This week’s advice column tackles helplessness, and how we can take back control of our lives.
Welcome to “Couldn’t be me”, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.
This week we’re tackling the feeling of helplessness, and how much of what happens in our lives is beyond our control. Just imagine: you’re a leader, but you’ve been told to sit on the sidelines against your wishes while your teammates get blown out of two games by an average of 28 points. That sort of helplessness is one of the most natural but frustrating feelings to deal with.
Helplessness makes the insignificance of an individual life clear in the worst and most humbling way. Fortunately, that helplessness doesn’t have to be defeating; it can also act as a starting point to living the best life one can.
Blake: After working hard all year to lead my new team to the playoffs (they hadn’t been since the 2015-16 season, when they were swept in the first round by the Cavaliers), I was told that I can’t play in the first round against the best team in our conference because of a knee injury. Yes, the injury is painful, but I can play through that. It’s just that the team doesn’t want me possibly risking my long-term health. I feel awful having to sit and watch the team lose when I know that I could help them and give us a chance at making it out of the first round.
CBM: I’m going to be real honest here, you should sit back and enjoy your rest, maybe even ask the team if you can go on summer vacation early, because nothing you could do on the court would give the Pistons any chance of beating the Bucks. Did you see Giannis Antetokounmpo take off from close to the free-throw line for a dunk? Your team is playing against a higher form of human being. It’s unfortunate that you can’t be out there with your teammates, and I know that your natural drive as an athlete is to want to play, but there’s no sense going out there with a bad knee and possibly hurting yourself more trying to stop Mr. Fantastic.
Miles: What do we do in a society that (falsely) insists that helplessness is just kind of a default state of being? How do we push back against “Well that’s just the way the world works” rhetoric (especially in art) without reverting to a sort romantic hero trope, where a single person fights valiantly against the world’s realism?
CBM: I think there are a few reasons behind “that’s just the way the world works” as a rebuttal to hope.
The first is that some people view nihilism as a form of higher intelligence, or a way of being realistic. But that thinking is lazy if it stops at “nothing matters” and doesn’t go forward from there as the philosophy was meant to do.
Yes, existence is absurd. There may not be a real reason to live, and none of this may matter in the grand scheme, but you’re still alive. You’re a human being who cares about things. You move, you interact with the world, you love, and you’re driven and pulled by emotions and reason. Past the point of “nothing matters” is the question of, “so then, what do you want to fight for?”
My view is that if we’re insignificant to the universe, then your obligation should be to that insignificant life and to the lives of others. To make our lives and the lives of others as good as possible, to protect the vulnerable, and to be in wonder at what we are and the world around us, since this small moment in time is all we have.
Second is that saying “that’s just the way the world works” is both ahistorical and impatient. There are struggles that have been taking place throughout world history — the rich trying to exploit the poor, for example — but the world has never been in a permanent state, and will never be. Art, even less.
I think stating that the world works a certain way reflects someone who has tried and been beaten down by external forces — which is a sad state, but understandable. Sometimes you really try to make a better life, to improve the world, only for forces greater than you to rise up, knock you down, and maintain the status quo.
But change is possible. Not with the romantic heroic trope, which shows how obsessed we are with individuality as a culture, but the power of groups, in the power of belonging to something bigger than yourself.
There’s obviously a balance to it, because divesting so much of your identity to a group can quickly lead to zealousness, but collective power has historically been the best way to change the conditions of the world around us. Even if those changes don’t occur in your lifetime, you fight for a better world because it matters. You simply have to take solace in knowing that you’re doing your small part in a process that might take many generations.
Charlie: One time someone (not very) close to me was threatening to delete a twitter thread that brought great joy to the masses. I wanted to help but they were ensnared by their own pettiness.
CBM: This is definitely a reference to me threatening to delete my nutmegs as philosophical quotes thread on Twitter. My worst trait is that I have a destructive streak, in which I can wake up one day and suddenly want to end a project or a Twitter thread, to both show myself that the thing isn’t integral to my existence and free myself of the obligation to it. To give myself space to start something new. It comes from my own powerlessness in how life unfolds, so I feel I have to take drastic action to show that I have agency, even if I’m acting on a terrible idea.
I’m not deleting that thread yet, but I will soon. The thought was to turn it into an art book and then do something new after. Not that I don’t still enjoy it, and I could do it forever, but I like doing new and creative things, and falling into the comfort of something ruins the fun of it to me.
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