Life Is Not Perfectible

Many people have the silly idea, gleaned from movies, adverts and glossy magazines, that life is perfectible. The idea that other people out there have achieved the perfect life. So, they feel dissatisfied with the life they have or even downright cheated out of the life they think they deserve but don't have, the life that no one has.  They yearn for a life of perfect happiness that is impossible, while failing to take control of the life they do have and make it more rewarding through decisive, realistic action. Existentialists are nihilists because they recognize that life is ultimately absurd and full of terrible, inescapable truths. They are anti-nihilists because they recognize that life does in fact have a meaning: the meaning each person chooses to give his or her own existence. They recognize that each person is free to create themselves and make something worthwhile of themselves by striving against life's difficulties. Life, or rather death, will win in the end, but what matters is the striving, the overcoming, the journey.

—Gary Cox, How to Be an Existentialist, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012, p. 15.

Love, Frankl and Midlife

I continue reading through Viktor Frankl’s fascinating The Doctor and the Soul, and I find it both enlightening and frustrating. Enlightening because I can see things from a different angle, frustrating because just when I think I’m going to get to a real insight about myself, he moves on the next point. I find I wish I could talk to him face-to-face.

Last night I finished the chapter on love, and while most of it was on point, I have a few quibbles.

Frankl distinguishes between sexual desire (i.e., lust), erotic desire (i.e., infatuation) and love. Lust is purely physical, of course. Erotic desire involves the psychological as well as the physical. In other words, erotic desire is the desire to have/be with a person for their personality as well as their looks. Love, on the other hand, is the full, non-possessive appreciation of a whole person. Love can be experienced in a monogamous relationship, or it can be for a relative, etc. Up to this point I agree fully.

What I think Frankl didn’t spell out and should have is that for monogamous, coupling relationships, lust and infatuation are stages one must go through to reach love. I don’t think many, if any, leap ahead directly to love, bypassing lust and erotic desire, to establish monogamous relationships. Love minus sexual and erotic attraction is simply a deep friendship (which is a wonderful thing, by the way), but not the basis for a monogamous coupling.

To be sure, I agree with Frankl that if a relationship gets stuck at the possessive, erotic desire stage, it isn’t love. Furthermore, a relationship stuck at that stage is fragile. If the partners cannot move it to real love, it may not be able to hold up over time and the vicissitudes of life.

Frankl also reiterates that one does not have to experience love to make life meaningful. One can also make life meaningful through action and through one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering. In fact there comes a point in some people’s lives when love is admittedly no longer possible, and they must make meaning otherwise. He maintains however that if one does not experience love and feels resentment toward life over this, he will hamper the meaning-making in his life. To be able to live without love and yet not be resentful about that is a path toward meaning-making.

And this is what I must learn to do. I freely admit I harbor resentment for not having been able to find/have/create love in my life. All my past relationships never got beyond the infatuation stage. I may have thought I was in love, but I wasn’t. Between coming out late and having warped ideals of love modeled for me while growing up, I was hampered in the pursuit of love. If I could undo my past I would certainly change how I did things.

But now I’m at a stage of life in which I believe opportunities for love are vanishingly scarce at best. Because (IMHO) sexual and erotic desire must precede love, I no longer can fall in love with someone. I do not desire men my age. They are not sexually attractive to me.  If, when I was much younger, I had truly loved someone, and had aged alongside him, that wouldn’t be an issue. We’d have our whole history together to draw upon. But without the initial stages of sexual desire and erotic desire to start off with, love of a monogamous, coupling nature is not going to happen for me. In my life, I’ve moved well beyond the time when this could have happened.

So my current task is to deal with the resentment. I must learn to live with my life (the unavoidable factors I was born into, such as a fundamentalist family, a small town milieu, etc., and the poor choices I made along the way, such as sticking with infatuation relationships when they should’ve been dropped) and move beyond the resentment. I must admit that the resentment runs deep, and is tangled up with my religious upbringing, my regressive childhood social milieu and a host of other factors. It may very well be that letting go of the resentment is a major component of my meaning-making tasks in life. To show to myself that having been born in the time and place I was does not need to make my life hopelessly angered and emotionally crippled.

I Don't Know How to Do This

A couple of days ago I wrote that life is a job, and implied that one of the most basic aspects of that job is to make life have meaning.

I know that the meaning of my life is entirely up to me, for me to create. I've come to see that this isn't some diktat from some being of a higher order making demands of me based on some responsibility contract I was forced to sign by being born, as if I'd coerced my parents into making me, rather than the other way around. No, there's no entity arbitrarily demanding I get to work at meaning-making. Rather this is simply a law of the universe, like the physics of gravity or the dharmic laws of cause and effect. It just is. The responsibility to make meaning out of one's life is like the responsibility to eat if one wants to live. It is simply a fact of the human condition. I'm beholden to no one, but I am vastly beholden to myself.

