H.W.P.O

 

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: “Why are you living?” life, if it could answer, would only say, “I live so that I may live.” That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living. —Meister Eckhart

I am a proud, yes proud, owner of an H.W.P.O. t-shirt. I am proud of the skills of persuasion I employed to get my hands on the shirt. I ingeniously persuaded it off a man’s back because I actually did not want to spend that much money on a shirt of such poor quality. Quality aside, the four letters printed in blue on a white background simply speak to me. 

I started following CrossFit during the Matt Fraser era. Brooke Ence led me to CrossFit, and I was instantly and insanely hooked. I watched enough to know who Rich Froning Jr. is even though he had stopped competing as an individual and had moved to the team division. I prefer individual sport rather than team sports, and that in itself reveals a lot about me. I am like Ryan Reynolds in Red Notice, “Teamwork, it feels weird in my mouth.” So, when I started watching CrossFit, I watched individual competitions exclusively, still do. CrossFit athletes, to me, are like gods made flesh. The things that these athletes can do is something that I still can’t wrap my mind around. I probably respect gymnasts and cirque performers just a little bit more but it's just athleticism to another level. 

Fraser has five Fittest Man on Earth titles which is one title more than the legend Froning Jr. In 2020, Fraser retired and went into coaching. He named his training program after his personal mantra: Hard Work Pays Off. It is simple, hard-hitting, to the point, and has just enough punch to make you want to work harder. There is a little caveat though, it is not true. Well, it is mostly not true.

I have probably mentioned this before in one of my earlier essays, but I live in a country that is a glaring example of how hard work doesn’t pay off. The economic backbone in this country is black people, they are the hardest working people in this country and yet they are the poorest. They manage to eke out a living month to month and there is zero correlation between the work they put in and the pay they take home at the end of the month. On the other side of the coin, there are many examples of people earning or inheriting money without having to work at all. From winning the genetic lottery to generational wealth, networking to becoming a Minister of such and such, there are many examples of how working hard is not even a prerequisite to having a certain amount of money in the bank. 

Facticity

In Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, he contrasts two baseball Hall of Famers, Bath Ruth (1936) and Lou Gehrig (1939). Gehrig was the quintessential athlete, like LeBron James, who was absolutely disciplined when it came to what he ate and how he took care of his body and one look at Ruth showed you that he did not care about any of that. 

Most kids like to play sports. Lou Gehrig saw in the game a higher calling. Baseball was a profession that demanded control of, as well as care for, the body—since it was both the obstacle and the vehicle for success. Gehrig did both. He worked harder than anyone. “Fitness was almost a religion to him,” one teammate would say of him. “I am a slave to baseball,” Gehrig said. A willing slave, a slave who loved the job and remained forever grateful at just the opportunity to play. This kind of dedication pays dividends. When Gehrig stepped up to the plate, he was communing with something divine. He stood, serenely, in a heavy wool uniform that no player today could perform in. He would sway, trading weight between his feet, settling into his batting stance. When he swung at a pitch, it was his enormous legs that did the work—sending the ball off his bat, deep, deep, out of the ballpark… There were players with more talent, with more personality, with more brilliance; but nobody outworked him, nobody cared more about conditioning, and nobody loved the game more. (Holiday)

There was a point where Ruth was a whopping 240 pounds, because his diet consisted of soda and burgers, and yet he was one of Baseball’s finest. To Holiday, he disrespected the sport by not taking it seriously enough while Gehrig dedicated everything to the game. The simple fact of the matter is that Ruth was great at the sport, and it seemed all he had to do was show up and hit the ball. Then there were athletes like Jim Thorpe and Bo Jackson who were so genetically endowed that there was no amount of hard work that opponents could put in to match their skills. There was a great talent divide which no amount of hard work could bridge.

Let me take an example from CrossFit. There is a CrossFit athlete who goes by the name of Colten Mertens, a pig farmer from Iowa, who just recently missed out on securing his ticket to the 2024 CrossFit games in the semi-finals. Mertens is someone whom I would describe as having that dog in him. He is hardworking and if he was a little bit taller, he would stand a chance of winning the CrossFit games. He is 5’ 4” which is very short for a CrossFit athlete. While there are some events that favour shorter athletes, these are few in comparison to those favouring taller athletes. From a probabilistic perspective, there is just no way that he would be able to win the games. Fraser is also on the shorter side, 5’ 7”, in comparison to other male athletes, but it is not a height that he cannot compensate for. His height is a height deficiency that can be overcome with more effort.    

The existentialists use a term, facticity, to sum up the hand we are all individually dealt. Our height, race, parents etc. are all a part of our facticity. There is nothing we can do to change these things. They are what they are and there are therefore certain limitations that we must make peace with. However, the existentialists believed that we still have options, given our facticity. We still have freedom to create our lives. I think this is true, provided we let go of the finite games that we human beings typically play. The big games are those we play around money, status, and looks but I actually don’t think that those games are for everyone to play, let alone win. The essay I wrote on “free will” titled Turtles All the Way Down made me seriously rethink this whole discipline thing. While discipline is highly valued in today’s society, the gods were closing their eyes and may have been slightly inebriated when they dispensed of it. There are things that I am very disciplined about, and things that I am not. When it comes to physical activities, I am there for it. I will show up every day, when I am supposed to, where I am supposed to, in the heat or cold, and with a smile on my face. Wake me up at 2 AM yelling “Who's going to carry the boats?” and I'll be yelling back “ME!!!” But ask me to do my admin, and I fall apart at the seams. There is truly nothing that I procrastinate more than doing admin. If my discipline was measured by how I show up to my admin duties, my score would be low. I would not think of discipline as freedom, a la Jocko Willink, I would think of it as pulling my teeth out. As it so happens, the things that I am disciplined with are the things that are important for my overall wellbeing so overall being disciplined for me is quite pleasant even if there is hard work involved. 

Following is an excerpt from Roland Lazenby’s biography of Michael Jordan which reinforces my point: 

The fifteen-year-old boy who pinned his hopes on trying out for the Laney High School varsity basketball team in the fall of 1978 was a far cry from the supremely confident Michael Jordan the world would come to know. That young man was stalked by self-doubt. He wasn’t a bad student, mostly Bs and Cs, but there was no indication that he was headed for stardom in academics. And he hated working, making no effort to do anything to earn extra money. He was oblivious to the example of his brother Ronnie’s two jobs during high school, and it was clear to his father that Michael would do anything to avoid anything that resembled effort.

