EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Searching for the meaning of life in your grey hair?

My friends are getting divorced, taking their children to university, living with chronic conditions, going to therapy, talking about therapy, no longer ashamed of grey patches on their heads or in their beards, and undergoing medical procedures that could either fix their latest biological setbacks or abruptly end their existence. Some are even mourning the loss of ugly pets.

Yet “just the other day” we were the undergrads they are now taking to campuses around the country. However, there is something about the ages of between roughly 35 to 45 that is a beautiful age gap in which to be.

As a precocious philosophy student, barely out of my teens, I thought I was entitled to have grand views about the meaning of life. After all, I could rehearse the philosophical moves of great thinkers in tutorials, term papers and the exams. But there truly is no substitute for life experience. I now thoroughly enjoy examining my stored theoretical knowledge in light of what the university of life has added by way of illuminating questions I had tackled with youthful zeal. Kudos to my philosophy teachers for not scoffing at the naivety of youth.

Existentialism is a philosophical movement or tradition that has helped me to make sense of my existence as I move through the world. The very meaning of “existentialism”, and who is and isn’t an existentialist, is subject to rich debate between philosophers.

Classic figures within this movement from the middle of the last century who many of us would have encountered, at least in passing, include, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, among many. There are a few strands in atheistic existential thinking in particular that help me grapple with the burden of existence. All these thinkers (including the ones who remained committed to religious beliefs) appreciated that the mere fact that I am alive creates a desire and need — specifically from my perspective rather than from some universal perspective — to make sense of my place in the world. No objective description based on the physical sciences can eradicate my need, flowing from and located in my consciousness, to make sense of it all. I am not, as a conscious being, reducible to my physical properties. Existentialism, in a sense, is a project of puzzling through the anxieties that come with language and (self-)consciousness.

Existentialism does not leave me stranded with an overbearing awareness that life isn’t inherently meaningful. What most of us would describe as the meaning of life, without giving the question serious thought, is really a rehash of what we were spoon-fed culturally, starting with family, societal traditions and even the church.

Now, however, the existential knowledge that I am an individual with radical freedom enables me to make meaning as I go along.  In so doing, I learn to live an authentic life, by which I mean one that is an expression of my most deeply held values and principles, arrived at through a process of self-creation, even if, of course, I cannot claim to be entirely free of the influences of social structures within which my individualism is situated and plays out.

The existential knowledge that I am an individual with radical freedom enables me to make meaning as I go along

I found existentialism to be quite quirky when I was younger. I enjoyed explaining it to non-philosophy friends as a kind of party trick. I did not feel it in my blood. It only made intellectual sense. It was coherent. It was deliciously disruptive of received “wisdom” and allowed me to challenge friends not yet comfortable with a full embrace of existential freedom, having been told what to think and feel since they — we — were born. But secretly, I don’t think existentialism was more than just a philosophy module for me. Well, look at me now. Ha. All of that has changed after experiencing modules from the university of life.

Existentialism lurks in your grey beard. Existentialism confronts you when you pop your first blood pressure meds. Existentialism stares at you when the mirror reveals zero returns on your hectic gym routine of the past few months. Existentialism sends you to a therapist’s couch where you reach for tissues you had sworn you would never reach for. Existentialism follows you out of your lawyer’s office after you have discussed your divorce proceedings. Existentialism looks at you from a loved one’s coffin being lowered into the earth.

I now move through life as an individual with a radical awareness that I experience illness, death, grief, anxiety, and various forms of alienation, alone, even if social relations such as great friendship and healthy familial relations can scaffold the journey. You cannot escape being embodied individually. You, and you alone, are in the Covid-19 ward bed — as I was — and no amount of well wishes on Facebook can change the I-sentences with which you experience and articulate the dread. It is deeply, even unbearingly, personal. Such is life. This you cannot know viscerally as a typical 18- or 19-year-old. Yet none of this is a morbid midlife awakening to the reality of meaninglessness.

