(2017-02-28) A Brief History Of Existential Terror

Taylor Pearson: A Brief History of Existential Terror

Given their starting point, homo sapiens naturally gravitated towards creating an environment that would be less difficult to live in

As we move towards the end the Industrial era, we’ve overshot. There is a space of dynamic equilibrium at the boundary between boredom and anxiety. This space is often called flow, the feeling of being fully absorbed. It’s the “in the zone” sensation professional athletes talk about, where they are able to black out everything but the task at hand

The term is misleading here, as it suggests it is possible to live in a perpetual state of flow (Flow State), as opposed to the reality, which involves a bouncing back-and-forth between boredom and anxiety, with brief moments of flow.

between anxiety and boredom is a healthier, more stable pattern than “perpetual flow.”

The typical modern human’s day-to-day environment has achieved such a low level of uncertainty that existential terror has been replaced by the existential vacuum: Boredom

A 1988 study found that people born after 1945 were ten times more likely to suffer from depression than people born at the turn of the 20th century

Depression is perhaps too strong a term. In my observations it seems to mostly manifest in a subclinical form of depression commonly called “being bored as fuck.”

Coming back to Viktor Frankl’s opening statement: “Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being.”

Just like exercise, existential terror follows a hormetic dose response curve. Too little is as dangerous as (and more common than) too much.

The ideal project, then, is one which might not work. The element of surprise and lack of control increase the dopamine response.

Imagine now that the monkey pulls the lever and instead of a banana dropping down with 100% certainty, it drops down with a high probability.

the dopamine hit, the sensation of pleasure, is much larger in anticipation of a reward.

The notion that we should embrace existential terror by taking on projects which might not work is the thesis of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.

The Resistance is a particular type of fear that the writer has before sitting down to write, the salesman has before making a sales call, or the engineer has before shipping a project. It is meant to be embraced, not avoided.

Common Failure Cases

Obsessive criticism: the person who is profoundly unhappy because of not confronting their own Resistance, and so who then criticize others. This is a common clueless pattern, as Michael Scott has beautifully illustrated.

The Two Most Subtle Failure Cases: Too Big and Too Small

The key to learning how to combat the Resistance is captured in two phrases: “Turning Pro” and “Dancing with the Fear”

Turning Pro

*In Woody Allen’s words, “80 percent of success is showing up.”

This is the basis of writing advice like “200 shitty words a day,”*

Dance with the Fear

Turning Pro is the external view of what you are seeking

The internal sensation you are seeking is what Seth Godin calls “dancing with the fear.” That is, feeling the existential terror and learning to not run, but rather to dance with it.

The healthy state of humans is mild existential terror. In Frankl’s words, “a certain degree of tension.”