Meaning in Extremis, Part 1
Extremely difficult situations are portals into moments of deep meaning.
1.
Cutting myself has never occurred to me. I think I understand why people do it, though. Beyond relieving one's emotional distress via initiating one's physical distress, I imagine cutting also satisfies a more fundamental desire to feel something intensely, something of consequence, something greater than nothing. We all chase this feeling to some extent, do we not? I know I do. It's why I've done a lot of things in my life. Some of them very self-destructive and hard to look back on. Others less so. It's probably why I so clearly remember the particular night when I was standing in a high school friend's garage drinking beer, and I realized with far too much relief that alcohol "worked" better for me than weed. It's also probably the reason that some of my friends from those days didn’t survive them. It's definitely the reason why I started running, and why I now dream of running for hours and days on end. But it's also why I have to restrain myself, for now, to only dreaming of doing so. Running to exert some conscious control over the things that go on in my mind is one thing. Running to exert the same kind of control over the things that go on in my body, such as the rate that blood flows through it and how capable my heart is of enduring all that my mind unleashes on it, is another. Like much of what we humans do, cutting and running are, at least in part, attempts to take control of our condition. The former is clearly far more self-destructive than the latter, but both require accepting (and initiating) certain damages in exchange for certain repairs. Emotional regulation is an art, and the difference between what works and what wrecks is often only a matter of degree.
I've known people who seem to feel good all the time. I know a few of them right now. They do not make sense to me. They confuse and intrigue me. Sometimes I'll try to sniff their minds to see if I can pick up an instructive scent, or maybe an endogenous powder of some sort that, if snorted, will reveal their secrets. But it never works; I never smell or snort anything transformative, and I always remain who I already was. This is probably for the best, though, as I know myself well enough to know that I would quickly start abusing any secret uncovered, and then return just as quickly to feeling bad from it and working to wean myself off it. In other words, I'd still just be who I already am. I’d still just be trying to exert control over my thoughts and emotions, and to feel better. This will be a gross and self-absorbed thing to say, but most of my actions on earth—underneath everything, i.e., beneath my version of these performative characters that we lug around and forget we’re not—could probably be summed up in four words: trying to feel better. Whatever remains could probably be covered in seven more: trying to get by when feeling bad.
Everything I focus and fixate and ruminate on, everything I genuinely believe I care about, everything I fight for and against, literally almost everything I do can be traced back to my attempts to feel better or get by. I encourage you to keep that in mind for however long you continue to read my words. (It is not my goal to alienate any of you. It is just my belief that I will eventually alienate all of you.) I'm what some might call an unreliable narrator. I want to be trustworthy. I try to be trustworthy. But I am human. And humans are carriers of hidden failings and self-deceptions and blind spots and whatnot that can't be countered because they can't be seen by the ones who carry them. That's just how it is. Look around and you'll see it in others. Look inside yourself and you won’t, but you'll know it's there. Look at me and you’ll see things plain as day that I cannot. You'll also probably see what I can: a guy with bad mental habits who’s working to defeat them—a guy who’s hindered and possessed by the desire to feel better or at least get by. It's reductive, I know. But my claim is not that this is all there is to me (or any of us, for that matter). My claim is that this is one of the most fundamental places from which all that there is to me begins. It doesn't mean I'm not also trying to be of service to others in some way, or that I'm not trying to be more selfless and considerate and functional. It just tells you why.
Running helps me feel better. It also helps me get by. It's one of a number of things that do both. You've got your version(s) of this. Others have theirs. Books, films, music, meditation. Cutting, alcohol, opioids, Taylor Swift. Name a thing and it probably serves this purpose for someone. Whatever yours is, I suspect that the value you derive from it is directly proportional to the meaning you derive from it. Perhaps they are even the same thing. In any case, for many of us, if not for all of us, meaning thrives in consequence. If there's nothing to lose, nothing to risk or sacrifice or overcome, then there's also nothing to gain. And that includes a sense of meaning.
2.
