There is a pandemic of existentialism amongst our generation. I fell prey to it at around fifteen when I started wondering why I existed and whether my life had any intrinsic value. From then on, the million-dollar question of ‘what is the meaning of life?’ became a personal favourite. On separate counts, it’s lonely to be existential, and it’s lonely to be young. The combination of the two did not exactly make for the time of my life. It is heavy to incessantly wonder why you exist, and why you should continue to exist as just one of billions of other ‘ordinary’ people passing through this earth.
From the various conversations I have had in my twenty years with people from all backgrounds, ages and walks of life, it seems the question of existence is one that transcends where you’ve grown up and who you are. Perhaps the pandemic of existentialism is not exclusive to our generation but is the human condition. Time and again, common ground can be found with the most unlikely people in a shared realisation that somewhere deep within us, there is a devastating longing for a connection to something bigger than ourselves. For there must be something, or else there is nothing. Blessed are we with the curse of existential thought.
We search high and low to make sense of ourselves, to have a reason to wake up in the morning. We search for something to guide us through each day, to show us how to live, to be kind, to love ourselves, to give meaning to our lives. If there does turn out to be a purpose to life, I should think that it would be to find what this thing is for every one of us. Though I still often wonder if this ‘thing’ can ever be found, this reason to live, the filler of the void. But having played with nihilism once, I would not recommend it. It is not a sustainable way to live or think. So, back to existentialism it was – there must be a purpose to life, for there cannot be nothing, I just haven’t found it yet.
We young people, constantly subjecting overstimulating ourselves, have a particularly glaring void within us. With the joys of modern technology, we can turn away from our thoughts and plaster over our emptiness with distraction after distraction for as long as we want. But the cry of that void doesn’t go, even if it is silent for a while. That cry for joy, for fulfillment, for that reason to wake up morning after morning with peace in our hearts. Though we are fooled into thinking it is happiness we want, since everything now is centered around short-term gratification. We want good grades, we want to love ourselves, we want new clothes, we want to be seen as good people, we want to go to that party, we want to travel, we want to meet new people. We want to do these things because, yes, they do make us happy. But happiness is fleeting where it is not underpinned by a contentment with Being and a greater meaning to our actions.
I think young people are growing increasingly aware of this, hence the boom in ‘spirituality’, which unfortunately and increasingly evokes an image of yoga-doing, green-juice-drinking vegans – all due respect to them. From my experience with it, in meditating, writing, prolonged and intense introspection, I found there to be something unsatisfactory. As those days passed, I reflected that my experience with it had been almost purely a self-pursuit. As is common with followers of this undefined Western ‘spirituality’, it felt like a practice I largely crafted myself after cherry-picking from various books, podcasts, and videos I had watched in a deep dive on the subject. When I began practising it, the novelty and serenity certainly brought me a deep sense of peace I had never before experienced in my life. But it wore off, and eventually, I came to see it had just been about me. It allowed me to withdraw so deeply into myself that I could put up a barrier between myself and the world around me. I did this so I could ‘heal’ in peace, to become a better version of me for me.
To disclaim again, I speak from personal experience and by no means underestimate the power of spirituality in bringing lasting peace to others. I bring this experience up merely to highlight the complexities of it, in a recognition of that there are a variety of strands, practices and beliefs within it. I myself, like many others, just adopted a new age, undefined notion of what I thought it was, and perhaps it failed me just as much as I failed to understand it. Regardless, I had nothing dogmatic to follow, nothing keeping me accountable, and eventually it stopped serving me. In reflecting on why, I increasingly came to think it was this exact lack of accountability and dogma on how to live which meant it was unsustainable for me. The progression from these thoughts led me to consider different belief systems altogether – this time, religion.
And now, at 20, I have begun going to church.
I was not raised Christian, and I did not go to a Christian school. I have grown up comfortably atheist, and unquestioningly so. There has nevertheless always been something about Christianity that appealed to me on an unspoken level, from the limited exposure I have had in going to church a handful of times. I am aware of the fact that I am likely drawn towards Christianity now simply because it is the one I grew up having the most exposure to. I am still debating whether it is right to pick up a new faith out of convenience and familiarity, or whether I should delve into another religion and explore all of them before choosing one. Though this is a vague goal I have had for years, and is one entirely impossible to complete at this stage of my life any time soon. I then wonder whether it is insulting to choose Christianity out of ‘convenience’, and whether using the term ‘choose’ at all is disrespectful, in an awareness of sounding like I’m online shopping.
I then wonder if it was selfish that I was going, because I wanted direction, I wanted purpose. I wonder whether it is self-seeking and centered to go to church for yourself and your own benefit, rather than out of a pre-existing belief in God. But I question whether it can ever be truly selfless to take up a new religion as an adult. Speaking with others at church, I am coming to terms with the fact of this not being true. Being able to meet a community of people who will encourage anyone to be there regardless of why, and who are so willing to open their ears to my questions has been a blessing. Whatever your motives for appearing for the first time are, you are welcome. And to rationalise my self-scrutiny further, I took from these conversations that it was perhaps out of my excruciating, 20-year-long desperation for guidance, purpose, and solution to the void, that He finally called upon me with open arms.
These considerations aside, highlighted only to reveal the self-scrutiny that accompanies the uncovering of a new way of living, I have turned to Christianity. I have done so also because of a long-standing admiration for the Christian friends in my life, and for the way that they carry themselves through their lives with such a deep capacity for love, faith, and direction. Religion in this way seems to provide something which the other self-pursuits do not; a) direction towards a defined higher Being, b) belief in the afterlife, and c) a fixed community.
At the same time, I feel as though my entire life teachings, from my upbringing and education, to family and friends, have geared my thinking to be entirely against the capacity for believing in God. And to top this off, as a now history student, I am growing into the perfect child of the Enlightenment’s secular and rationalist legacy. My degree taught me to scrutinise sources until you cannot any longer, which has made the Bible difficult for me to come to grips with in regard to accuracy and substantiation, the two backbones for historians’ work. I retain doubt in putting all my faith in something that cannot be fact-checked, says the atheist born in me, and I have been led throughout the course of my life to the belief that objective truth cannot exist. But I am now beginning to call this into question. I am trying, with admitted extreme difficulty, to call into question what I thought I already knew about the world and its creation, as well as my staunch belief in the ‘impossibility of truth’.
I am yet to reconcile with my perceived dogma of Christianity, and I’m still not sure I entirely believe in God. But friends from church have listened to my considerations, heard my doubts, answered my questions, and still welcomed me in. They kindly gifted me the gospels as an entry point to the Bible, and reassured me that all one can ever do in uncovering the truth of Christianity is to read, research and talk until that truth either reveals itself, or your capacity for believing fades away.
I don’t know yet if my capacity for faith runs deep enough to live always and only by the word of God, and to believe it as absolute truth, but if I stop going now I will never know. My knowledge is still too limited for me to come to a judgment yet. Therefore, I plan on continuing to read, continuing to go to church, to ask questions and press my existing beliefs in order to see whether I come to this outcome. And I know that if I don’t, that is okay too. I am learning not to shy away from bigger questions in life, and from belief systems just because they might challenge what I thought I already knew. If all fails with faith, I will continue to expand my worldview through other pursuits, I will continue my hobbies, continue to travel, continue to meet new people. In doing so, I hope I may then come across purpose. Perhaps I will find something to be true.
Photo link (Melancholy 1894, Edvard Munch)