Yeah I know, this sounds dramatic. It kinda is.

I’ve had this feeling quite a lot in my recent adulthood. Feeling like the world was closing in on me. Even recently.

And the weird part is that at certain points in my life, this may have motivated me to become unstuck. To make the world less likely to close in around me. At times that may have looked like me working even harder at whatever I needed to work at. Sometimes that meant I would try to be clever about my situation and get around it. Here’s the thing. It worked.

… up to a point.

You may see what I am getting at here. The problem is that this feeling kept returning. That the world is closing in on me. Maybe it was for one situation, or maybe it was for another. It doesn’t really matter. It just kept coming back.

And every time it would come back, it would eat away at me a little more. Bit by bit, more and more. And of course, I would work hard to become unstuck, or tried to be clever about my situation. And each time it required more and more effort.

Once I would navigate myself out of one disaster, I would no longer be running on adrenaline. I wouldn’t be in survival mode anymore. And once that happened, well. I would be down for a while. Burnout. And that burnout would last longer each time I had to shovel myself out of a situation, or put in effort to avoid something when I wasn’t ready. After a while I could see the trend. It would get worse each time.

I needed to do something each time. And that was precisely the problem.

The Need ¶

I needed to do something. Each time. Need. Neeeeeeeed.

I can say now that I don’t need to do anything. Not write this blog post. I don’t need to pay my bills. I don’t need to make money. I don’t even need to eat food. But as you might be asking yourself, well, don’t you want these things?

Yes. Absolutely. Unbelievably yes.

You may ask, well, if you want to do it, and you need to do it, what is the problem? It’s the need. Don’t worry, I’ll explain. But first I need want to explain something else first in order to comprehend what I am truly getting at.

I came across one of John Vervaeke’s ^{(UoT Department of Psychology, if that matters to you)} lectures^[1], called “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” at one of the most absurd periods of my life^[2]. It’s a fantastic set of lectures targeted at a general audience.

John speaks about a topic which I think is sorely underappreciated by western society. In fact, he speaks of many. But one of the topics which managed to have stuck with me the most is what he described as the two modes of existence.

1. The mode of being.
2. And the mode of having.

Take a guess which one most people are predominantly in all the time. You’re (probably) right. It’s the mode of having. How can you tell if you’re in the mode of having?

Well, one good way is to tell if you feel like you need something. Have you ever said to yourself: ****ing hell, I need to do this (or else). Congratulations, you are thinking of things from the mode of having. You need to HAVE the completion of something. You need to HAVE something out of your way.

A common response to learning about this is attempt to reduce the need for having. This is good. But beware, you may think you’re making meaningful changes without realizing that nothing has really changed.

Ok then! - you may say. I’ll just become a minimalist! Easy! I’ll drop all of my possessions, live with minimal baggage. I’ll be happy. Well, not for the wrong reasons you wont.

The Minimalist Trap ¶

As far as I can see it, there are two forms of “minimalists”. Lets look at this in the form of a dichotomy.

1. You have the minimalist that just is.
2. And then you have the minimalist who is focusing on being a minimalist.

Which one is thinking from the existential mode of having? Now that I’ve pointed it out, you might have intuitively caught on to it. It’s #2.

Now you may be asking: well, isn’t that how you become a minimalist? You focus on it? Not exactly, but that’s not to say you can’t eventually end up as #1 through the path of #2. But something critical needs to change before that can happen.

The trap with #2, is that even though the person is attempting their hardest at “being” a minimalist, they are more-so focused on having the aesthetic of a minimalist. It’s about having the aesthetic. You tried to escape the having by being, but instead you found yourself still thinking about having. You’ve been fooled.

How do you escape the trap? By being- intensely. Here’s a hint. You cannot rationalize your way to the being mode of existence. You just are, you become.

You may have heard people speak about meditation. Modern self-help advice is wrong in many ways, but it gets this one thing right. If you have ever felt a certain peace by practicing meditation, you might know what the mode of being is. That is how you invoke it.

But for those of you who never have experienced what I speak of in meditation: you know of this feeling too. You just may not have experienced it in a while.

Flow ¶

Have you ever worked on something you enjoyed so much that it took over you? Focus came so naturally because it was something that mattered to you? Maybe you wrench on cars. Maybe you make music. You play guitar. Maybe you sing. Maybe you do programming on projects that fulfill you. Sometimes, when you work on these things, everything just comes so naturally.