That’s the laziest boy I’ve ever seen, James Jordan would say time and again. “If he had to get a job in a factory punching a clock, he’d starve to death. He would give every last dime of his allowance to his brothers and sisters and even kids in the neighbourhood to do his chores. He was always broke.”

Yet that laziness magically disintegrated when it came to sports. If it involved a ball in the air, a contest to be settled, the switch came on. In his adolescent mind, Michael figured maybe he could be a professional athlete. That was really about the only thing that interested him, which made him no different from millions of other daydreaming boys his age. He couldn’t see how to make that happen, but rarely is there a clear or even a sane path to a life in professional sports.

Time had narrowed his options. He had watched his advantages in baseball mostly disappear. And his mother was determined that he drop football entirely. His choices seemed so bleak that Deloris even suggested he begin taking home economics courses so that he could learn to sew and cook for himself. Chipping away at his self-esteem, she implied it might be wise to do so because he didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who could easily attract a mate. It was her way of saying, “Just go on in the house with the women.”

Rather than getting bent out of shape, Jordan took her suggestion and signed up for the courses—and found he liked them. “I remember he baked a cake in school that was so good we couldn’t believe it,” his mother said. “We had to call his teacher to verify it.”

Nonetheless, at age fifteen, Jordan was verging on the melancholy common to so many teens. Truth be known, he didn’t have a lot of friends. The single beacon, the one bright spot in his life, was basketball.

Now considered the Greatest Of All Time when it comes to basketball, no one would associate laziness with Michael Jordan. And yet, there were things that he was lazy at because they just were not interesting to him. One of the biggest deceptions in our culture is that we all should be interested in the same things and have the same preoccupations. There are a handful of idols which almost all of us have bought into and when we just can’t get ourselves to worship at the feet of those idols, we feel like ‘losers’. We spend so much energy and time trying to convince ourselves to do things that we would rather not be doing because they have been given the social thumbs up.  

In Putting the Work Hard Delusion to Rest, Thinking Ape shares a study of how conscientiousness has a genetic component to it. Conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits that is most aligned with “hard work.” Not only is our conscientiousness not entirely up to us, but even what we are conscientious about is not entirely up to us either. How do we then make the most of our facticity in such a way that we aren’t always feeling like we are missing the mark socially? Authenticity. I am of the opinion that we have all been uniquely gifted and that the gifts that are available to us as the human race are inexhaustible. There are people, right now as I type this, who are spending their lives engaged in something you and I have never even heard about. Take myself as an example, I’ve recently dedicated 10 hours of my weekly hours to learning the Cyr wheel. At the beginning of the year, I didn't even know what a Cyr wheel was, and now it is an important part of my life. There is so much possibility out there and with every passing year, I realize how vast the vistas of human potentiality are, if only we would attune ourselves to them. To fully access these possibilities though, we have to let go of the mindless conforming forces in our lives.

Trauma specialist Gabor Mate once said that the worst thing a parent could ever do to a child is to make them choose between authenticity and acceptance. From what I see, society has taken over the baton from toxic parents and consistently makes us choose between authenticity and acceptance. There is a cruelty in this choice and death on either side. Since most of us choose acceptance over authenticity, there is a sense of deep mourning for not having truly known our own particular and unique shape and discovering our own potentialities. We remain existentially stuck as children, accepted, yet never really knowing what it means to grow and become who we are. That’s why it's called never never land, we never land into our truest selves, and remain estranged from ourselves. 

Our authenticity is too great a price to pay especially since we only just have one life to live, and we do not have the luxury of time on our side. At any given moment, our brief candle can be blown out and we would have withered away this one chance we have at life by living other people’s lives and worshiping at the feet of their idols. I could not think of a worse way to live than inauthentically. I’ve personally managed this supposed dichotomy by refusing for it to be paradoxical or dichotomous in nature. Being accepted is just as fundamental and indispensable as it is for the next person, but I have selected and qualified those whom I seek acceptance from. There are people, whose names I can string together in a single breath, who have fully accepted me in my authenticity. We think we do, but we do not actually need the approval or acceptance of the general public. We just need the eyes of those precious few to rest their warm loving gaze on us and know that we are seen. It may be family; it may not be. It may be friends or mentors or people passing by who have significantly altered our lives’ trajectory in a positively significant way. You know those people, right? Those on the side of your personal growth and development regardless how ambiguous and vague the path may currently be. Those are your people and everyone else can, well, just do them.  

In Mastery Robert Greene writes about how we all have a life’s task, and it is our life’s task and the mastery of it that should take up most of our lives. I truly believe that we all have a life’s task and that it is our duty to explore and listen when that life’s task is revealed to us, and to follow it. A life’s task is not a procrustean bed on which we have to amputate or stretch ourselves to fit onto, it is the bed which fits Goldilocks perfectly. It may be one thing or several different things which call to us along the path and create an exquisite bricolage when combined. Ours is to heed the call and diligently follow through on it. Someone like Mertens may truly be drawn to the CrossFit games and it may be something that he wants to do even if winning is off the table. That is still pretty cool because that means that he is motivated to continue on the path from the inside out. 

Morality and the Protestant Work Ethic

It was definitely during the reformation where morality and hard work were betrothed, 'til death do them part, and it has been difficult to separate the two since. It was believed that those who worked hard and reaped the rewards of the hard work were in God’s favour, a prosperity gospel at its finest. Earning our way into God’s graces by works goes against the entire “it is not by works we have been saved” project, but society in general seems to not have gotten that particular memo. It also seemed that when God died in the Nietzschean way, the protestant work ethic proved harder to kill than the terminators. Our modern bent towards hyper-productivity, where our first encounters with each other are marked by the classic “what do you do?” can have us forgetting that before we were human doings, we were human beings. Our human doings were meant to be in service of our being, not the other way around. A sleight of hand prestidigitation that has most of us working like dogs, worse of all identifying and priding ourselves as such. So, what is the deal with hard work? 

