Book Review: The Trouble with Being Born
Darkness, my old friend! I'm back for some more existential angst!
With some authors, your soul simply resonates. A pure tone, similar to striking a wine glass just so. This soul-synchrony usually manifests itself as thoughts: “wow, s(he)’s putting into words what I’ve been feeling all this time!”
I’ve had many of these soul-connections over the years — with Mark Manson, Jordan B. Peterson, Brandon Sanderson, and recently, with Emile Cioran. Upon reading The Trouble with Being Born — a clickbait title from 1973 if you ask me — something in me reached out to this wonderfully, poignantly, and deeply existentially troubled individual. The moment I fell in love? Probably after reading this:
“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”
I can’t recount the number of times I woke up with the “nope, don’t feel like existing today” kind of mood. Reading Cioran makes all those dreary mornings if not okay, then at least... relatable. It is perhaps because Cioran explores this dark side of human existence with the precision of a surgeon that I felt attracted to him.
Here’s what resonated with me.
I. The Creation of Meaning
Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
After reading the Free Will, some of the work of Benjamin Libet, and studying psychology in general, you may begin to question the notion of free will. Are “we” really the ones causing our own behavior? Or are we determined by a complex hodgepodge of factors — our habits, beliefs, attitudes, social norms, environments, and so on?
It’s counterintuitive to think I may not be the one’s deciding to hit the keys on the keyboard, producing this sentence. Yet, upon reflection, it’s likely that I’m not — I have no clue where the thoughts in my head originated, how they got transferred into the tips of my fingertips and finally began shining as a series of symbols in front of me. Yet, this baffling conundrum of the workings of the mind is, under normal circumstances, hidden in plain sight; we don’t think about how thoughts arise. They just, well, do. Marek… stop being silly. Well, I encourage you to try mushrooms and see how the thought-making process crumbles like a cookie in a hand of a clumsy five-year-old.
Once on shrooms, I spent an indeterminable amount simply lifting my arms, turning my head, walking my feet, all the while asking myself “how am I doing this?”. Amid all that, I remember the concerned looks of my friends. High as a Redwood tree1 themselves, they saw the frayed ends of sanity unravel right before their eyes.
But those are fringes of experience, fleeting thoughts, or drugged states. Normally, daily, casually, we’re just doing things, thinking thoughts, and feeling emotions, without any semblance of being conscious of the process, even when — deep down — we know that all of it is a farce, a collective game we all play.
Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: “After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.” One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret one has seized. Yet, by an obnubilation which has something of the miraculous about it, there are gynecologists who are attracted to their patients, gravediggers who father children, incurables who lay plans, skeptics who write….
Imagine you’d be aware of this reality all the time, constantly questioning the origin of your emotions, actions and thoughts. You’d be crazy in no time. Therefore, our minds come to the rescue — they neatly sweep the pesky thoughts about thoughts down below in the unconscious. You know, the place where you keep your secret love for big toes, fascination for the donut hole, and parental abuse.
It follows, then, that our minds need to give importance to things and events because without doing so, there’s no semblance of control: we’d simply be floating in the sea of determinism. And the minds are scared shitless of that. Because without value assignment, they become impractical as tools for survival, disconnected from the outside reality.
Cioran puts the following spin on it:
No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make. (Location 470)
We judge because we are born with a mind that categorizes events into yikes or likes. For survival and stuff. And like the default setting, the majority of us simply stick with it. Why twiddle with something that “works”? This goes beyond the individual, too — we judge others for whom this “default of belief” isn’t their natural setting as outcasts:
We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an “automatism of doubt,” while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an “automatism of faith.” Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise—inside perplexity, it is true. (Location 1594)
Isn’t it weird that the only instrument we’ve been given to experience reality is one that distorts it, makes us unaware that it does so, and gaslights others that might see things differently? Isn’t it even weirder, though, how normal this is?