I want you to think about this state of mind. Were you rationalizing? Were you thinking of about YOU in YOUR STATE doing work? Let me rephrase. Were you thinking about the state of mind you HAVE? If you were in flow, the answer is no. You had an experience where something meaningful somehow just happened to come out.

If that doesn’t work, I want you to think back about when you were a kid. Think about times where you were running out on grass, playing ball, or frisbee, or whatever. Or even recently, for that matter. Were you thinking about your running? Were you thinking about your hand movements? Probably not. You were probably locked in.

I want you to think hard about the state of mind you felt. Try to feel it again. Keep that in the back of your mind.

You can invoke this feeling whenever you want through what is understood as meditation. I want to suggest something that helped me understand this state of mind when I first really needed it. I won’t ask you to close your eyes. Just to do some dishes.

Scrub the Dishes ¶

In another absurd period of my life, I had to learn a primitive form of the mode of being. I was really upset. At that time I couldn’t get rid of certain thoughts that were in my head, they were truly dragging me down. Distracting me from the good things in my life. I tried to think my way through them, but somehow it wasn’t helping me. In fact, it was doing the opposite. So instead of thinking them away, I focused on removing all space in my head for the thoughts. My logic here was: well, if these thoughts keep haunting me, then I will make sure there’s no room in my head for them.

So I began doing the dishes. And I scrubbed. And scrubbed. I filled my head with the scrubbing. Each scrub was deliberate. Each movement. I paid attention to every detail. I filled every last cubic millimeter inside my virtual brain space with mundane scrubbing. The feel of the sponge. The water escaping the sponge each time I scrubbed. The abrasive side of the sponge slowly removing some food from the plate. I was aware of every detail. And in that moment I realized something. This was helping me so much more than thinking my way through the the problem I was facing ever did.

Some problems are not problems that can be solved with rational thinking. You cannot rationalize your way through everything. This was one of those situations.

You see, in that moment, I stopped thinking about how I neeeeeeeeeded to solve that problem. Instead, I focused on my experience. I was just experiencing. And eventually, I found that problem almost resolving itself.

Experiencing = mode of being.

The Lie ¶

Now we get to the real part. The lie. Here it is:

You have responsibility in life. Get a degree, get a good job, get married, have kids. You have a responsibility to society. **** you if you think otherwise. - The advice which happens to be a lie.

Here’s the thing. You don’t. It’s garbage advice.

These things are motivating. Being told sternly that you have an important role to play and YOU WILL play it and learn to enjoy it can certainly be motivating. But it is the same motivation which I spoke of at the beginning of the article. It works.

… up to a point.

It fails when your effort is not good enough. When all of it is not good enough. When you know that you’ve given every last inch of yourself, and yet things still seem to be getting worse. You start noticing a pattern.

But most of all, it takes away your agency. You are expected, therefore have no choice, to do these things. It’s in the framework of our social interactions. It’s in the framework of the filling out of our tax returns. It’s either do that, or be a lowlife. Or stated differently: have the status of a lowlife. There it is again. The have.

You must HAVE these things. You must. HAVE. HAVE a job. HAVE a marriage. HAVE a degree. HAVE an education.

Look. These are important things. If you think I am not advocating for these things, you have misunderstood the message I wish to portray.

I am going to appear to contradict myself now. These are real responsibilities, IF and ONLY IF you want them. But your responsibility isn’t to society. It’s to your life experience. That’s it. The experience. Nothing more.

Anything else just comes as a result of your responsibility to your life experience. Your responsibility is to attempt to spend as much time in that first (being) mode of existence for as much time as you possibly can.

You may find that responsibilities, things which you need to do no longer haunt you. Ironically, it can make the things you neeeeed to do much easier to face and do. It can make it easier to cross those things off the list. On the _(irrelevant) exterior, it can make people think you are taking your responsibility to society more seriously. But they’d be wrong. It’s not about society. It’s not about the rules. It’s about your experience. You do everything enthusiastically because you want to experience a good life. You have subverted the lie, and lived a better life for it.

This freed me from the feeling of life closing in from around me. Because life was telling me what I needed. I instead chose to focus on what I want to experience. Even when those may appear to be the same thing.

Hopefully this helps you, the reader, figure some things out. I can’t promise you that it’ll make sense right away. But I can promise that effort put towards attempting to understand this topic does pay off.