The more free you are, the more lost you will be.
Do you know that feeling when you’re watching your sport of choice, something completely ridiculous happens and you’re just sat there confused thinking “What the hell just happened?” until they put on the Instant Replay? Well, that’s how I felt this past week when I finally sat down to reflect on the year 2023. So, cue the Instant Replay:
🎞️ What the Hell just happened?
Well, the attentive reader might have noticed by now that my writing here is purely autobiographical. I have no clue of SEO to find the topics that rank highest on Google, nor do I dissect Analytics to see what performs best. The process of finding each week’s essay is a very simple “What question am I struggling with right now?” followed by a deep dive into the research around it. So what’s the picture painted by these little snapshots?
Well, upon reflection it looks pretty damn obvious. One week it’s about doubting one’s path (Trusting the Process is Self-Doubt Detox), the next about doubting one’s intuition (How do you trust your Intuition?). A foray into its causes here (The Pursuit of (Un-)Certainty), a little exploration of the neurological footprint here (The Harvard Method: How to turn your Anxiety into Excitement) and then a deep dive into the phenomenological nature here (Confessions of a Recovering Positivity Addict). In that last one, I really spelled it out:
Life has been one hell of a rollercoaster lately. Periods of anxiety, insecurity, overwhelm and just general lost-ness.
So what the hell just happened? Was this the year of poor choices? Did I become a sensitive snowflake? Was it a year of bad luck? No. Very decidedly, no. Instead, I think it’s just the year I stopped fooling myself. To make this point, let me tell you about baby beavers. I swear, this will all make sense soon.
🦫 Baby Beaver Buckteeth
So, at this point, we’re all familiar with the ideas of evolution: A baby beaver inherits a certain size of teeth and intensity of its dam-building instincts from their parents. This is called genetic inheritance and made a guy called Darwin pretty famous. But it doesn’t stop there: They inherit the dam that their parents built & the flooded land behind it. Some beaver dams are absolutely massive and last for decades - way more than the life of an individual beaver. This is called ecological inheritance - and humans just happen to have supercharged this process.
Sure, you might inherit your dad’s eyes and your mum’s smile (→ genetic inheritance) - but you also inherit this incredibly convoluted repertoire of artefacts collectively called culture. In social learning theory, this term doesn’t just include ballet performances and classical piano recitals, but all those systems of knowledge & behaviour that are learned from others.
As you grow up, a mixture of mere exposure (→ learning by imitation) and overt expectation (→ learning by reward) introduces you to the what generations of human imagination have manifested as. Consider concepts like cars, laws or countries - or behaviours like shaking hands, reading from left to right or eating with a fork: All of these are inherited ecologically, defining your reality just as much as your height might.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, ecological inheritance isn’t just limited to such trivial examples as the perception direction of letters. Our entire perception of what is possible is shaped by the culture we’re exposed to. The crucial difference is this: While traits of genetic inheritance (like your eye colour) might be fixed, the cultural artefacts of ecological inheritance are not. Genetic inheritance leads to physical constraints, culture merely leads to conceptual constraints. Still, as a matter of experience these are treated often indistinguishable - or have you ever questioned reading left to right? Like the fish that can’t see the water he swims in these concepts become invisible to us, leaving us with their implications but without the knowledge of its origin.
My most vivid example is this: Before arriving in Australia in 2022, I’d never even considered the possibility that one could move to another country. I hadn’t decided against it - It had just never occurred to me as a possibility because it wasn’t within my perceptual guardrails. Only after spending some time abroad did I stumble into those guardrails - to find that they’d been imaginary all along.
Now, these inherited guardrails have plenty of benefits - they allow us to tap into the knowledge that millennia of humanity cumulated and ease our cooperation within society. The issues arise when we forget that they are conceptual (aka made-up).
When we confuse a concept with reality, all sorts of funky things happen. For example, one might eat a menu containing all sorts of healthy dishes and wonder why they aren’t getting any nutrition. Or one might fool themselves into thinking that whatever is outside of the guardrails is actually impossible the same way breathing underwater is.
“All of this is well and good”, you might say, “but this time you’ve really gone off the rails. Wasn’t this about anxiety once upon a time?” Well, good thing I have an angry Frenchman up my sleeve to bring it back. Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th-century cigarette connoisseur with a side hustle in this fun field of philosophy called Existentialism - and he was angry because people were living in bad faith.
😟 Scary Choices
Commonly, acting in bad faith refers to acting dishonestly in social interactions. For example, making a promise you have no intention of keeping or arguing a point you know is false for your own benefit are actions in bad faith. Sartre took this one step further: Instead of just deceiving others (acting in bad faith), many are continually deceiving themselves (living in bad faith).