For Cioran, the answer clearly lies in relinquishing responsibility because the only basis for it are the judgments of the mind. How can we hold someone — including ourselves — responsible for what they do, if the very basis for the behavior — value assignment — is a made-up collectively agreed-upon illusion?
We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more.
This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion, … Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.
Nihilism is moral relativism. Everything is commensurate, nothing is unique. Vices are equal to values, and killing puppies is not more reprehensible than stuffing your face with donuts. The tension that ensues from accepting this is unlike any other: on the one hand — boundless freedom. No wasted time, ever. No FOMO. No remorse because you’ve wasted an afternoon, a week, or your childhood. Yay!
On the other hand though, such conclusion breeds paralysis and existential terror. If I can do anything without constraint, what exactly will I do? If you give me five different pairs of socks to choose from, I’m reasonably confident I’d pick one and be happy with it. If you give me five hundred, I’d first be overwhelmed — whoa, so many! — and then… nothing. Deadness. Now extrapolate from socks to meaningful work, relationships, hobbies — you know, stuff people tend to intrinsically care about — and the dread exponentially increases.
Here’s where I started to think about Buddhism.
The main tenet of Buddhism is that you shouldn’t create any attachments by responding to sensory stimuli with craving or aversion. Because such stimuli are fleeting, forming any attachment to them will lead to suffering, as they inevitably stop existing sooner or later.
The perfect Buddhist sage is free from attachment and thus free from suffering. (S)he bathes in the eternal glory of boundless compassion for others. Because, apparently, if you are free of attachments, you’re free to be compassionate. And by watching prominent Buddhists, Dalai Lama, and other such examples, you can see that it’s true (at least for this very tiny segment of examples that I have in my mind).
But how is it that from the same premise — non-attachment (which can be understood as valuelessness and thus meaninglessness) — Buddhists arrive at ultimate compassion, living according to higher values, and other such “noble” stuff, but Cioran arrives at “whatever floats your boat, dude”, and doesn’t really care whether you spend your time knitting, distributing malaria nets, or watching Netflix?
How can we have both meaning and meaninglessness, compassion and indifference, from not assigning value to sensory experiences, from observing the world as it is — a valueless rock spinning in the vastness of space?
If I put on my Vipassana hat, an answer might look like this: valuelessness is a weird form of attachment, attachment to the idea that nothing really matters. And as any ideology, it distorts reality to accommodate itself. I wonder if Cioran was aware of this, writing:
“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.
II. The Tragic Basis for Humor
Having been endowed with a mind, and noting how, ehm, special, this instrument is at interpreting reality —
throwing meaning indiscriminately about like confetti,
causing existential angst for no particular reason, and
thinking that Brendan Fraser is a good actor because he played in your favorite childhood movie The Mummy —
— what you’re often left with is… humor:
If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.
Or:
“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?” —That’s what I’d like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
Lastly:
What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don’t want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.
I can’t count the number of times I writhed in the throes of exquisite depression (feeling like shit, battling the feelings of dread and anxiety, and being constantly bombarded by destructive thoughts) for days, only to arrive at an epiphany in seconds:
Exactly, why? There’s no reason. Life’s meaningless. The brief moment of recognizing the mind’s bullshit always plasters a Duchenne smile on my face, wrinkles and all. And usually marks the end of the depressive period.
This brought me to the idea of linking humor and mental disorder. It turns out this pairing isn’t antagonistic as it might seem at a first glance. I have a few pieces of evidence to support my case:
Professional comedians tend to be a mentally-disorderly bunch in an above-average kind of way.
There is plenty of plausible ideas that explain why humor and mental disorder are linked.
Nietzsche said so.
Here’s the reasoning for the above.
In 1975, Samuel S. Janus — a clinical psychologist — published a paper called: The Great Comedians: Personality and Other Factors. In it, he interviewed 55 profi-comedians2 of that era (with some super-stringent criteria such as:
be a full-time comedian, eg. you must make a living out of it (most of his sample earned over 6 figures, in the 80s, so they were quite well-off)
be nationally known,
have worked in the field for over 10 years.