We all make and derive individual meaning where and when we can. But as I see it, there is only one inherent and universal source of meaning in life, and that is death, life's intrinsic consequence. Everyone knows it’s waiting for them. And yet, no one knows exactly where or when it will arrive (excluding those who decide that for themselves). No one knows exactly why it must be or even what it is. All we really know about it is what it isn’t: more of this; more of these minds and bodies and relationships as we know them. Death might be the greatest moment of our lives. It just as likely might render our lives irrelevant. It might be the beginning of whatever comes next, a movement from light to dark, a passage into universal consciousness, the first moment of eternity, the next leg of our eternal recurrence, another violent reemergence from the womb. Or it might just be lights out. Maybe some peace. Maybe some punishment. Maybe an E minor will strike. Maybe there will be a low drone—O))))))))))). Or maybe not. One thing is certain, though. There will be death.
Examining his somewhat recent near-death experience in his book In My Time of Dying, Sebastian Junger writes:
Dying is the most ordinary thing you will ever do but also the most radical. You will go from a living, conscious being to dust. Nothing in your life can possibly prepare you for such a transition. Like birth, dying has its own timetable and cannot be thwarted and so requires neither courage nor willingness, though both help enormously. Death annihilates us so completely that we might as well have not lived, but without death, the life we did live would be meaningless because it would never end. One of the core goals of life is survival; the other is meaning. In some ways, they are antithetical. Situations that have intense consequences are exceedingly meaningful—childbirth, combat, natural disasters—and safer situations are usually not. A round of golf is pleasant (or not) but has very little meaning because almost nothing is at stake. In that context, adrenaline junkies are actually “meaning junkies,” and danger seekers are actually “consequence seekers.” Because death is the ultimate consequence, it’s the ultimate reality that gives us meaning.
We tend to think of consequences as only negative. In reality, they can be positive, negative, or, more likely, both. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines consequence as “a result or effect of an action or condition” or “importance or relevance.” It comes from the Latin word consequentia, which is derived from the verb consequi, meaning “to follow closely.” Meaning, meanwhile, is defined by the NOAD as “what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.” Or more specifically: “implied or explicit significance” and “important or worthwhile quality; purpose.” To my mind, then, the position that there is a direct relationship between the two concepts is unassailable. Moreover, just as consequences can be both positive and negative, so too can meaning. And just as consequences and meaning can both be tied to our actions, so too can they be tied to our inactions.
In Junger’s 2010 book War, in which he documents the 15 months he spent embedded with a platoon at the highly volatile Restrepo outpost in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, he writes:
In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out—can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose a sense of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don’t even make the connection; at Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore. It was tedious but it gave the stuff of one’s existence—the shoelaces and the water and the lost shirt—a riveting importance. Frankly, after you got used to living that way it was hard to go home.
Interestingly, to me at least, we don’t need to have lived in combat, or gotten used to it, to understand this. Somewhere deep down, or maybe not deep down so much as simply permeating through our lives, many of us will recognize this gnawing sense of lack, this feeling of untapped potential. Because a life lived exclusively in the civilian world also shows us how hard the inconsequential comforts of home can be. Many would in turn cite the great strides humans have made and how fortunate we are to enjoy those comforts, and I would not disagree. I would just add that even good fortunes can come with negative consequences (and vice versa). These things are not binary or cleanly divided. They are one and the same, and they are usually a mess. To categorically dismiss the positive or negative aspects of something as secondary is to commit a kind of cognitive crime. As I’ve written before, I spend my days working for a progress-oriented organization, and I’ve done so now for the past three years. I mention that again only to say that I think about these things—broadly positive advancements and their pernicious negative consequences—a lot, too much, almost constantly most days of the week. In doing so, I have learned and grown considerably, and demolished and rebuilt my view of the world and myself and others many times over. At the same time, I have been witness to countless cognitive crimes, and they irk me more deeply than I’m able to express or fully understand. They grate against my soul. It is like a mental and spiritual rot that nests unexamined in the shadows of our good fortunes, this refusal to engage with the darker contradictions and complexities inherent in our forward march. It is a well-meaning refusal, a passive refusal, an easy refusal, an unconscious refusal, but a refusal just the same. Negativity and darkness are no less aspects of wholeness than are positivity and light. They can be harnessed, as Carl Jung teaches us, but to dismiss them is to make monsters. To evade them is to evade wholeness. You can’t have light without shadow. You just can’t. But you also can’t have shadow without light. And I think that is beautiful and brings wisdom and guidance to our search for meaning.
