I recently stumbled upon a casual conversation about existential crises in a Discord server I am in. You know, just completely normal conversation topic. It allowed me to take a moment to think about the sheer amount of time I have done nothing but think about “existential” concepts, especially in my younger years. It is kind of crazy to look back on it.
I distinctly recall trying to have conversations with my brother about these thoughts I was having in my middle school age. A specific memory of this is both of us, laying in the same bed at a relative’s house, late at night. I was thinking about the idea of consciousness. I asked him, “How do we know anyone else is really alive?”. He responded with something like, “because we can talk with people, and they have feelings.” I retorted with something like, “what if everyone is just robots? What if you are a robot that is just very good at acting like a human? What if I’m the only one that can actually think and you are just a robot programmed to say that? What if I’m just a robot and you are the only human?”. He went silent to think about it.
He is 2 years younger than me, and I definitely was asking him questions that were far beyond his normal comprehension. Trying to have these conversations made him bitter with me and made him think I was trying to be pretentious (though we would have used the phrase “smart aleck” at that age). Perhaps I was – I definitely remember thinking highly of myself when his school grades weren’t as good – but these thoughts were still questions my brain was generating and just handing off to myself, who at the time had no capability to handle them or even describe them properly.
I know now that the question I asked that night is similar to the though experiment of Philosophical zombies, and that these questions are absolutely nothing new or special. To middle-school me, though, these questions were just the tip of the iceberg for a rabbit hole of concepts that had no right to be in an immature person’s mind. I was already in therapy and such, and while I wanted to talk with adults about them, they were much more concerned with my day-to-day life and mental health. Honestly, they were right to be more concerned about those things, but I wish the closest adults to me – my parents – would have been able to comprehend what I was saying. I remember trying to have conversations about my mom about these things, even if I don’t remember exactly what the conversations were about. I could never get into the subject that I was thinking about like I wanted to. I just couldn’t communicate what questions were popping up in my head. There were productive conversations, but they always wrapped back around to stuff that was happening in my life, which wasn’t necessarily bad, just not what I wanted to talk about.
At one point, the consciousness questions did start to effect my mental health. I started thinking about senses – for example, what is consciousness like for a blind person – and came to the conclusion that existence itself is subjective. Of course, I wouldn’t have phrased it like that – knowing my vocabulary, I probably would have said something like “being alive is different for everyone”, which sounds much less serious and might as well just be a truism. You hear that, and think “well, duh”. But you think about the phrase “existence is subjective”, and you might start to have other thoughts, like, “what is consciousness like for other people?”, “how do I know if anyone experiences anything like I do?”, and perhaps most dangerously, “What is truth, and what is reality?”
I really had those thoughts and questions as a child, even if I didn’t have the correct words to describe them. And at the peak of my school-related depression, I could not avoid asking them. It was weird. I broke down crying several times with these heavy thoughts but could not get any kind of satisfactory answers to them, both because I didn’t know how to ask them and no adults in my life knew how to answer them.
The answers to all of these questions are, of course, “there’s no way to know”, “we can only know through the limits of communication”, and “there is no reason to believe that our senses are lying to us, and we should go about life with the assumption that everyone operates in the same reality”, respectively. These are obvious now, but not so back then.
One of these breakdowns and ensuing conversations resulted in me (unintentionally) asking what the meaning of life was. And, funnily enough, the answer I got was one that eased the burden of all of my questions even if that wasn’t the question I wanted to ask. The answer was, that the meaning of life is to simply,
Enjoy the ride.
This one stuck with me and still sticks with me. Seeking general contentment has been how I operate for a long time. There are a handful of different ways I do this – working towards my career, having a social life, consuming entertainment. You know, just living life in the modern era, in my own way.
I still have existential questions, but with much less frequency. Since I can communicate them much better now, it is much easier to find philosophical resources on whatever the question may be on the internet. I still think the idea of truth is an extremely important one that is difficult to pin down. But it’s not present in my headspace and doesn’t actively bother me like it used to.