Modern Problems

I wish I wasn’t so easily disheartened. The smallest inconvenience or observation can spin me into downward, existential dread. I’m fixated on and discouraged by the negatives – the stress, difficulty, and futility of life. Even though I have it so much better than most people who have ever lived, I’ve born the weight with far less panache. I’m lonely, tired, sad, and angry all the time, and it doesn’t make me special because it’s just the human experience.

Maybe this is a product of the times: mental health awareness, systemic discontent, nihilism, and self-obsessed overthinking are in the air. Every era has its sins and these are ours. I wish we could be free from them all, but there will always be something. We carry the burden we’ve been given and we live through. Our victory and our revenge is not in shedding the Sisyphean weight, but in seeing it to the end. 

I wish I wasn’t always comparing where I am in life to where I want to be. I wish I could be present and enjoy the moment for what it is in gratitude and wonder. But I’m distracted by comparison – comparing my current circumstances to my desired circumstances. Especially when I see so many who seem to have what I want.

Which is not to suggest that I know what I want. I’m disillusioned with external circumstances like money and fame; they can never fill whatever gaping hole sits in the human soul. Happiness is too anemic. Significance and impact are too elusive and unknowable. Contentment is not enough and ambition is untrustworthy. At our core, we all want something like purpose and love. I know I have far more of this in my life than most people, but it’s not enough. How much more do I need? I see purpose and love in the lives of my family, and heroes, and friends, and so many people, but I can’t see it in myself. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. 

It’s not just me I feel sorry for. I wish life wasn’t so bad for the majority of people. The waste in human potential and the sheer vastness of preventable suffering is staggering. Yet I know my jealousy for those at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid is greater than my compassion for those at the bottom. I am a part of the System, and whether the good we produce outweighs the bad we perpetuate, I don’t know. 

Death is the constant. I am always aware of the looming, imminent suspense. I don’t like the idea of being unable to create or finding myself with no more opportunities or potentialities. But I look forward to the release, the trip across the river, and the dawning of what comes next. 

There is more to be said, but there will always be more to say. I lock myself in my room and purge myself, spinning poetry out of confusion, but when I’m done, I am still confused. If I can just get to the bottom of this and straighten it out once and for all in my mind, I could move on and live. But the Hydra keeps growing heads and I’m running out of time and leaving too much unsaid, undone, and unlived. 

I don’t want to take spiritual shortcuts or philosophical copouts or wrap everything up with a bow so vague it doesn’t mean anything, but poetic enough that no one notices. God knows I’ve done that often enough. But I need resolution and the kind of hope that raises one higher than however far into the Abyss I’ve rappelled. 

I’m reminded of the words of Leonard Bernstein: “This will be our reply: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” We do our job. We walk the path God has given us, without illusion or despair. And we trust that it matters. I may not like the path or where it leads, but I can trust the process – that if I do my job fully and with a grateful heart, the Story will be better for it. I can’t always see how, but if I could, it wouldn’t be faith. 

It may not be salvation, but the process of doing my job has curative properties. It makes my path and hopefully the path of a few others more tolerable. It gets me out of my head and slows the cycle of self-manufactured problems. It reminds me that I serve a higher purpose than myself.

Hebrews 12:1-2 says, “Let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus.” We are not called to run someone else’s race, or the race we wish we had, but the one set before us. How do we do that without getting tripped up by the problems and sins of our time? How do we see it through to the end? By fixing our eyes on Jesus. When we look at ourselves, we trip over our feet; when we look at the runners next to us, we fall behind. We run our race well by looking to the One who ran perfectly. He has given us this job to do, and with it, hope, even in the Abyss.

With that in mind, I stop writing, stop thinking myself in knots, stop wishing and comparing. I get up and do my job.

J.

June 21, 2023