(All of that said, I’ll remind you again that I’m an unreliable narrator with bad mental habits. I’ve found fault with all of my many forms of employment over the years. To put it generously, I’ve never taken well to authority. And it has occurred to me many times over the past few years that my real issue with the idea of progress has less to do with all the ways I intellectualize and ruminate on its trade-offs and incoherences, and more to do with the fact that I’m hopelessly inclined to rail against The Man. And since The Man in my life right now is a well-intentioned nonprofit organization focused on progress, it is quite possible that I’m doing it again. I’m also riddled with self-doubt and low on self-worth, though. So who knows, maybe my grievances are valid. Let’s get the fuck out of these parentheses now.)
I’ve come to understand and accept that I’m simply incompatible with a lot of the ways of the world. And that’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s fantastic. It gives me strength and clarity. It tells me which battles to fight and which ones to walk away from. It makes it plain that I’m largely on my own. And I’m good with that. I’m invigorated by that. It simplifies things. It lights the way forward and places the responsibility for making meaning entirely on me. It is on me to try to close the gap between living a standard civilian life and living a more meaningful one. It is on me to make a more concerted effort to live and act in ways that give a “riveting importance” to the stuff of my existence. It is on me to bring a higher level of care and intensity and awareness to all that I do (including all the mundane things that I must do—out of economic servitude, basic human upkeep, and a sense of moral duty to others). It is on me to imbue my days with greater consequence, and to in turn imbue them with greater meaning.
It is on each of us, in fact. The world is not on a path to fill our inner voids or induce enlightenment or support our spiritual growth. For better and worse, the world is on a path to appease its citizenry and prolong “life years” and boost GDP—shit like that. Not unimportant shit. Just different shit. Material shit. Shit that doesn’t have any time or interest in, say, pondering the different philosophical interpretations of the pneuma or the numen.
3.
We are not all in this together. But we are also not all in it alone. Not literally. Even if it were possible, it would be unsurvivable, even for those of us whose constitutions require ample time in solitude. Eventually, we would falter. This essay is not about community, but it would be incomplete without some consideration of community as both (1) an intensity-amplifier of consequence, and (2) an indisputably fundamental source of human meaning and purpose. This is one of the reasons why people start brandishing their “we’re all in this together”s when the communal stakes are clear and high. Because for brief flashes here and there, we actually are.
In War, Junger shares a story about inviting an infantry sergeant he’d been embedded with in Afghanistan to a dinner party in New York. “Over dessert,” Junger writes, “a woman asked him if there was anything that he missed about the Korengal. O’Byrne just looked at her. ‘I miss almost all of it,’ he said.”
That’s the problem when they come home, I thought: not necessarily that they come back traumatized—which some do—but that they miss it. Missing something as horrible as war is deeply confusing not just to the men themselves but to their wives, their families, their friends. […] The thing that existed at Restrepo but was virtually impossible to find back home wasn’t so much combat as brotherhood. As defined by soldiers, brotherhood is the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the group. That’s a very different thing from friendship, which is entirely a function of how you feel about another person. Brotherhood has nothing to do with feelings; it has to do with how you define your relationship to others. It has to do with the rather profound decision to put the welfare of the group above your personal welfare. In such a system, feelings are meaningless. In such a system, who you are entirely depends on your willingness to surrender who you are. Once you’ve experienced the psychological comfort of belonging to such a group, it’s apparently very hard to give it up.
