If You’re Having an Existential Crisis
By: Victoria Jayne
Tags: Meaning Of Life, Existentialism, Philosophy, Existential Crises, Self Help

If you’re having an existential crisis, come have some coffee with me.

You’ll have to pour yourself a cup, obviously, as I am little more than text on a screen.

It’s 8:06 AM as I write this. I’ve been watching the morning gradually brighten my patio, a rain-soaked patch of cement covered in scattered pine-needles. I’m thinking about taking my laptop out there and typing this with icy hands and misty breath beneath the beautiful, bruised morning light.

There are a few types of “morning light,” and each have their own distinct qualia. For example, there are the soft sun rays that pour in through window-blinds to kiss your eyelids awake. Then there’s the spicy pink dawn that bleeds boldly into the sky, announcing the new day with magnificent strokes of watercolor warmth.

Then there is the “blue light” — the light that looks a bit like a bruise.

The blue light is the most mundane and special of the three. It happens when the sun is too low to reach you with butterfly kisses and too distant for you to see its pink seeping fire. It’s just a gradual, gentle shift in the sky from velvet black to the thick misty grey of a drizzly morning. No spectacle, no greeting, just quiet evidence that the new day is starting. It’s a simple “knowing” that the sun is rising, without actual witness.

This is my favorite because of the introspective experience it creates.

“Simple knowing” is a precious gift for the weary mind.

Humans have a tendency to quest so hard for knowledge, that we end up overlooking the moments most pregnant with it. This is mainly because we expect knowledge to flow in the form of words. We thinkers really like our words — we try to fit everything into them.

I watched Noam Chomsky say in an interview once that he believed language evolved to help humans understand their own increasingly complex thoughts. He added the disclaimer that this was a “minority opinion” amongst linguists, as most believe it evolved to facilitate communal “communication.”

I am inclined to agree with Chomsky. Amongst his vast academic and field qualifications, his soothing grandfatherly voice is irrefutable evidence of his credibility. It’s like a robust, well-aged whiskey you’d find on the top shelf of a hidden cellar, with a deep, rich and warm body, and woody notes that creak like a floor board in an old manor. A voice like that defies all argument.

And the fact that I was so excited about it, I actually Googled descriptions of whiskey to describe his voice, because I knew it was reminiscent but felt the need to carve out exactly how.

I think that Chomsky is right that language evolved to help us understand our own complex thoughts — but perhaps the desire to stems from a deeper desire to connect to “others” — whether they’re our “tribe,” aliens, God, or the Universe itself — intelligent life seeks itself.

I believe that language is the cause behind of every existential crisis. More specifically, the boundaries of language.

Of course, as someone who has had one, I both welcome a simple answer, and am wary of any. A true Existential Crisis is pretty big stuff. To me, it felt like an actual fracture of my “soul” or “self” or, whatever I was experiencing as “me-ness.”

My crisis took the form of religious neurosis. Which is weird, considering I wasn’t remotely religious when it began. The Asking Mind doesn’t discriminate, I guess. I think at first I was just so attracted to the certainty that was characteristic of zealously faithful people. At one point in time, I just assumed that most religious people were kind of stupid — but attending a Catholic University forced me to quickly part with this actually infantile notion. I mean, the existence of this universe at all, and the delicate balance in which it hangs, really sets the bar of any existent “truth” at “unbelievably absurd.” If anything, the belief in God is perhaps the most rational conclusion.

Ask Descartes. Apparently he has a “meditation” on it, logically proving the existence of a God, and a benevolent one at that (score?) I didn’t read it, I admit. The point at which I became aware of it, the amount of philosophy I read was directly proportionate with the amount of cigarettes I smoked. Words like “meditation,” “rational,” and “God” made me literally, physically gag.

Existential crises are hard. They don’t only stretch the limits of your mind, they show you just how brittle those boundaries are. I can say that I am officially “over it.” Meaning that yes, I found peace. However, once you encounter the infinitely vast void, you don’t walk away unchanged.

Even now I have five versions of the Bible on my Kindle, the complete Books of Enoch, and two versions of the Apocrypha. Two of the Bibles are in languages I don’t speak at all (Latin and some weird-ass Old English? language, translated by Wycliffe the founder of Methodism). One is the “good old” KJV, and one is the Literal Standard Version — created by etymology nerds who believe in the importance of keeping certain words as close to their original translations instead of “transliterations.” Of course, they still reformatted the sentences. (Don’t worry. No amount of this blog-post will involve proselytizing).