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow in The Further Reaches of Human Nature differentiates between two types of hard work. The band Tenth Avenue North begin their song By Your Side, with the opening line “Why are you striving these days?” which offers a clue on the type of hard work which we should not be engaged with. Throughout the entire book, Maslow makes reference to Taoism which is in concert with the self-actualization process. The Tao is also known as The Way which if you think about it, embodies an effortlessness to it. When you are on the way, your particular way that is, then you will be doing what you are supposed to be doing. There will be resistance as Steven Pressfield describes but it will be of a completely different nature. It won’t be miserable. There may be tons of work on the way, but you won’t be miserable. It’s the Albert Camus line, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Sisyphus was fated by the gods to carry a rock up the mountain which would eventually roll back down of which he would roll back up the mountain again, in perpetuity. We like to imagine Sisyphus miserable because from our perspective, there is a futility to his efforts. Perhaps if we look a little closer then we may see subtle changes in his boulder rolling skills. He may be getting better and better with each subsequent roll that there is a beauty to it. He would be like Bach, making music with his rolling. His body and the rock communing, his strapping muscles, calloused hands, clenched jaw, protruding calf, as he makes his way up the mountain, striking our hearts like poetry. In a similar way, we must imagine Mertens happy. “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. We justify our existence by being faithful to our life’s task to the point of beauty and disconsolate tears. 

When we set aside the striving, we are left with what Maslow calls trust. When we begin to create our lives as opposed to striving to be other than what we are, then we also begin to open ourselves to trust. We trust ourselves, the world and the way. 

All of the foregoing happenings imply a kind of trust in the self and a trust in the world which permits the temporary giving up of straining and striving. of volition and control. of conscious coping and effort. To permit oneself to be determined by the intrinsic nature of the matter-in-hand · here-now necessarily implies relaxation, waiting. receiving. The common effort to master, to dominate and to control are antithetical to a true coming-to-terms with or a true perceiving of the materials (or the problem, or the person. etc.) Especially is this true with respect to the future. We must trust our ability to improvise when confronted with novelty in the future. Phrased in this way, we can see more clearly that trust involves self-confidence, courage, lack of fear of the world. It is also clear that this kind of trust in ourselves-facing-the-unknown-future is a condition of being able to turn totally, nakedly, and wholeheartedly to the present. (Maslow)

This is the other facet of trust, the return to the present. Most of our strivings are externally rewarded which means that most of the time our consciousness is in the future while our bodies are in the present. We approach our work in a disintegrated state which inhibits us from being completely absorbed and arrested by our life’s task.  

Rather than being focused on hard work, it may be more beneficial to focus on peak experiences and entering states of flow which is one of the behaviours leading to self-actualization. There is a Japanese concept called muga. “This is the state in which you are doing whatever you are doing with a total wholeheartedness, without thinking of anything else, without any hesitation, without any criticism or doubt or inhibition of any kind whatsoever. It is a pure and perfect and totally spontaneous acting without any blocks of any kind. (Maslow)” Muga becomes possible only when we have transcended or forgotten ourselves. The prevailing work ethic is solipsistic in nature, it is entirely focused on the self and what the self may hope to achieve through its effort. In this instance, the external rings loudest, with a preoccupation of biting the fruits of our labour checking for ripeness. Be it God’s favour, prestige, status, the material trappings of worldly success or even the number one title, these get in the way by pretending to be the way. 

The Jonah Complex, according to Maslow, is one of the reasons that we never enter into our fullness. Named after Jonah from the Bible, who when called to take up his life’s task, ran away and wound up in the belly of the whale. There is something quite vanilla, safe, uninvolved, when it comes to doing what other people want us to do. We can always blame others for our smallness, and the world offers us ready-made answers to life’s pressing questions. But the world punishes us for this smallness. The megaphone of social media broadcasts our ineptitude, reminding us that we are not good enough and that we are not working hard enough. There are no solutions, as it has been said, only trade-offs. The belly of a whale is no place to live. “The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously,” writes Nietzsche. “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas.”  Taking up the challenge to go your own way is dangerous because you risk standing out and facing persecution for it, you can’t avoid the responsibility that comes with acknowledging your own unique gifts. Unlike the man who received one talent in the biblical parable and buried it, you have to contend with the possibility and danger of failure by putting your talents to use, and you have to make peace with perhaps parting ways with security and control. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Hard work is indispensable as illustrated in Maslow’s “secondary creativeness”, but this hard work is different in nature. 

Meister Eckhart writes that it is not our works which sanctifies us but rather we who sanctify our works. It is not our hard work which sanctifies us but rather we who sanctify our hard work. We have to reimagine ourselves as something other than beasts of burden worked until our backs break or our minds depart from us. We have to look at our hands and the wondrous works thereof in a sacred light. Our hard work is an arc in the story of our self-actualization, itself hardly the main theme in our lives. Who we are and become through our works and how we serve the greater humanity in our own unique ways is what it all boils down to, what remains when everything else evaporates away. It is not hard work that pays off, but the heart committed to creating meaning through work, the radiant body which offers itself in focused service, and the quiet self-actualizing mind trained on being rather than doing.

The worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the [work] is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of its [unique self-actualization] and dead to the [world’s]. (Meister Eckhart inspired)

The Prelude

 You are the slippery morning dew on the leaves

The premonition of events to come

The moist coaxing out the sun to take up the seat in the skies,

Charge us, and make a living

You are the thing before the thing

The announcement, save-the-date, the call-to-action

The trembling beneath the feet of elephants 

As they make their way to higher ground before the storm arrives

You are the impenetrable acorn

Tipping its cap and winking 

An accomplice harbouring secrets of great oaks to burgeon

Whose leaves will block out the sun when tempers flare, burnings and blindings ensue

You are the grabbing of the coat before taking a step over the threshold

The preview, trailer, foreshadowing

The clink of flutes in a celebratory toast 

Before the rivulets of champagne meander through the gullet

Looking at you bubbling over with potentialities

I wonder, if like a puerile sneeze observed, 

You will flatten to the background like a child neglected

Into the eternal silence of a firecracker rained on

Never entering into your fullness  

The Fisherman by Ness

Me and my friends we go down to the water. 

We talk about getting older. We’re folding to the ocean. 

Stitch up my chest, cast my heart in a bottle. 

My body will walk up the shore till he finds it.

I miss the warmth crawling up inside my skin. 

Looking at the sun, the pieces fall into place– 

this cityscape– I gotta burst out.

The fisherman feels a pulse on his line, 

reels in my heart like a call to the sky. 

But he throws it for my own good. 

A god among men gives the task to the waves, 

left me a chance to learn from mistakes and be honest. Be honest. 

My feet are in the sand and my head's in the sky, 

but my heart's in the water as I justify the earth, the wind, the waves all to collide.