The cavity that can result in the absence of kinship—as well as its inverse, the psychological well-being and fullness that can come from sacrificing oneself for the good of the group, or just for something greater than the self—is at the heart of Junger’s 2016 book Tribe. There are a number examples in the book of people coming together in times of disaster and crisis and war, and then later missing those times and the sense of purpose and belonging that they’d engendered. But the book’s broader, driving argument is laid out plainly in its introduction. After recounting a pivotal experience he’d had as a young man in 1986, hitchhiking across part of the US and encountering an older man in Gillette, Wyoming, who, somewhat bewilderingly, went out of his way to help him, Junger opens Tribe as follows:
For reasons I’ll never know, the man in Gillette decided to treat me like a member of his tribe. This book is about why that sentiment is such a rare and precious thing in modern society, and how the lack of it has affected us all. It’s about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning. It’s about why—for many people—war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
At one point in the book, Junger references a study titled “Depression as a Disease of Modernity: Explanations for Increasing Prevalence,” in which the author writes:
The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment promoting decisions that maximize consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.
That study is from 2012, which I think can fairly be called one of our many “before time”s by at least 10 metrics. There’s now strong evidence to suggest that an adolescent mental health epidemic, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called it, was just getting started around that same time. Haidt, somewhat famously at this point, links the changes to “the four foundational harms of the new phone-based childhood that damage boys and girls of all ages: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.” He has, also somewhat famously, received some pushback for his stance. But he appears to either genuinely welcome it or be very good at pretending to welcome it. In any case, I’ve seen him adjust the specifics of his position, in response to receiving and processing new information, numerous times now. And each time I’ve seen those adjustments strengthen his case. He is careful and methodical in a land of carelessness and chaos. So even if he’s wrong, which I don’t think he is, it won’t be because his beliefs were rigid or went unexamined. It will be because of some blind spot, some light that he could not see. Here’s Haidt clarifying one aspect of his stance in his book The Anxious Generation:
We need to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape. Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops, PacMan is not World of Warcraft, and the 2006 version of Facebook is not the 2024 version of TikTok. Almost all of it is more harmful to preteens than to older teens. I’m not saying that 11-year-olds should be kept off the internet. I’m saying that the Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness. We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices. Unfettered access to everything, everywhere, at any age has been a disaster, even if there are a few benefits.
Lights and shadows, shadows and lights.
Of course, adolescents are not alone in navigating the negative consequences of modern society and some forms of progress. And this raises important questions about life, and what a fulfilling life looks like, and whether we humans have organized ourselves in such a way as to increase or decrease the odds of living one. For example: On the face of it, any increase in life expectancy sounds like a purely positive development. But is it, necessarily? In a recent paper from The Consilience Project, the authors ask a (fairly basic and unanswerable but still helpful) question, one that weighs on me in my daily search for progress: “What matters more: quantity of life, or quality of life?” Part of their answer is below (I’ve removed the many supporting footnotes and sources, but you can easily find them all here):
Even with advanced healthcare and far fewer deaths in early life, American lifespans recently endured a pronounced period of decline. Since 2014, the clear upward trend in life expectancy has changed, with year-on-year reductions attributed to chronic disease, overdose, gun-related homicide, suicide, and road traffic accidents. More relevant, however, is the quality of the additional life that we are living, and there is little evidence to suggest that we are passing our additional years in a state of good health and happiness. The average person over sixty in the US now takes fifteen prescription medications a year. Many of these drugs have a range of damaging side effects, which must be borne alongside increasing rates of neurodegenerative disorders (such as Alzheimer’s), as well as depression and advanced physical ailments.
[…]
Quality of life among younger members of society has also demonstrably declined. Obesity, diabetes, cancers, and autoimmune disorders are now increasingly common afflictions across generations. Scores relating to general happiness, wealth inequality, and trust (in others, in governments, and our societal institutions) are all in multi-decade decline. Suicide rates for children and teens have increased dramatically over the last twenty years. Within the most developed parts of the world—the countries benefiting most according to the progress narrative—the right to euthanasia is often a leading human rights issue. While the pursuit of a legal right to die under some circumstances is a viable ethical goal, it is also the case that the developed world’s demand for euthanasia is driven in part by the burdens of anthropogenic (human-caused) disease, chronic unhappiness, and profound existential emptiness into which the progress narrative has delivered us.
None of this is to say that humans have not also made great and crucial advancements over the years. Believe me. I’m aware. I’ve seen the charts. I am on the Our World in Data website five days a week, every week. I am subscribed to the Our World in Data newsletters and review every new data insight, article, and update. I see the charts that do the rounds in “the progress community” regularly. And I’ve seen the greatest hits many times.
