Existential Dread as Orienting Principle

Modern alienation as a guide to meaning.

I admit that I, a grown man, sometimes fear that a ghost is in the next room when the apparent sound of a limping gait wakes me up in the dead of night in my 200-year-old funeral-home of a house.

Ghosts, insofar as they do exist, are apparitions - meaning, they can only exist on the perimeters of awareness: in the vague terror of a half-sleeping mind or in the unmapped swaths of reality in childhood. They vanish, as it were, under the cold gaze of our analytical mind - that hunter’s gaze turned language-user.

If I had simply gotten out of bed and walked into the other room, I would find the mechanical cause of the sound, and my terror would vanish along with the spirit. I could even comfort myself with the notion that spirits don’t exist but are, in this case, squirrels scampering in the attic. I won’t notice that the very same spirit will appear again on the horizon of some other unknown, ad nauseam, until I believe enough to exorcise him. This would, however, require me to accept reality on his terms.

Years ago, I had the worst existential dread of my life. Only now do I notice that it functioned under the same rules as ghosts: life’s meaninglessness seemed always to lurk in the next room. In my weaker moments, I was paralyzed by the fear of it and unable to illuminate the proverbial bump in the night. I remember one particularly bad episode my roommates literally dragging my limp body into the sunlight. In my stronger moments, I would simply apply my analytic mind to the issue: depression is just a chemical; life is meaningless anyway, so I might as well be happy. And the dread would vanish. For a time.

We all have this habit of soothing ourselves with a quick and cynical deconstruction to make sure everyone knows that ghosts are not real. This habit of self-soothing, in aggregate, has made it impossible for us to believe in anything beyond ourselves. We inoculate ourselves and each other against the resulting nihilistic horror with a blasé attitude that says, “Don’t worry. I’m not foolish enough to believe anything. Are you?” and an involuntary Californian vocal fry which suggests “Who cares, anyway?”

Everything emergent is henpecked to death. We are never able to sit quiet, but are always listening to some podcast that “explains” or “debunks” some shadowy corner after another. We scroll and scroll, always flitting our attention from one clear and legible explanation to the next, tirelessly and vigilantly searching all the cracks with LED light. Despite the nocturnal glow, there are still infinite places for the ghosts to hide - infinitely many things we don’t know, and so our terrible search never ends. We started out thinking we could bust the ghosts by bringing them all to light, but we have instead become monsters of searching, never able to rest in the murk or play in the mist.

There was a time in my life where this all got so bad that I even considered myself a utilitarian, believe it or not. I thought something as human as morality could be reduced to calculation. I believed that if I made these calculations correctly (by reading Peter Singer and then donating to Effective Altruism) I would become, mathematically, a “good person.” No one in the cosmos, not even God Himself, (though I didn’t believe He existed) could accuse me of any wrong. All that existential dread, the ghosts, would finally fade away forever.

In hindsight, utilitarianism was a sort of death rattle of my nihilism. It always collapsed into an even more mundane sort of “nothing matters.” One that, at least in the relatively-insulated-from-consequences-of-lived-beliefs West, quickly becomes that more run-of-the-mill nihilism of “my phone was made by slave labor but I don’t care enough to do anything about it, but neither do you so it’s OK, I guess” sort.

This, though much more common, was way worse. With utilitarianism, at least I believed that the battle for good could be fought, although my battlefront had been badly misdrawn. But at least I had some fight left in me.

The real fight for meaning was in the last place I wanted to look. If the sprawl of shopping centers, for example, were indeed “meaningless,” why then do they take on such a negative meaning? Why the dread? If they were truly meaningless, you might predict a neutral valence. Cosmic horror would be replaced with cosmic adequacy; Cthulhu with a friendly fellow named Steve. But, you suffer there, and that very suffering betrays itself by revealing the possibility for positive meaning.

Nietzsche said that all philosophy was a humiliating and accidental personal revelation. In other words, no matter how far away from your personal ghosts you try to place the moral center of your world, your ghosts ooze through the gaps in your language and the cracks in your work. Utilitarians, for example, accidentally reveal perhaps an un-repaired relationship with the father, specifically by their very hiding behind emotionally distant yet entirely reasonable calculations. What I don’t trust about utilitarians is never their rigor - I believe wholeheartedly in their rigor - it is that what fuels their rigor is hidden from me, and the fuel is the medium and the medium is the message.

We oscillate between these two seemingly opposite delusions: the existential doomer who is powerless to the ghosts that haunt him, and the optimistic ghostbuster who believes that all can be brought under his control and apprehension with enough data and perhaps some private gnosticism. I do have a preference for the doomer, though, if I had to pick. One, because studies do suggest that clinically depressed people are better attuned to the facts of reality, being more statistically accurate in their predictions. And two, because they’re funnier.

Sorry, you can’t bust a whole cosmos of ghosts. You have to allow yourself to notice that not only are ghosts real, but everything is positively infested by them. You may only delude yourself of their absence by brushing them away to isolate, for a moment, a small portion of seemingly sterile cosmos. Inevitably, though, their noise pushes in where you aren’t looking. And a good many of them want to consume you. They will even abide your belief in their unreality in order to steal your life’s attention. These tricks are manifold. Above all, they would love you to think that what you believe “out there” has nothing to do with what moves you “in here.”

Next time you dip into despair, don’t rush to explain it away. Ask yourself this instead: What would it take to not be afraid, if it was all real? You will get an answer. It will point to the great and terrible adventure of your life.

Don’t be afraid.