I salute to the fisherman, 

built an ark with my bare hands– 

said I’m done pitying my scars, 

set sail for my human heart. 

I salute to the fisherman, 

built an ark with my bare hands– 

said I’m done pitying my scars– 

can’t live as a human heartless.

Daring Greatly

"What do you think we can do about it?"

I thought he was asking a rhetorical question, but he made a gesture with his eyebrows urging

me to answer.

"To live as happily as possible," I said.

"Right! But do you know anyone who lives happily?"

My first impulse was to say yes; I thought I could use a number of people I knew as examples.

On second thought, however, I knew my effort would only be an empty attempt at exonerating

myself.

"No," I said. "I really don't."

"I do," don Juan said. "There are some people who are very careful about the nature of their

acts. Their happiness is to act with the full knowledge that they don't have time; therefore, their

acts have a peculiar power; their acts have a sense of..."

Don Juan seemed to be at a loss for words. He scratched his temples and smiled. Then

suddenly he stood up as if he were through with our conversation. I beseeched him to finish what

he was telling me. He sat down and puckered up his lips.

"Acts have power," he said. "Especially when the person acting knows that those acts are his

last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that

whatever one is doing may very well be one's last act on earth. I recommend that you reconsider

your life and bring your acts into that light."

I disagreed with him. Happiness for me was to assume that there was an inherent continuity to

my acts and that I would be able to continue doing, at will, whatever I was doing at the moment,

especially if I was enjoying it. I told him that my disagreement was not a banal one but stemmed

from the conviction that the world and myself had a determinable continuity.

Don Juan seemed to be amused by my efforts to make sense. He laughed, shook his head,

scratched his hair, and finally when I talked about a "determinable continuity" threw his hat to the

ground and stamped on it.

I ended up laughing at his clowning. 

"You don't have time, my friend," he said. "That is the misfortune of human beings. None of us 

have sufficient time, and your continuity has no meaning in this awesome, mysterious world.

"Your continuity only makes you timid," he said. "Your acts cannot possibly have the flair, the

power, the compelling force of the acts performed by a man who knows that he is fighting his last

battle on earth. In other words, your continuity does not make you happy or powerful."

I admitted that I was afraid of thinking I was going to die and accused him of causing great

apprehension in me with his constant talk and concern about death.

"But we are all going to die," he said.

He pointed towards some hills in the distance.

"There is something out there waiting for me, for sure; and I will join it, also for sure. But perhaps you're different and death is not waiting for you at all."

He laughed at my gesture of despair.

"I don't want to think about it, don Juan."

"Why not?"

"It is meaningless. If it is out there waiting for me why should I worry about it?"

"I didn't say that you have to worry about it."

"What am I supposed to do then?"

"Use it. Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or

sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you don't have time and let your acts flow

accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will

your acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a

timid man."

"Is it so terrible to be a timid man?"

"No. It isn't if you are going to be immortal, but if you are going to die there is no time for

timidity, simply because timidity makes you, cling to something that exists only in your thoughts.

It soothes you while everything is at a lull, but then the awesome, mysterious world will open its

mouth for you, as it will open for every one of us, and then you will realize that your sure ways

were not sure at all. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men."

"It is not natural to live with the constant idea of our death, don Juan."

"Our death is waiting and this very act we're performing now may well be our last battle on

earth," he replied in a solemn voice. "I call it a battle because it is a struggle. Most people move

from act to act without any struggle or thought. A hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act; and

since he has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if every act were his

last battle. Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a hunter has over his fellow men. A

hunter gives his last battle its due respect. It's only natural that his last act on earth should be the 

best of himself. It's pleasurable that way. It dulls the edge of his fright."

"You are right," I conceded. "It's just hard to accept."

"It'll take years for you to convince yourself and then it'll take years for you to act accordingly.

I only hope you have time left."

An excerpt from Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda

Ashley Madison

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.   

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

As always when one starts engaging in some new educational endeavor, for a while the fabric of reality begins to unravel itself in a particular way. The words in the textbook stand up, jump off the page and make their way into the streets. During the corona virus quarantine Eric Dodson, a professor at the University of West Georgia, uploaded all his Humanistic Psychology lectures onto YouTube. I had just completed After Socrates by John Vervaeke and had fallen deeply in love with Soren Kierkegaard. Who, after listening to Christopher Mastropietro wax lyrical about Kierkegaard, would not fall sweepingly into his arms? Mastropietro’s ability to loosely possess the English language with eloquence, grace and a hypnotizing cadence is exceptional. He is one of the best orators of our time. Once I emerged from the vertiginous whirlwind of Mastropietro’s Kierkegaard, and had begun to gather myself, the YouTube algorithm led me to Dodson’s work. And thus began my education on existentialism. 

Three weeks in, my day-to-day encounters with people, challenges, tasks etc. are all shrouded in an existential cloak. Existentialism has received such a bad rap that many believe that this cloak must be a dark and gloomy one, I haven’t found it to be so. Well, what existentialism does is to bring us face-to-face with reality and the nature of life. Reality is harsh, but when we stop running away from it through various numbing agents, distractions and addictions, and truly reckon with it, there is a freedom to be found there. A lightness in the heaviness and play in the seriousness. Reality accepted is a reality which releases and all the anxiety, fear, uncertainty, dread etc. don’t cling to the brief candle of our lives like poison ivy. 

Every morning, I walk to the gym, and on my way, I pass trees which I find myself reaching out to touch. There is something that I find soothing when I touch the texture of leaves. There are also thickets which I end up brushing up against. By the time I get to the gym or home later in the day, my jacket has gathered a glorious number of blackjacks and I spend the next 10 minutes of my day de-blackjacking (is that a word?) my fleece. That is the plant’s way of spreading its seeds, through other animals like me. Unfortunately, this particular human animal is indoors at day’s close, with the blackjacks ending up in the trash. Plants, especially weeds, are very crafty, so they may wind up in a place they can find root regardless of my actions. Anyway, this is how I sometimes feel when it comes to our existential angst, anxiety and fears. In our refusal to face reality, we gather these as we make our passage through life and end up spreading them to other people around us. They show up in our work, in our restless filled ‘rest’, spirituality, and colonize every aspect of our lives. Inadvertently, our attempts to flee reality only worsen things for us, and at an alarming rate at that. 

