Consider a few of the things I did during the 24 hours before beginning to write this article. I watched an hour-long episode of a TV drama my friends had recommended, long after it became clear it wasn’t one for me. I spent twenty minutes replying by email to a sort-of-friend who, if I’m honest, doesn’t play a particularly important role in my life. And I wasted the usual hour or two on social media. I’ll stop there, because this list is exceedingly dull – which, in a way, is the point: I used my precious time in some notably half-hearted ways. And at the risk of giving offence, I’m willing to bet that you did too.
Yet as multiple philosophers and other wise minds have noted, there’s something fascinating going on here: since I’m going to die, and I know I’m going to die, why on earth would I spend any time on so many things I cared about only moderately? Why do I act as though time wasn’t scarce for me? Ponder the matter, and you might begin to agree with the character in the Mahabharata, the 200,000-line Sanskrit epic, who calls it the most wondrous thing in the world that “hundreds and thousands of living entities meet death at every moment, but foolish living beings nonetheless think themselves deathless and do not prepare for it.” Seneca the Stoic makes a similar point in On the Shortness of Life, chiding his fellow Romans for acting as though they had all the time in the world – when they knew all too well that they didn’t.
It’s absurd, when you think about it. But also terrifying, as anything involving death tends to be. Which is probably why we so rarely think about it.
Indeed, one way of understanding the entire tradition of psychology that originates with Sigmund Freud, and his disciple-turned-rival Carl Jung, is that our personalities are shaped around an effort to deny the truth about the human situation – not merely about our limited quantity of time, but also our limited control over how it unfolds, over other people, and over our own emotional lives. In the words of the therapist Bruce Tift, we exert extraordinary effort in the attempt not to consciously participate in what it feels like to be “claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality”. Our condition is an inherently limited one – yet we’ll do almost anything not to fully face up to that.
Many behaviours that might otherwise be hard to explain begin to make more sense when viewed this way: as efforts not to feel, on an emotional level, the truth about life as a limited human being. Commitment-phobia? That’s just the yearning to feel limitless – to avoid the reality that committing to one relationship inevitably means repudiating others at least for now (and repudiating the freedoms of singlehood, too). Procrastination? That’s often the desire to avoid the fact that starting a project means doing it imperfectly; it’s far more pleasant not to start, and continue to wallow in the fantasy that when you do get around to it, sometime in the future, you’ll do it flawlessly.
Or take my personal version of all this: for years, I harboured an obsession with personal productivity techniques that, as I later came to understand, amounted to much the same thing. It was an attempt not to feel limited by pursuing the illusion that, any day now, once my systems were in place, I’d be so efficient as to be capable of anything and everything.
If all this denial made us happy, it might not be so bad: after all, we shouldn’t assume there’s some inherent virtue in facing painful truths, just for the sake of doing so. But it doesn’t. Instead, it drains the value from life. In seeking to deny reality, the commitment-phobe denies himself the rich experience of a relationship, while the procrastinator denies herself the rewards of bringing her work into the world, however imperfectly. And by privileging efficiency over all else, my productivity fixation made me busier and busier, because the more I could do, the more I then felt I ought to do.
These kinds of behaviours, falling under the broad psychoanalytic label of ‘neurotic’, are “always a substitute for legitimate suffering”, Jung famously wrote. Yes, the experience of facing reality involves suffering. But it’s suffering that is legitimate – that is part of the proper response to confronting our true situation. And so to embrace it, even a little, is to live more authentically, with a sense of meaningfulness that’s worth vastly more than the cheap comforts of emotional avoidance.
All of which helps explain why the art of ‘acceptance’ – despite having become a self-help cliché – is both so important and so difficult. Acceptance is sometimes condemned as an overly passive attitude, as if it entailed resignation in the face of undesirable circumstances. But true acceptance isn’t a matter of agreeing with your current reality, for example by forcing yourself to remain in a toxic relationship or giving up on efforts to fight social injustice. Instead, it’s the arguably far harder matter of being willing to face the fact that things are as they are in the first place – and of not choosing the easier path of denial.
Far from being passive, this kind of acceptance – accepting the truth of our situation as it stands – takes guts. And far from being antithetical to the project of improving ourselves or the world, it’s actually a vital precondition for doing so. “We mistake acceptance with settling, or being OK with a position we’re in that we don’t like,” observes the American coach and writer Catherine Andrews. “Not at all. Acceptance [is] Step Zero in actually changing something… You can’t change what you don’t first accept and acknowledge.”
And there’s a merciful irony at the end of all this, which is that to whatever extent we can face the truth of our limitations, they cease to become so much of a problem: the lion’s share of the unpleasantness, it turns out, comes not from the sheer fact of being limited, but from our struggles against those limitations. As the Zen teacher Mel Weitsman liked to say, “our suffering is believing there’s a way out”. It’s primarily the idea that things ought to be otherwise – that we ought to have unlimited time or be able to dictate how events unfold – that makes it so uncomfortable to face the fact that we don’t.
But why ought they to be otherwise? Why think of, say, our limited time as an affront – as if we were entitled to immortality, and are somehow being denied our rights – instead of marvelling at the fact that we get any time at all?
It’s not easy to hold on to this insight. (If it were, I’d never waste an hour on an uninspiring TV show again.) But whenever I glimpse it afresh, I’m reminded that the truth about being alive isn’t really so bad – and immeasurably preferable to the only alternative.