Interviewing these individuals, Janus noted, among other things which aren’t relevant for our discussion3, that 80% of these individuals have been involved in some kind of psychotherapy. Most of them also believed that a successful conclusion to the therapy would cost them their job — they feared that sanity would make them lose their mojo. Janus concludes4:
The early lives of all the subjects were marked by suffering, isolation, and feelings of deprivation. Humor offered a relief from their sufferings and a defense against inescapable panic and anxiety. The presence of these same needs and fears almost universally accounts for the success of these particular individuals as humorists.
It seems, then, that doing comedy and being considered funny often comes from a dark place.
Moving on.
It was back in the first half of the 20th century that Sigmund Freud of all people — someone I’d never have imagined utter a single joke, probably because he stylized himself into the figure of the disapproving father of the 20th century — theorized that laughter, the product of humor, serves as relief of misplaced psychic energy. In the face of events you can’t control, laughter is the only freedom available to you. You can also think about laughter as an analgesic, a form of self-medication that gives you a dopamine hit and thus helps to push the (mental) state back to the baseline. Some comedians probably build their careers self-medicating on humor.
If we spin the idea of suffering and asserting control over something uncontrollable as the basis for humor, it becomes clear why someone with nihilistic leanings like Cioran ends up cracking jokes: the mind, suffused in the thoughts of meaninglessness — yet also unable to not dispense meaning frivolously — blows an involuntary raspberry. Bpppprrrrrrrr.
(By the way, in case you don’t know how to blow a raspberry, there’s an excellent tutorial on WikiHow. Yes, that’s a thing. It even made it into a standalone — albeit bracketed off — paragraph instead of a footnote.)
Lastly, we have, of course, the obligatory mention of Nietzsche, who’s been informing science about what to do since ~1870 and he obviously foresaw the connection between darkness and humor:
Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.
Meaninglessness is suffering, and the mind’s defense is laughter. Cioran again:
“Everything is without basis, without substance,” and I never repeat it to myself without feeling something like happiness. Unfortunately there are so many moments when I fail to repeat it to myself.
III. Conclusions
Reviewing The Trouble With Being Born wasn’t as breezy as Radical Honesty. Not because the ideas were more difficult to grasp — although they might have been — but mostly because I had to wrestle with the intimacy of the subject matter. The soul-resonance thing I mentioned in the introduction. Many of the ideas Cioran expresses read like reformulations and extensions of my own thoughts. It was difficult not to lose myself in the process. But hey, what else would you expect after picking up a book that sports such a title? A bit of masochism is a given.
The book has left me with a vague feeling of (dis)comfort. Comfort because I felt understood. Discomfort because, well, it’s somehow taxing to ponder how the existence of a plant might be preferable to that of a human:
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
And because Cioran is so damn relatable, in all the wrong ways:
Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: “What do you expect of this world?” stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep. …
Would I recommend the book? It depends on the location. On the one hand, its form — short aphorisms — make it imminently suitable as toilet literature: easily digestible, bite-sized nuggets of existential dread. Kind of like a short scroll through Instagram. Excellent for a short stint in the bathroom.
If, on the other hand, you’re used to reading on a windowsill, looking down the street while your one leg dangles precariously (yet still very much safely!) over the edge, basking in the evening sun — like I do — reading Cioran might not necessarily be congruent with the continued existence of your physical body.
For a more casual experience, I recommend you watch BoJack Horseman instead.
Random trivia time: redwoods are the largest and tallest trees in the world. Based in California, these giants can grow up to be around 100m tall (with the tallest one to date, Hyperion, racking up whopping 115,92m!)
of which only 4 were women, sadly. I wonder what the rates are now.
here’s a taste though, if you’re interested:
most of them were geniuses (only 3 had IQ between 108 and 115, the rest was between 125 and 160+)
most of them were closer to their mothers than their fathers (who were often disapproving)
had no formal education whatsoever (some didn’t finish 6th grade, some dropped out of college)