So here I was watching the Ashley Madison Netflix docuseries, and I began to observe its entire unfolding through an existential lens. Just a little bit of context, Ashley Madison is an online dating website for married people who have the desire to participate in extramarital affairs. Included in the service offered by Ashley Madison was discretion. Clients were under the impression that all their data would be secured. It wasn’t. The company was hacked, and a lot of client data was released onto the dark web. It was a big deal at the time because highly public personalities were implicated in the matter. It was a shit show, if you will allow me some french. I learnt a lot from the docuseries, in light of my current existential preoccupation, about others but mostly about myself.   

Lying to Ourselves

In conversation with one of my clients who has a bent towards the law being the daughter of a magistrate and the plan being to go into law herself in the near future, we had a discussion over statutory rape. A month ago, a 17-year-old girl posted a video on social media thanking her boyfriend for their four-year-anniversary gift (an iPhone 15). Turns out that the boyfriend is a forty-something married pastor from the East Rand. There was social uproar because if the math is mathing, then they started dating when she was 13. Black Twitter (now X) called for his arrest. 

My young interlocutor felt that this matter was black and white and that the pastor should be arrested because that is just the law. There is a famous musician in South Africa, Busta929, who is notoriously known for dating young girls and he has pretty much gotten away with it. Here is the thing, even if our legal system were practically what it theoretically purports to be, this would not put the slightest dent in curbing this behavior. Reason being this problem is cultural. It has been widely accepted and is deeply entrenched in black culture in particular. When I was in high school, everyone was dating a guy in varsity. Now that I think about it, I too was dating a guy in varsity at the time. It was dating in the most innocent of ways, an only holding hands type of thing, it didn’t escalate beyond that because my mother was nothing to be played with. She once caught me holding hands with him and both our lives were threatened, and she meant it. Lol. My mother objected to dating in its entirety, it did not matter whether the guy was a peer, older or younger; she just did not want me to date. The fact remains I was a minor in a romantic relationship with a guy who was a varsity track athlete. In Yizo Yizo, which first aired in 1999, Hazel (played by Nomonde Gongxeka-Seopa) dated a taxi driver. No one so much as batted an eyelid. When behaviors are a constrictor knot, the law is ineffective in undoing these impossible knots. No outside structure, particularly South African law enforcement, will be able to dismantle these behaviors. It has to happen from the inside out. When we cry foul on social media with our mouths and yet our right hands are behind our backs doing the very thing we are publicly protesting against, we are doing something worse than engaging in hypocrisy, we are engaging in self-deception.  

In the docuseries, self-deception is rife. For the most part, I noticed that people would engage in “morally reprehensible” behavior if there is the slightest chance that they will get away with it as long as they can still wear the mask of being a good husband or wife to their spouse and community. Most of us will steal money if we know we can get away with it. It isn't so much that we are honest people, it is that the perfect opportunity has not yet presented itself. Our honesty or faithfulness is contingent, and this contingency undermines the entire value enterprise. 

We have a CEO, Noel Biderman, who went on talk show after talk show with his wife, Amanda, repeatedly telling the world that even though they were in the adultery business, as a couple they were ‘happily monogamous.’ Meanwhile, Biderman is soliciting the services of barely legal escorts in the background. Then, we have Sam Radar, who portrayed the picture of the perfect, doting husband on social media platforms, and yet had been having trysts before and during his marriage with Nia. When Radar was first implicated in the scandal, he repeatedly lied to his wife about the extent of his clandestine activities. He had even made advances on one of Nia’s closest friends who as a result cut ties completely with Nia and her family. It wasn’t until the threat of undeniable exposure loomed did, he eventually come clean to Nia. It reminds me of a C.S. Lewis quote where he writes that it is no use saying you choose to lie down when you can no longer stand up. Nia, herself, engaged in self-deception by convincing herself that somehow what she did as a wife, could earn the faithfulness of her husband. She made sure that she carried out the duties of a great Christian wife. As if we can control anyone’s behavior but our own. Even our own behavior sometimes stymies us. We say that we won’t do something, then we end up right where we did not want to be. As Emeli Sande puts it in Heaven, “Oh heaven, oh heaven/ I wake with good intentions/ But the day, it always lasts too long.” The stoics remind us to separate the things we can control and the things we can’t control; other people belong in the latter category. We should rather adopt the posture of the humanistic psychologist, Carl Rogers, who wrote, “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” More on our response to other people later. 

For the most part, we assess each other according to behavior. We have rigged the game of life where behavior becomes the most salient thing. We do not go any deeper and it is about how we can outwardly convince other people we are who we portray ourselves to be. It is more important for us to appear honest or be perceived as honest, rather than being honest. We have this entire thing backwards, turning our lives into fodder for self- deception. The litmus test for the state of our lives, according to Tom Bilyeu, is how we feel about ourselves when we are by ourselves. Personally, this has quietened a lot of noise for me, and it has helped me come to terms with who I currently actually am and the values that I currently hold and be ok with it. Not as a static personality but accepting myself in the process of constant becoming.  

When it comes to behavior, the same behavior can stem from two different places. The obvious one is killing. You can kill someone in self defense or you can kill because “somebody gotta die” as that Lupe Fiasco song goes. Same behavior, different processes leading to the behavior. The existentialist Jean Paul Sartre introduces the concept of radical freedom in his writings, where radical is the word derived from the word meaning root. Behaviors are to be understood at the root or rather they should emerge from the root. The actions we take should be an exercise in radical freedom where we willingly choose them, and own them, regardless of the consequences. Sartre differentiates between what he calls “good or bad faith,” from whence behavior comes. It can come as an exercise in radical freedom or by blaming other people or making excuses. When discussing Kierkegaard, one of the points which Vervaeke and Mastropietro make is how Kierkegaard placed great emphasis on the “how” rather than the “what” of behavior. As we decide on our next steps, are we being faithful to the spirit or the letter? 

As we rounded up our conversation, we came to the realization that any true change can only be truly achieved at the individual level first, where the individual takes full responsibility for their actions and faithfully straps the Sisyphean weight of that responsibility to their back. It is the individual who ultimately chooses, who can no longer hide behind the skirts of the collective, if anything were to change. “We are old hands at denying the truth of ourselves, of turning our heads, of refusing to turn the telescope inwards,” (Ian McCallum). This is the only place where we can begin, inwards, not with other people, or society. It is within ourselves. Once we are able to clear away the webs of self-deception, we can really start living authentically. McCallum writes: 

Because we all have something of the hag and the hyena in us. We are all, in our own subtle ways, manipulators, conmen and we own a little bit of the beggar, too. We are pathetic, but we are also wonderful. And when we know this, when we recognize our inflation, or the scavenger, the conman, and the road-rage creature within us, then we can learn how to say yes and no to them.   