According to Sartre, people cheat themselves out of an authentic life when they blindly give in to the guardrails they’ve inherited. He argues that we deny ourselves a massive degree of freedom merely because the abundance of freedom we have as humans is deeply terrifying. But the reality is, as put so succinctly by American Psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp:
You are free to do whatever you like, you just have to face the consequences.
You could pack up your life tomorrow and book a one-way flight. Quit that job. Change that degree. Importantly, this doesn't mean that you necessarily should. If the consequences aren’t worth the thing, it’s rather wise not to do it. Kopp is simply attempting to evoke the recognition that there is a decision here, and you’re making it. You’ve always been making it, aware or not. There’s a whole school of therapy fittingly named “Reality Therapy” centred around helping clients acknowledge their agency and the power of their choices. Sartre, Kopp and Reality Therapy all share this simple premise: It is only once we acknowledge the surprising extent of our own freedom that we can start making informed decisions about our life.
But here’s the catch: There’s a reason people usually do this sort of work in the safe context of dialectical therapy. Sartre spelled it out himself: The abundance of freedom we have as humans is deeply terrifying. The value of the guardrails is that in a world of infinite possibilities, they make everything a little more manageable and a little less crazy. After all, there’s no use in spending every day in the rabbit hole of fundamental existential questions. Therefore, constraining the perception of one’s potential is a helpful seasonal mechanism to settle into a given routine and really focus on that season’s objective.
However, this is where we come to my central point: There’s incredible value in daring to have a peek into the void of infinite possibility every once in a while. To remember that the guardrails were always made up. To check if they’re still serving you. To recall that they aren’t physical but conceptual - so you’re free to imagine them differently.
🪢 Don’t Look Down
As for the “deeply terrifying” part, I have good & bad news. The bad: At least in my personal experience, it doesn’t get any less ridiculous with time. After a whole year of continually poking at the guardrails and feeling accordingly, my most recent encounter (courtesy of a trip to Asia) sparked the exact same pattern of experience I felt a year ago. The reality is that, especially at this funky early-20s fresh outta college stage of life where you’re just kinda thrown into the world with a cool “You’ll figure it out!”, there’s real grounds for being overwhelmed. To never feel that overwhelm, then, is merely an indication that you’ve gotten sufficiently good at the mental acrobatics of making imaginary guardrails feel real. Or, in the words of a our man JP: It’s evidence that you’re living in bad faith, choosing the comfort of arbitrary limitation in a limitless world.
But there’s good news too. While you might not be able to change the nature of the experience, you can change the way you relate to it. Here’s what I wrote in my journal after the most recent storm had passed:
I think the existential crisis - the moment of recognising that the guardrails were always made up and that you are in fact balancing this crazy tightrope without any safety - was a necessary step toward the sense of freedom that comes once you move past it. By asking fundamental questions with a genuine openness to answers you might not like, you force both recognition and vertigo.
It might just an attempt at justifying why I feel like this, but I like to tell myself that the road to an authentic life just happens to be paved with the occasional vertigo. One does not pack his life into a backpack, move to Australia with no job or flat lined up and not wake up some days doubting his sanity and overall life decisions. It’s a package deal. It’s facing the consequences of the action, as Kopp would say.
All the joy that lies on the other side of an authentic life, then, is simply the flip side of the same coin that brings you the occasional lostness. In the words of my wonderful therapist, these periods are simply growing pains to be expected. As one last analogy, imagine someone wants to build strength in the gym. When they go for a PR workout and it hurts to go up some stairs the next day, they probably don’t see anything inherently wrong with that. They’ve understood that these are growing pains. But, and this is important, it still hurts. They just don’t add this second pain of “This is wrong!” onto it.
After a year full of it, this is how I feel about the existential overwhelm. As an inherent part of an authentic life, I’ve started to expect the occasional period of vertigo. I see it as a routine check-in, testing all my guardrails and making adjustments to realign if necessary. Like the stairs on the next day, it’s still far from comfortable when it happens - but I’ve cut back on the second pain. Even just a year ago, whenever I caught a glimpse of the infinite possibility and subsequently felt overwhelmed, I took it as something wrong with me. “How dare I not have this figured out when, apparently, everyone else has?” But even though our ecological inheritance likes to persuade us otherwise, no one’s got it figured out - and those who say they do just believe in their guardrails a bit more than others. With this in mind, I’ve just started to welcome it a bit more. Each of the essays was simply another perspective that helped understand the experience, curiously deconstructing this novel feeling that 22 years of strong belief in guardrails had prevented quite excellently.
So on the off-chance that you’ve felt lost in the last 12 months, do so right now or happen to in the next 12 months, I’d argue this isn’t a flaw of yours. I’d argue that isn’t even a bad thing, that there’s nothing inherently wrong with it or you. It just means that you aren’t fooling yourself - and I think that’s a good thing. The authentic life goes hand in hand with the occasional growing pains - or, to sum up this entire piece in a simple text I received in February:
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