April 2nd, 2007

A friend of mine is kind of stuck in the doldrums of his career/life. I know those ruts from my past: there once were days when I would look at myself in the morning mirror as I shaved and think to myself, "Here we damned well go again! First this side, then that side, then those last three little whiskers under the nose ... oh bloody brother ..." and it was, of course, not really about the shaving at all, but about its symbolism of preparing for yet another day of the Same Old Shit, Different Pile.

When you get like that, you realise that it is a Sartrean Angst about death. I mean, it's just as a guest lecturer in one of my university classes (arts in context or something like it) once said: All fears boil down to a fear of death. Or, call it Sartrean Angst after Jean-Paul Sartre, that clear-writing over-explainer who introduced such trivial concepts as not being able to truly have self-knowledge, and of consciousness as a transcendent object—at least when it is consciousness of consciousness ... read his Being and Nothingness if you want to experience the top of your head popping off.

Where was I? Oh, fear of death. Yes. Well. Here is what I mean by that: When you stand in front of that mirror morning after morning, time sort of folds and wrinkles a lá Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time so that you can see the single line connecting your shaving actions now with your shaving actions when you are an old man. And you realise that unless you "Do Something, Anything!" you might as well be that old man already. That's it, dewd, your life is over; just wait for the scythe-toting man in flowing robes to come and get you. You lose patience. You panic. You start to scheme, desperately grab at straws.

You look for a way out of this repetitive trap. You try to stop the broken record from skipping and repeating the same day over and over again. (Um, do you remember "records"? Those flimsy thin black discs that stored an amusingly small amount of music for their size?) And what you settle on is a career change. You think maybe if you found a different job as part of a new career, you might somehow be able to reinvent yourself. You think that maybe you can redefine your life so that all those doors you think are closing can be re-opened.

Sartrean Angst, man. You're dead. (Well, or so you think.)

Now, we Westerners have raised the avoidance of thought—and, in particular, this kind of dark dangerous thought—to a 50- or 60-year-old art form, known as television. I don't mean to say that television offers a window into art, necessarily, I mean that its employment as a way of avoiding the cold pricklies of Sartrean Angst is an art form. It's not a coincidence that Sartre himself had a career that started around the same time that television started oozing into Westerners' homes; the no-thinkers of the world would never have tolerated existentialism before the mass Soma of TV was available.

I mean, would you go tromping out in the rain if you thought you could never come back inside and dry off in the warmth again?

So, back to my friend: He is having his own shaving mirror moments these days and I can certainly sympathize. I want to help him, I really do, but the best I can do is to remember the decision I myself made at some point: I chose a single career path because I had expensive habits and lifestyle choices I wanted to maintain. And in doing so, I also decided that any mind-freeing that was going to go on in my life would have to come from internal realizations—things like this blog and the books I read (and write). And stop trying to change myself by changing the environment I live in. It is the way I chose to make it work for me. Who knows? Maybe it would work for him, too, but it's not my place to lecture him.

He's got his own way of fearing the reaper.

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