There is a story about how Diogenes the Cynic walked through the ancient Greece marketplace carrying a torch saying that he was looking for one honest man. Described by Plato, as a “Socrates gone mad,” he did this in an attempt to expose the hypocrisy and general dishonesty of how people interact with one another. Let us turn that lamp inwards and set it up in the clearing of our hearts to illuminate all our ways.

 

We have all interacted with the internet long enough to know that the internet does not forget. I bought an android phone a couple of days ago, and while setting up my gallery, a picture that I had taken more than a decade ago popped up on my screen. I had forgotten about the picture, but the internet has a long memory. Unnerving. With that being said, when we engage in self-deception, we also begin courting delusions. Both Biderman and Radar knew this about the internet when they pursued their duplicitous behavior but they still lied, to the bitter end. Self-deception removes us so far from reality that our judgments become unsound because they are based on a reality we’ve warped and essentially sucked out of our thumbs. Not that we should own our actions because of the looming risk of exposure but rather because they are ours to own. 

Vervaeke describes wisdom as the ability for us to attune ourselves to what life asks of us and to respond harmoniously. He also acknowledges self-deception as one of the greatest hindrances to the development of wisdom. Dodson points out that it is our addiction to our own self-importance that leads us astray. We think that we are so special, wealthy, beautiful, famous, privileged that reality does not apply to us. We are so sure that we are that much smarter than everyone else that we can pull the wool over everyone else’s eyes. We reduce other people to objects of manipulation and control. But the thing is, the sun shines on us all. The further we climb up the stairs of self-importance, the precipitous the fall when all delusions disapparate.

The antidote, according to Dodson, presents itself in three parts: cultivating humility, self-awareness, and courage. Our need for self-importance is our way of establishing some semblance of control, but control is an illusion. Life is characterized by uncertainty and imminent death, and we don’t actually know what will happen to us thereafter. We just don’t know and admitting that is difficult for most of us. All we can do is empty ourselves of the stories we tell ourselves, and approach life with palms upturned, and watch it unfold with wonder. Confucius wrote that the beginning of wisdom is calling things by their proper name. It is about seeing things as they really are, including ourselves. Self-awareness brings us back to shore when the tides of self-deception have dragged us too far in. A commitment to self-awareness will steer us clear of the advancing coastline. That commitment requires courage and so does moving forward in the face of reality at its harshest and most naked. It’s the Paul Tillich idea, that we need to muster the courage to be while the world shifts beneath our feet. Plato described self-deception as the worst form of deception; so, it seems the worst is the best place to begin.           

Hell is Other People

Season 1 Episode 4 of Being Mary Jane begins with a Bob Marley quote: “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just have to find the ones worth suffering for.” Marley points us to the fact that being relational is risky and that it is a risk we have to accept if we are to know others and be known by others. The deeper we are in a relationship, the higher the risk that when those people cause us pain, it is going to hurt like hell. It is no secret that the people who we are most intimate and vulnerable with, know where all our buttons are and which to push if they wish to detonate us. It is not just that other people know our depths but that from those depths, expectations rise to the surface. We expect those who love us to act in certain ways, to show up in particular ways and at other times to be able to read our minds and figure out our needs without us having to spell them out. We start creating our relationships in our own images and want our romantic partners, particularly, to fall in line. When people fail to live up to our expectations, which they inevitably do as we do theirs, the fires of hell start burning. Over a long enough timeline, our relationships become a spectacular inferno destroying us in unimaginable ways. And so, watching the docuseries, I felt the anguish as Nia’s story unfolded but I also felt the betrayal of a company that swore to keep its client’s data private. Anger bubbled within me when hackers decided to play God which led to people taking their lives. I felt all of these as a spectator, with no dog in the fight. I could only imagine the people who were living this incendiary mess. A large part of me agreed with Jean Paul Satre when he wrote that hell is other people. When the emotions subsided however, I recalled Dodson’s words that other people don’t cause us nearly as much pain as we cause ourselves. In Noname’s song Beauty Supply she raps, “New identity, same enemy… me.” Hell is usually ourselves. 

Even if, for argument’s sake, hell is indeed other people, what then is the alternative? Do we go off to some cabin in the woods like Ted Kaszynski and swear off people forever? Do we, as American psychologist Rollo May says, build up a stockade and refuse to let anyone in which also prevents us from participating fully in the lives of others. As someone who usually retreats into my interiority when life feels like Tekken 6 and I am really “being taught what fear is”, it is encounters with other people, a handful of friends, books, music that expand my consciousness and enrich me. Even if these were all to fade away, there would be God. As Saba asks in Photosynthesis, “how you lonely in a room with God?” The trinitarian God always entreats to relationship with others, to the practice and perfection of agape. Afterall, when Jesus went up the mountain to pray, He eventually came down.

In Alone with Others, Stephen Batchelor reminds us that our relationship with others is not an accidental, spatial occurrence, it is ontological. Being in relationship with others is fundamentally constitutive of who we are. This brings to mind that age old question of whether the tree that falls in the forest with no one perceiving its fall really falls? When we call to others and there is no one to hear our call, do we really even call out? Do we even exist? As bats echolocate with objects around them, we orient ourselves with the people around us. It is the way we know that we exist. The word “existence” has its etymology from the Latin words which directly translate to “standing out.” In a way, the tree falling in the woods does not exist because it does not stand out. Our individuality emerges from our collectiveness. 

Almost 8 billion people are currently roaming the earth, yet loneliness is at an all-time high. Many people are living the alternative, and it is just not working. Loneliness is not just characterized by isolation, but as Batchelor points out, there is another side to the loneliness coin. Loneliness is also characterized by a lack of participation. Regardless of the inner experience we may have, it “only achieves true completeness when it has been spoken,” (Batchelor). Our call has to be answered by others, necessarily so. Batchelor continues: 

No matter how profound an insight one may gain, as long as it stays inarticulately concealed within an introspective silence, it remains one-dimensional and incomplete. However inadequate our words and concepts may be in accurately communicating our experiences; it is only in the act of conceptualizing them to ourselves and subsequently articulating them to others that they finally come to completeness. Only through articulation can an inner experience realize a degree of dimensional complexity that fully harmonizes with our ontological constitution.

