There are moments in everyone's own life when they get frustrated and feel as if the whole world is against them. Even though in the context of a long lifetime many of these things are only minor in hindsight, in the present moment it just sinks in, sinks in, and it's hard to pull ourselves out of it, hard to struggle.
It's the same for everyone. Even the most rational person can get caught up in a quagmire of emotions. It's true for you, it's true for others, it's true for me.
Different people, at different stages of life, have anxiety, stress, emptiness, hopelessness that only they can understand....... The sorrows and joys of the world are not connected, so it's not that they don't exist, it's just that each person has to bear them independently.
So, when you feel difficult, you may want to think about: there is no "why me", you are experiencing, it is the world imposed on the whole group of human beings in the general predicament.
Everyone, from a certain point of view, is actually our partner and comrade-in-arms.
We may not be able to understand each other's pain, but we can understand the plight.
So why is it that this is a universal predicament that the world has inflicted on mankind?
I would like to ask you a question: what is the meaning of life?
You may know: life has no meaning. Existence precedes essence. We come into existence before we search for meaning and give meaning to existence -- that's the existentialist view.
But knowing this doesn't mean you can actually accept it.
What does it mean to accept that 'existence is meaningless'? It means that our entire lives are purposeless. We came by chance and will eventually leave by chance. And there is no one person, law, or set of laws that directs how you 'must' behave in this process.
In other words, what the world has given us is absolute freedom -- but is absolute freedom always a good thing? Maybe not. Sometimes absolute freedom may mean disorder, i.e., infinite possibilities. But life as an entropy-decreasing ordered body, this is inherently antithetical to each other.
Another consequence of absolute freedom is the relativity of values. Everything we do is really just following the rules of the game we have set for ourselves. It's like the kid building a castle on the beach -- we think it's valuable just because it's valuable in our eyes.
There is no subject beyond all objects to judge the value of its (and our) existence.
The combination of these two constitutes an 'existential crisis'.
It points to the absurdity of existence. Namely:
If existence has no meaning, then why do we exist?
If existence has no value, then where can we go?
But life must still be lived.
So the strategy of many people to combat the existential crisis is to anchor their meaning and value to a particular goal.
This goal, might be a job, a career, a family, an industry, a field ...... something like that. By focusing on this goal, we can visualize that our presence, dedication, and effort can make a difference, intervene, and influence the world in a precise and effective way.
This is feedback. It is effective feedback, so to speak, that becomes the fulcrum of our survival in this world.
But what is one of the most common problems we make in this process? It's this: we focus too much, and often magnify this goal infinitely, mistakenly believing that, in our lives, there is only one thing like 'it'. It is the only source of value and meaning in our existence.
This is a terrible thing.
When we anchor all of our values to one thing, all of our attention, then, is focused on it -- like a close-up, which I call the 'close-up effect'.
We would expect that all the behaviors we do, all the moves we make, will have immediate, expected feedback, so that we can get inside a virtuous circular loop.
But this is impossible. Everything is subject to surprises, and the more complex the system, the more likely it is that tiny perturbations will produce unforeseen results.
So, throughout our long lives, there are bound to be all sorts of surprises, big and small, that break expectations. And these accidents are especially easy to be magnified by our 'close-up effect', which in turn impacts the sense of value and meaning of our existence.
What is the most common? Loss of feedback.
We always have the thought that we want to control as much as we can of what we can control. When the goal we're anchored to, then, loses feedback due to normal fluctuations, it's easy to get caught up in uncertainty about the future, creating a huge sense of loss of control, which can lead to a cascade of negative consequences.