The upside to the embrace of the radical freedom we each have — even if that freedom is socially situated and structurally constrained — is that we can begin to live authentically once we have internalised this existential insight. That is the simple and profound insight existentialists give us. I shared this with a very dear friend who had gone through a dark period after taking his liberal arts education so seriously that it led him to places to which he had not been ready to journey.

The upside to the embrace of the radical freedom we each have – even if that freedom is socially situated and structurally constrained – is that we can begin to live authentically once we have internalised this existential insight

He called me during the December break. I wasn’t sure if he was drunk or high, but he sounded, at any rate, somewhat melancholic. It is one of those calls you get that, once you have answered it, you know instinctively it requires of you to listen, to stay on the line, and to be present with the person who has reached out.

My friend has two characteristics which normally would be praiseworthy but can be bad for your health. He is both razor sharp and relates what happens in class to his own life and to society. University, for him, was not about intellectual masturbation. It was personally transformative. This, in one sense, makes him an ideal student, as another friend of mine said when I once described to her what had happened. But the circumstances were not quite so endearing. He had done brilliantly as a philosophy student, and one of his modules had led him to debate with himself the rational basis of his theism. He had gone to university excited to fulfil God’s plans for him. His life’s meaning was bound up with the wishes of the God he had served all along.

Now, his intellect had led him to doubt the veracity of most of his religious beliefs, the metaphysics of Christianity in particular. Most philosophy students would be OK with this, by the way, because they can separate the academic study of philosophy of religion from personal praxis. Not so for my friend. If he doubted his God in a philosophy seminar, it was definitely going to lead him to have an existential crisis in his own life. That is why he ended up calling me, melancholic and scared of suicidality: If God must be chucked out of the window, what reason will he have to wake up in the morning? After all, he was a hardworking student, in large part because he did not want to let God down. God played an organising role in his psychological structure that was core to his identity, core to his life’s purpose. I found myself listening to him, speaking into these personal anxieties, very late at night during a December break when most students — including his brilliant peers — would have been partying the night away.

He returned to Johannesburg before his next academic year was due to begin, and we met in Rosebank to break non-biblical bread. I had persuaded him to hit the pause button on the anxiety until back here. I told him, in essence, that the freedom that comes with letting go of tying the meaning of your life to some deity’s plan is that you can be the authentic author of your own life. I pushed my luck further, making a case also for why it is, in a real philosophical sense, emotionally and morally pathetic to defer deep, personal, existential questions of meaning to an authority figure outside your own self. Instead of feeling empty, I suggested, he should fill the intellectual and emotional void left by his flirtation with agnosticism and atheism by seeing it as an opportunity to fully embrace his own self that had, by virtue of his upbringing, been relegated to taking instruction from God via parents and elders. Our conversation was far more sumptuous than the Ocean Basket platter I had ordered.

Years later, my friend is very much an adult in the grip of living — living is hard — but without a collapse into meaninglessness. Interestingly, he did not, and never needed to, abandon Christianity entirely, but was able, for the first time perhaps, to forge a relationship with his friends from his religious communities he had previously inhabited on terms that were more truly his rather than received. Existentialism is not anti-institution nor anti-religion. It is simply about freely choosing life forms that resonate most deeply with you. You could, for example, choose to reject the metaphysics of much theism while embracing some religious communities, such as the productive political role that liberation theology had played across parts of the world.

Death is more certain than taxes. That fact does not frighten me. The very possibility of living intentionally is animated by the fact that we aren’t immortal. The desire to live meaningfully would be weaker, I suspect, if we didn’t have a guaranteed expiry date. Limited time requires best use, for most of us, of that limited time. The trick is to see the upside of our temporary sojourn — an invitation to embrace our radical freedom and to live authentically — rather than to be crippled by our mortality. This means the next time you are confronted by ageing — another grey hair, needing an afternoon nap, staring at your dad bod in the mirror, sagging boobs — simply smile, and take it as a reminder to make your own meaning for the rest of that day rather than waiting for Godot.