For better or worse, we are inextricably tied to other people. However, we do get to create the dynamic between us and others. In The Discovery of Being, May shares how he has seen that the fear of castration (losing one’s power) has been replaced by the fear of ostracism. This would make sense in this era of loneliness. People over participate relationally, which means that they lose themselves in others. They lose their distinctiveness to the homogenizing factor of conformity. They lose themselves in their marriages and all the different roles of their lives that they have mistakenly begun to identify with. In this relational scenario, our individuality is threatened, and is not accepted as a necessary component of the unity found in all relationships. 

At times an inclination to individuality at the cost of participation disrupts our existence, and at times our individuality is threatened with dissolution through submission, imposed or voluntary, to the will of another or to the force of an impersonal collective. (Batchelor)

In a way, while Nia had fully immersed herself in her role as mother and wife, Sam felt straightjacketed by his roles as father and husband. His infidelity was an internal cry for freedom, resistance against over participation. The weight of his responsibility was overwhelming, and he escaped it with transgressive acts. In a way, Sam was carried away by his preconceptions of what falling in love meant. It meant getting married, having children and providing for his family. When the reality of all of that congealed into a day-in-day-out existence, he balked. He projected his life forward into the future and could not reconcile it with reality. Sam acted out of bad faith by getting married and having children. Not that there's anything wrong with getting married and having children, but he approached his life as someone wearing the borrowed and ill-fitting robes of someone else. He didn’t soberly choose his life; he blindly followed an idea. The problem with wearing other people’s robes is that there will come a day when you take them off, leave them on the floor and step over them as you make your way out of the door. 

At times an inclination to individuality at the cost of participation disrupts our existence, and at times our individuality is threatened with dissolution through submission, imposed or voluntary, to the will of another or to the force of an impersonal collective. (Batchelor)

 

One of the ways we can negotiate the relational landscape in a way that affirms and in a way that does not oscillate between the two extremes of the relational continuum is by taking complete responsibility for our actions. It is by making decisions in good faith and accepting whatever comes with those decisions. When we accept full responsibility, then we can begin to unburden others. We can relieve them of the need to carry our existential burdens in the name of love. We can actually lie down in the beds we’ve made and get a good night’s sleep while we are at it. 

In I and thou Martin Buber articulates how we can perceive and engage with others in such a way that encounters with others are creative and personhood-building. When we instrumentalize people then we approach them in a “I and It” way, and we participate in an erasure of personhood. There is a way to say “I” in the spirit of ubuntu (I am because you are) that truly honors the other person. Buber expounds on this personhood constitutive I as follow: 

How much of a person a man is depends on how strong the I of the basic I-You is in the human duality of his I. The way he says I- what he means when he says I- decides where a man belongs and where he goes. The word “I” is the true shibboleth of humanity. Listen to it. How dissonant the I of the ego sounds! When it issues from tragic lips, tense with some self-contradiction that they try to hold back, it can move us to great pity. When it issues from chaotic lips that savagely, heedlessly, unconsciously represent contradiction, it can make us shudder. When the lips are vain and smooth, it sounds embarrassing or disgusting. Those who pronounce the severed I, wallowing in the capital letter, uncover the shame of the world spirit that has been debased to mere spirituality. But how beautiful and legitimate the vivid and emphatic I of Socrates sounds! It is the I of the infinite conversation, and the air of conversation is present in all its ways, even before his judges, even in the final hour in prison. This I lived in relation to man which is embodied in conversation. It believed in the actuality of men and went out toward them. Thus, it stood together with them in actuality and is never severed from it. Even solitude cannot spell forsakenness, and when the human world falls silent for him, he hears his daimonion say You.

This Socratic I cost Socrates his life. He had committed himself so faithfully to the “actuality of men” that he was willing to die for it. Authority had turned against him, but this wasn’t the match that set the fires of hell. Instead, he quelled what would have been inflammatory and riotous, and refused to turn his back on man. Loneliness was not on the cards for him, and his being alone did not prevent him from being with others in the Batchelorian sense. Sometimes, the way we uniquely participate in the world may drive us to solitude, this is okay. This doesn’t mean that we abandon our existential stances to drive out solitude, but we exercise what Albert Camus referred to as an existential defiance and embrace the solitude. Perhaps you may find some comfort in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke “You suffer, you say, because the people closest to you are distant: this shows that your world is beginning to grow vast. And if what’s near you is far, then how enormous your whole extent is, reaching all the way up to the stars.”

At the end of the day, when it comes to other people; your freedom is what you choose to do with what’s been done to you. You are absolutely free to be unaffected. You are absolutely free to run towards this freedom even if this spells death. As Satre puts it, “men are condemned to be free.”                

The Calculus of Felicity

When I was young, I learned very quickly that life isn’t fair. What took me quite a long time, too long to admit, to learn is that life is not about being happy. Everything I did was aimed at maximizing happiness or turning unhappiness to happiness which I truly believed was the whole point of this living thing. I felt life was about getting everything you wanted and worked hard for. It was about accomplishments, getting married to the dream guy, having two boys (non-negotiable, lol!) and living the “mama I made it” life. It didn’t help that, according to the church, being blessed meant having material possessions. In a way, there was a lot of Nia in me. It did not take me too long to be dissuaded from these notions though. Life, the great teacher.  

I’ve always been different to everyone around me. I thought differently and behaved differently as well and just stuck out like a sore thumb. This difference caused me a lot of pain and trying to fit in, and repeatedly failing at it, was one long saga. I wore my difference like a scarlet letter, ashamed of it. At some point, I befriended my difference, because I was tired of fighting it and it, incredibly, became my superpower. However, even though I had completely owned my difference, the pain was still there. Other people have a hard time dealing with difference, it makes them uncomfortable, and they don’t know what to do with it which usually means they push back on it. Before, the pain came from the inside (I was causing myself pain), this time the pain came from the outside (other people), but it was much easier to deal with. I would rather be at war with others than be at war with myself. Over time, the effect that other people have on me has decreased substantially. All this to say is that I no longer fought suffering by trying to wish it away, I made peace with the fact that suffering is just going to be a part of life. My thing then became about doing what I can to get through it, and each time making a concerted effort to not let it destroy any part of me or change me in ways that I do not wish it to change. 