The difference between my “research” now and my “research” from the belly of an existential crisis is that now I enjoy it. I can be at peace with unanswered questions and enjoy sheer, simple, exploration. This itself is a miracle.

But the key that led me to this miracle was a single word, in a single sentence said by a single mother (her marital status is irrelevant, actually). “Vanity.” This woman is pretty devoutly faithful, and when she heard that I was searching the scriptures so deeply she warned me of a passage in the Bible regarding “vain philosophies” and “vanity of the mind.”

Like any ambitious academic, I am absolutely prone to vanity. But there was special symmetry in this particular word: it had a double meaning. It’s one thing to “be” vain, and something else to “act” in vain — and yet there’s a hidden, hardly articulable link between the two meanings (apart from the fact that they share the same word, obviously).

I have to thank Jane Austen for informing me of the nuances of the word vanity: “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

When this woman mentioned vanity, it struck a chord in me. Of course, I felt immediately defensive — but then I thought about the many Medium blogs I’ve tried to write over the years. I have an embarrassing amount of unpublished drafts filled with spaghetti thoughts I couldn’t tie together. I was always too worried that my article wasn’t “meaningful” enough — and truth be told, it never was.

I couldn’t post garbage, and yet I couldn’t write gold. Hours upon hours of study, reflection, and introspection yielded absolutely nothing — an experience that tangled me up in both forms of vanity.

This single realization led to a series of other realizations, each one a step out of the quandary and onto stable ground. Those things are quite personal to me, and probably totally unhelpful to anyone else. But at the end of the mental maze, there was an overarching lesson that I felt truly “right” in sharing.

The word “vanity” was a key for me because language is a puzzle. Geometric in concept, like everything else we subconsciously perceive. It has value and symmetry, patterns and identity. It reconfigures. A single, simple word in any unassuming sentence has been morphed and changed, adapted and transformed, by mouths and brains of peasants and princes throughout history. Throughout this process, it has become imbued with memory, from the sound of its vowels the the muscles of our mouths that move and twitch around them. This is always happening — it’s why we choose to say “totes” instead of “totally,” or that a slice of cake has “like a million calories,” instead “seventeen-hundred,” with neither description being “dishonest.” There’s a difference between a person who says “um,” with an upward lilt and someone who says “uh” with a flat and deep intonation.

Similar to how the “blue” type of morning light will carry significance for a person that is much deeper than what they can express, language itself has countless dimensions of meaning. But, in the end, it is as limited as our own thoughts.

When a person experiences an existential crisis, oftentimes they have a question for every answer. Eventually these questions and answers take on layers of nuance and detail, as the mind grips for the solidity of words. The mind tirelessly efforts for words — they’re the reigns and saddle we thrust upon the unwieldy “complex-thought.”

But in this struggle we should keep two things in mind.

One: an existential crisis stems from existential questions that “cannot be answered.” Perhaps the answer is evasive because the outermost edge of complex thought, as it evolves, is question? That doesn’t mean that these questions will never be answered, or cannot be answered, just that they have not — and our very asking of them informs us of our course of evolution. Imagine that they could be answered, or even have been — its very unlikely that the asking will stop. It’s out nature to evolve, and evolution stems from a sense of incompletion.

Two: If language is indeed a reflection and aid to complex thinking, and our existential questions are indeed asked from the “outermost edge” of evolved thought, then is it possible that the answer can be known without being spoken? Can you have knowledge that you cannot put into words?

I think it’s pretty clear that we can, and do. It’s important to remember, and take comfort, in the knowledge that “ineffable” does not mean “unknowable.” You can ask a question with words and thought, and receive an answer with “knowing” and feeling. And honestly, if you’re going through an existential crisis, you probably need to remember what that feels like.

If a blog post could help me out of my crisis, I would have saved so much money on books and therapy. But I seriously hope that whoever finds this, gleans value, aid, or comfort from it. If you’re struggling to trust your own thoughts, then trusting a random woman on the internet is probably off the table.

But try, just a little bit, to remember what it “feels” like to “know.” Not the pendulum swing between rapture and dread as you contemplate all possible articulable answers — but quiet, boring, beautiful knowing. Like knowing your lungs will keep breathing whether you ask them to or not. That your eyes will keep blinking, even when sleepy and strained.

And that the sun is rising as the sky turns blue, even if you can’t see it.

It’s rising in you, too.