Like this one:
And this one:
And this one:
I know, I know, and I know. I’m not dismissing any of that. Our World in Data does a great job of putting it all together. We need people who do that, and they are some of those people. But we also need people who plumb the depths of the more metaphysical and immeasurable stuff of life and ask: Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? Why are we? What is this? And what the fuck is that? That’s what I do. And all I’m saying is: lights and shadows, shadows and lights. Betcha can't eat just one.
4.
The term in extremis can mean to literally be "at the point of death." But more generally, it simply means to be "in an extremely difficult situation." It is my position that extremely difficult situations are portals into moments of deep meaning. And I’m using the word moments very intentionally there. Meaning is like sleep and nutrients and sunlight: it must be regularly replenished, lest we become deficient in it. It is also my position that modern society—including and in some cases especially its comforts and benefits—can make our replenishment of deep meaning very difficult. Some would say extremely difficult. I, for example, would say that. At the same time, there is an opportunity for deep meaning to be made from the meaning deficiencies that have become such a pronounced part of modern life. As I’ve written before: We all have things that others don’t. And we all lack things that others have. And almost all of the best (and most meaningful) things that we have start from the things that we lack.
A writer I know said something impactful to me recently. She said, in effect, yes, society is in some ways sick right now. But maybe it needs to be sick for a while. Maybe it needs to be sick before it can become something better. Maybe it needs to be sick to get healthy. That, to me, is what a more evolved optimism looks like. That is what a more evolved hope looks like. It is neither a dismissal nor a rejection of the stuff in our shadows. It is an assimilation of it, a harnessing of it, a way to make use of it, to turn the dogs of nihilism into lemonade.
Maybe I am less alone in the world than I sometimes think. Maybe my sense of incompatibility with it is a source of meaning, rather than a barrier to it. Probably it is both. As Charles T. Rubin wrote recently in The New Atlantis: “For better and for worse, meaning requires a world that resists us, that we enter into without having chosen it, still less having created its terms for ourselves.”
5.
After struggling for a couple of years with the psychological effects of almost dying, Junger was still unable to decide if he felt lucky or unlucky to be alive, blessed or cursed. So he looked up the etymology of the word blessing, hoping that it might help him in some way. “The word blessing,” he writes, “is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for blood—bledsian—and contains in its meaning the idea that there is no great blessing without sacrifice, and perhaps vice versa.” Or, as he put it in a recent podcast episode: “There’s no blessing without a wound … no blessing without the shedding of blood in some form.” And “maybe there's also no wound without a blessing.”
From In My Time of Dying:
The association may date to the ritual sacrifices of pre-Christian Europe as well as the hallowing of ground through combat. “We cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground,” as Abraham Lincoln observed on the battlefields of Gettysburg in 1863. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” The ultimate struggle, of course, is with God. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles a man by the banks of a stream not knowing that his adversary is God Himself. At daybreak, God wearies of the contest and unjoints Jacob’s hip by touching his thigh, but Jacob refuses to release him. “I will not let thee go except thou bless me,” Jacob says. God relents, and Jacob limps home blessed among men but crippled for life.
At the tail end of a long run the other day, it hit me that that’s what running is to me. It’s clearly not combat or childbirth. But it’s also not a round of golf. Like longer forms of writing and meditation, running is a variation on the ultimate struggle. It’s a surrender to it, a form of inward-bound self-sacrifice, a kind of inner combat against a world that resists me. It’s me versus God (in the sense that “God” is a serviceable symbol for the mysteries in me and in everything that I am in awe of and mad at). It’s the temporary suspension of reverence and illusion, a ritual bloodletting. It’s me at my deepest and hardest-won point of sacrifice, leaning into God and saying, “Bless me. Take whatever you want. Take it all. But fucking bless me.” It’s God relenting, taking His ounce of flesh and leaving me wounded but whole. Surrendered but free. Damaged but repaired. Until the next day. When the struggle starts again, but I wake up looking forward to it.