How Can We Live an Authentic Life?
By Corbin Aquino
Our lives are directed and defined by society. As social creatures, we find it beneficial to conform, comply, and obey, and this group act pervades every aspect of our individual lives. Many find order in this society and call it “functional” to the extent that its flaws have not yet led to its collapse, but this categorization alludes to a personal complacency and satisfaction that hinders us from a more beautiful liberation. We do not live in a utopia, and we inevitably find ourselves conflicted by these flaws and contradictions that are inherent to our imperfect society.
A society’s order is usually perpetuated through social standards that the majority agrees on. These norms are then enforced, either through formal politics like a government’s legislative, judicial, and executive activity, or by pervading everyday life with social sentiments that encourage assimilation and conformity. Regardless of any “political” actions committed, this will always be a political interaction because there is a power dynamic between the individual and society. Society, inherently, is normative (tells people what they should do) and compulsory, forcing people to change into certain modes of behavior and thought that sustain the society.
To conform to society does not necessarily entail recognizing its flaws. Many will healthily assimilate and develop a harmony between their desires and society’s. Many are happy in a box of normalcy. But for others, conforming creates tension and dissonance. This kind of individual “accelerates” society’s worldview, carrying it out to its logical conclusions and elucidating its flaws vividly.
Within a societal system, this accelerationism manifests through chaos. In a sense, this is not good for a society. Even if chaos is the logical conclusion of a flawed civilization, no mode of society desires its own destruction.
Within an individual, this accelerationism manifests as the feeling of the Absurd. By exhausting a structure to its logical extent, we find its irrationality and we lose our place in it. We disconnect. Whereas previously we could support our existence with reasons that satisfied us despite hidden flaws, those flaws uncover themselves and there is now nothing to base our lives off of.
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes, “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” Inherently, the Absurd only exists between the dissonance of two entities. In its original context, Camus uses these words to describe the dynamic by which the Absurd arises from a disconnect between our existence and the world. Here, I am describing the dynamic by which the Absurd arises between our existence and the society we find ourselves thrusted into.
Once we lose our reasons within a localized context of life, we do not know what to do anymore within this context. Once the Absurd arises between us and society, our basis for living becomes upheaved, and we are left with a pervasive sense of distrust. Not only do we now view everything through a skeptic lens, but we are also left with a perpetual dissonance because we cannot reconcile our disconnect or find a new system to connect to. We cannot reconcile the feeling of the Absurd for it has seemingly no external, “objective” evaluation.
This now poses a fight. We get to observe a political standoff as this absurdism manifests itself either externally or internally.
Externally, it manifests as rebellion, revolution, chaos, violence, anarchy—the chaotic forms of political change that we all know. But there is an arguably more violent and more widespread epidemic, which is the normalization and segregation of people whose absurdism manifests internally. Within an individual, this absurdism manifests in one’s psyche as a kind of disconnection, dissonance, dysphoria, and rebellion. Perhaps you know it as “insanity.”
Clearly, psychopathology is a relative concept. What is categorically pathological is defined by sociocultural context. The “sane” get to roam free and liberated while the “insane” are grouped and policed into mental hospitals to be prisoned or “fixed.” Insanity can provide a rationality and clarity that the sane are too assimilated to see, yet they are controlled and oppressed because of the sane society’s de facto fear of the insane’s potential for subversion.
Squidward in the “SB-129” episode of Spongebob Squarepants helps to illustrate this phenomenon. Squidward lives a stressful life in Bikini Bottom, and he regularly makes remarks that he does not want his current life, to a significant extent because of Spongebob’s constant annoyances. As he tries to get away from Spongebob, Squidward finds a time machine, what is seemingly his savior. He succeeds, and retreats into a white void. It is here that he loses any previously held reasons of life, facts that explained the world, and he feels the Absurd. Squidward has the choice to develop a full “insanity” by committing to his depart from his past, stressful life and becoming acquainted with the new void, which would place him as relatively insane when compared to people whose lives are defined by Bikini Bottom. Instead, Squidward decides to comfort himself and return to his old reality. He makes the explicit realization that he misses Spongebob, as his daily rejection of Spongebob has become an integral piece that defines his identity. Squidward, in a failed attempt to individuate and embrace his relative insanity, finds safety in the sanity of the life he was thrusted into, despite any bad aspects of it. Indeed, it is even the bad aspects of this “unwanted” life that are the defining aspects of why it is so “desirable.”
Although my tone may suggest otherwise, this is a not a statement on ethics, but a mere observation on society’s policing of individual identity. Personally, this manifests in two significant areas of my life.
Transgender people are seen as inherently ontologically different, but in truth it is often a natural reaction to the finite and oppressive categories of the normalized gender binary that are constricting the inherent fluidity of personality. Whereas some may find comfort in submission to this system, others will reject the system in an act of trans-ness. My discomfort with my body is not something one I was born with, but rather an expected byproduct of society’s limiting expectations.
Laziness cannot be understood as a personally inherent inability to exert effort. To the contrary, one's laziness is a mere product of a society's gaze. The concept of laziness is determined by a failure to strive towards arbitrary expectations. It is this failure that is then pathologized— made to seem "incorrect" and "insane." Paradoxically, in a world where structures such as formalized academia have birthed restrictive categories of success and foisted them upon us, it is no surprise that my desires become deviant. It is not surprise that I become “lazy,” lest I submit myself and assimilate within society to only develop a paralyzing cognitive dissonance and dysphoria of desire. My deviance from society could be mistreated as a failure, but indeed could be seen as a foundation for flourishing.
Now, this is not to say that we ought to embrace all our impulses and fluidities of personality. Despite our dysphoric reaction to our realities, we surely cannot fully escape this world into which we are born. To live is to be policed by the context of our life. Inevitably, we must deal with society. In order to live as authentically as one possibly can in this world, it may be bad to act in complete rebellion, but we must be armed with the tools to challenge complete assimilation. We must embrace insanity.