The problem is that I feel I lack the skill set to create meaning for my life. If someone has been indoctrinated— dare I say brainwashed?— for the first three-fifths of his life, the "formative years", to believing that the meaning for his life comes from an all-powerful entity given to mercurial moodswings and tyrannical rulership, it's hard to take control of life for oneself. In other words, I was taught throughout my childhood, youth and young adulthood, that God had plans, that God had given me my life's meaning, etc. So I not only received no training in meaning-making, I was discouraged from even questioning it. I just don't know how to do this.

I can of course think critically. I can weigh options. I can say, well, I like this, I loathe that, I don't give a shit about the other. But I cannot find the wherewithal within me to feel passionate about anything. The closest I come to passionate is anger over the way I was raised. And even that is mitigated by feeling sorry for my parents, who were so smart and so clueless at the same time. I have no burning desire to accomplish any particular thing; I have no "great work" waiting to be done.

So here I am. I'm freaked out about being old and alone, and completely unable to find a mate. I'm adrift in a life that has no inherent meaning, and feel ill-equipped to create that meaning. I have no real career, no real family and nothing to look forward to except getting older, uglier and more alone.

Bear with me; I'm still trying to figure this out.

Life Is a Job

I had been dwelling on the difficulty of making life have meaning the other day, when I ran across one short, key sentence in Frankl's The Doctor and the Soul:

Life is a task.

Exactly. Amen. Almost the same words I had been thinking.

I lose patience with people who keep talking about how life is a gift, as if it came wrapped in pretty paper with a cute bow on top, and we open it to find the most awesome playstation/smartphone/lego set/malibu barbie/pony combination imaginable. You insult me when you say life is a gift. Being born a gay child to Christian fundamentalist parents is not a fucking gift. Ever.

Life is not a gift. It's a fucking job.

But it is a job that if you work hard at and keep at it, you can make it somehow meaningful. I believe that you don't have to have been born in fortuitous circumstances to make life have meaning. You don't have to have hit the jackpot of good looks, material comforts, or decent parents. You just have to take whatever you find around you, whatever your circumstances are, and metaphysically macgyver it into something meaningful. And that job is different for every person.

Man's Search for Meaning

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

—Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006, p. 79-80.

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus everyone's task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.

—ibid., pp. 108-109.

This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: "Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now."

—ibid., p. 109.

Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

—ibid., p. 111.

Brief Notes

1. I've been researching meaning-making, and while what I've learned has been interesting, it's also left me a little bummed. Frankl, for instance, says meaning is found through love, work or courage. I doubt that I'm capable of love, I've never been able to find a meaningful career, and the last time I had real courage was 20 years ago when I came out. I don't know whether there are any other sources of meaning-making. I'll keep looking, but I'm not optimistic. For the time being I'm just faking my way through this shit.

2. I want to get through this Frankl book as quickly as I can (I have a second book by him, but I'll hold it for later); I've got a mental list of books I'd like to read next. Two that I've already started are proving to be quite good. The Ball by John Fox is about why people play sports, and has chapters on basketball, soccer, lacrosse, and even the old Mayan ball games. It's actually very inspirational. The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner is a classic survey of economics which I read over 25 years ago and desperately needed to re-read. I'm particularly interested in the chapter on Adam Smith, since I've come to believe today's "conservatives"* don't really understand him. After that I plan to read Smith himself; also Vennum's book on lacrosse.

3. Speaking of lacrosse, I've begun to collect the parts to make a long stick. I don't play, and never will (I'm too old and too poor), but I want to learn how to toss with both short and long sticks. I have a short stick, which I purchased whole; but I want to put together the long (defensive) stick, including stringing it, just for fun.

4. I also want to get back into hand-crafts more. I feel better when I engage in some kind of creative work.

5. I thought it was odd that last night five of my must-see television shows came on. I don't really have a whole lot of must-see shows. Even shows that used to be must-see for me have begun to feel old and less enjoyable. I would love to be able to cut my must-sees down to almost nothing. I hear of more and more people cutting the cable completely. That would be a very interesting experiment.

6. Speaking of cutting down on things, yesterday's entry highlighted how I've begun to feel about my use of substances, particularly alcohol and caffeine. I, too, am tired of feeling poisoned. I want to feel better. Cleaner on the inside.

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*I put the term "conservatives" in quotes because the people today calling themselves conservative are not actually conservative. Our country as a whole has been dragged so far rightward, words have lost their original meanings. Today's "middle of the road" folks are actually very conservative, while the "conservatives" are actually reactionary radicals, bent on destroying the country as we know it in order to create some monstrous vision of "purity" from the ashes. There is no longer an effective left in this country, just moderates, conservatives and radicals. Also, we don't really have capitalism in the US any longer, as Smith, et al., understood it. Capitalism is investment in the production of goods and services, and exchanges based on that. We have "financialism": making money from money, all profits based on ethereal instruments, without true goods/services/entities underlying them. Thus, the seeds of our doom.