to assert any one way to see a given experience only causes fighting and pain. It does not allow people to make their own meaning from the chaos. The truth is - it doesn't matter if you think their interpretation of the experience is helpful or harmful - it's their interpretation. It's not up to you. 

We fight to hold on and we fight to let go. What I am continuing to encourage through my work is acceptance. Allow all things to simply be as they are. Make no attempt at changing anything or anyone except yourself. Instead, find helpful meanings in everything you see and experience. As chaotic as it may appear, there is purpose in everything. Existentialism allows you to determine your own purpose for each of those things. There is great freedom and rebellion in not being stuck with societal rules and interpretations that only cause pain. How do you see the experience you're right now?

Love to all.

Della