Fear Is The Key

When I was a child, I was a terrible student and the subject that I would flunk, time and again, was mathematics. I was, however, also curious and had this inkling to understand rather than believe. I wanted to know how we got here. The ontological absurdity of life started bothering me even when I was a child. I would gaze up into the night sky and try to imagine how far are the stars from one another even when they are in one constellation. And then I would gaze beyond and gasped with awe at the thought that the black background that I can see is basically an empty nothingness stretched beyond anything we could conceive as eternity. This thought of us living on a tiny piece of rock moving in an endless void seemed so absurd compared to our daily lives with meanings and beliefs that it, kind of, fried my brain or whatever was there inside my skull. This sense of dreadful absurdity was again a sense of relief every time after my term exams I was anxious. In the same line of thought, I felt that our existence, floating in the complete nothingness, is so absurd that any meaning or value or priority or even necessity we associate with our lives are equally absurd in the face of this cosmic absurdity be it flunking math paper. This was my spontaneous response to the anxiety during childhood. Later, I realized that fear... is the key...

Growing up, the first thing I realized was that we cannot wait for the entire universe to reveal itself and then build up our social values, top down, in line with the metaphysical nature of the universe. Our social order is also a metaphysical mechanism called evolution that works in a synchronous way with the universe... more like fractal patterns. I realized that like our biological system, our social system has also been shaped by natural selection which is a cohesive force in line with the cosmic absurdity. I gradually realized the importance of us a product of social dynamics, of emergence. That the values that we develop are like the tools we create; they give us a relative control over the chaos the indifferent universe throws at us. They help us coordinate and make existence possible. And as Stanislaw Lem once explained in one of his short stories, no matter how momentary or figmentious we or our existence is it doesn't make our suffering an iota less. And that's how I understood the importance and the constructive capacity of fear and anxiety in shaping us as a species and as an individual to exist in a universe seemingly indifferent to existence. Anxiety is the value we attribute to anything that we consider important. Without our relative sense of importance, we would not be able differentiate one thing from the other. In such a condition, any sense of meaning, even in the line of pure subjectivity, is meaningless.

The popular quest has always been to get rid of the pain. But what evolution taught us is that pain is probably the most important tool for survival. It helps us understand what's harmful for us so we can respond with a fight or a flight... pain...fear...anxiety...negative feelings and memories are paramount for us to navigate our life across the whole buffet of sharp edges life has to offer.

I think the key take away here is not to fight the anxiety nor to be anxious about being anxious. Fight, instead the cause of anxiety. Anxiety is just the fire alarm... don't let the sound of it drive you crazy... don't try to rip it off the wall. Focus instead to extinguish the fire...