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with the calculus of felicity which is also known as hedonic calculus. It’s actually pretty cool the way he has broken down the factors that drive our hedonistic decisions and actions. There are seven parts to the calculus: intensity (how intense the pleasure will be), duration (how long the pleasure will last), certainty (how sure we are that the pleasure will elicit pleasure), fecundity (how pleasure is affected by the repetition of the action), propinquity (proximity of the pleasure with regards to space and time), purity (the degree that the action is pure) and the extent (the number of people who will be affected by the pleasure.) 

Without even being completely aware of it, we engage in this calculus on a regular basis, and here you thought that mathematics wasn’t your thing. We have this idea that life is about scoring high on the hedonometer and yet we know how fleeting pleasure is, just like happiness. The pursuit of happiness only makes us more dissatisfied with our lives. It eludes our grasp each and every time. We spend most of our time in pursuit, never taking the time to enjoy what we do have. According to Kierkegaard, there are three stages of reality we can live in. The aesthetic stage is characterized by a focus on personal pleasure and individual experience. In this stage,we seek fulfillment through external experiences, such as art, beauty, or sensations. This is a life driven by passion and desire, where we seek immediate gratification without worrying about the consequences of our actions. This is where most of us have made a home. 

The ethical stage, on the other hand, is focused on the pursuit of moral values and principles. In this stage, we recognize our responsibilities and obligations to society and seek to live according to a higher ethical standard. This involves making difficult choices and sacrifices for the greater good, rather than indulging in personal desires. The ethical stage represents a move towards a more mature and responsible way of living.

Finally, for Kierkegaard, the religious stage is the highest and most fulfilling stage of existence. In this stage, we turn to faith and spirituality as a way of finding meaning and purpose in life. It involves a deep commitment to a religious belief system, as well as a willingness to surrender ourselves to a higher power. Through faith, we can find a sense of peace, fulfillment, and transcendence beyond the limitations of the material world.

While not all existentialists were religious, they did all agree on one thing. They all believed that life was about much more than being happy. Dostoevsky believed that to close ourselves off to the dark aspects of life is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is not about getting what you want, for that only makes you a prisoner of your pleasures. True freedom, which he calls our most advantageous advantage, is that we can choose anything that life offers us. Instead of choosing the things we like, that would be Maynard wine gums for me, we can choose something we don’t like, like that salty liquorice from Woolworths (barf!), for the sake of it. What this does is remind us that we actually have not given up all our power to our pleasures. Things like preferences are actually quite arbitrary in that we can consciously choose differently. We can learn to like other things or just let life surprise us. When we lean towards our preferences then we close ourselves off to certain aspects of reality. Existentialism calls us to experience life, the dark parts and the light parts, the things we like and those we don’t, the rational and irrational, happiness and suffering. 

In The Coolest, Lupe Fiasco raps, “I love the Lord, but sometimes it’s like that I love me more/ I love the peace and I love the war/ I love the seas and I love the shore.” Lupe acknowledges our contradictions and paradoxes which are a part of our human experience. He does this in a lot of his songs. He juxtaposes two extremes which widens our aperture of perception and consideration when it comes to human beings and opens up the conversation between these extremes and everything in between. In This is War by 30 Seconds to Mars, a similar theme can be picked up: 

A warning to the people/ The good and the evil/ This is war/ To the soldier, the civilian/ The martyr, the victim/ This is war/ It’s the moment of truth, and the moment to lie/ The moment to live and the moment to die/ A warning to the prophet/ The liar, the honest/ This is war/ To the leader, the pariah/ The victor, the messiah/ This is war

If there is one thing that existentialists and Christians believe is that life is war, and apparently so does 30 Seconds to Mars. It is a fight against being caught up in the winds of over-participation, avoiding the claws of non-being, and a fierce fight to contend with reality as it is and not run away from it. 

***

“Life is short. Have an affair,” goes the Ashley Madison tagline. Whenever we are reminded of the fleeting nature of life, there are two popular human responses. The first has to do with maximizing pleasure. We think of all the pleasurable experiences we’ve missed out on and seek to do right by them. Geez, we think, surely, I cannot die without seeing the majestic Egyptian pyramids or having a raunchy ménage à trois. Our response is a bucket list of experiences. On the other hand, we let loose the restraints of propriety. We think of all the things that we would have done if there were no penal consequences. We would lie, cheat, steal and even kill. There are people, very few of them, who when confronted with their mortality would choose to live their lives as they have been living. The life they are living is the life they should be living, and they are greatly satisfied with it. Their response would not be to have an affair with a stranger, but they would choose to look deeper into the eyes of those they have built a life with. The excitement and the thrill would be inconsequential, irrelevant even. These are people who are living life on their own terms, who have chosen and owned their choices. These are not people who need rescuing from their lives by a tagline or need to be poked and prodded to show up in their lives. These people are free.

Even when we have chosen to follow through on the Ashley Madison tagline and taken steps of embarking on an affair, we are soon confronted with a problem, who to choose? I personally have a hard time wrapping my mind around dating apps for a number of reasons, with one reason being the cataloging of human beings. Cataloging, in general, brings about the problem of choice. The more choices we have, the freer we think we are. Except the more choices we have, the more likely we are to question our choices once we have made them. We will keep second guessing ourselves particularly when the reality of our choices becomes apparent. “What if” becomes the soundtrack of our lives playing over and over again in the back of our minds. Perhaps we think the best way to overcome this problem is to keep our options open and spin plates. When we do this, there are certain depths of relating with other people that we will not have access to. We remain on the pleasure/consumption axis, not venturing further than the aesthetic stage. 

According to the existentialists, all reality inheres an action. We have to choose a path. We have to become involved. Commitment, as Dodson sees it, does not mean being rigid; it means being faithful to reality. When we make a decision, and along the way reality discloses itself in a way that would require us to make a different decision, then we do it. Commitment does not mean that we do not get to change our minds, it means that we own our decisions and whatever that follows as a result. Above all, action is required. 

The soul in its essence will say to herself: no one can build the bridge on which you in particular will have to cross the river of life- no one but yourself. Of course, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods ready to carry you over the river, but only at the price of your own self. In all the world, there is one specific way that no one but you can take. Whither does it lead? Do not ask but walk it. As soon as one says, “I want to remain myself,” he discovers that it is a frightful resolve. Now he must descend to the depths of his existence. (Friedrich Nietzsche)