Pandora’s box

You know the story.

There was once a time and a place. And in that time, and in that place, the gods gave the mortal Pandora a sealed box. Eventually unable to withstand her curiosity, Pandora opened this box, releasing a whole number of evils into the world. All that was left behind in the box when she looked more closely was a shiny little thing called hope…

2023 has been a rough year globally. Ongoing conflicts, genocide, climate change, political and social polarisation, financial hardship, and much, much more. All presented in our daily reality in a way we may not have experienced before. These shared stories filter through and build into our own individual tales of pain and suffering.

Among the many ways this plays out for me as a Samaritan, the conversations on the phone often go to a downward spiral of hopelessness. It’s said that when we’ve lost hope, we’ve lost everything.

Viktor Frankl, someone who experienced suffering first-hand more than most, wrote in his enormously influential Man’s Search For Meaning,

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence

Inarguable. And yet.

The concept of hope is brilliantly deconstructed in Manson’s Everything Is F*cked – A Book About Hope. Truthfully, to paraphrase Tarantino very weakly, Mark Manson. When you absolutely, positively got to get your head straight on a topic, accept no substitutes.

I picked the book up at the airport last week on the way out to a client gig in Dubai. As my fellow passengers sensibly slumbered in preparation for whatever fun and games awaited them at their destination, I read on into the night and into the morning, engrossed.

Entertaining as the rollercoaster is, the book’s a tough read at times. If the below reads cold and harsh, trust me, Manson’s inimitable style is a lot more fun, so please excuse the disservice I do him.

Via how to create your own religion, our Thinking and Feeling Brains imagined as Consciousness and Clown Cars, the perils of ice cream and more, Manson arrives at the Uncomfortable Truth that in the face of infinity, everything we could care about approaches zero. He argues convincingly that, scary as this is, it’s very freeing. It means there’s no reason to not love ourselves or one another. No reason to not treat ourselves and our planet with respect. No reason to not live every moment of our lives as if it were to be lived again and again. We must learn to love what is.

He pulls us back from the void and rebuilds us with Nietzsche’s amor fati and Kant’s Formula of Humanity.

In brief, the very Stoic amor fati is the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience. The highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness. It’s not a question of desiring some imagined idea of reality but of embracing actual reality, because hope is ultimately empty. Our challenge is to act without hope and to be better now, in this moment, and the next, and the next, as opposed to in some dreamt of future…

Building on this theme, he posits adulthood as developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right. The Formula of Humanity states – very much like Arbinger’s Outward Mindset – that we act towards and with others as an end, never as a means. That we love and respect others without expecting anything in return. It is unconditional.

Let’s not hope for a better life. Let’s be a better life. This is how we change the world. There’s a whole lot more we could say on this, but let’s leave it there for now with perhaps the most famous Frankl quote –

The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance. Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

May that give us all some support.

Be well.

Julian

I help people lead their own way forward

Learn more at https://orangecairns.com