The Encounter With The Snake
Why living your life seeking pleasures and avoiding pains is absurd, and what’s the alternative
Living the Illusion
Here you are, born on this planet, with a set of genes, a citizenship, parents or caregivers, and an initial environment that you had nothing to do with. You are born with a set of predispositions, one of which is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. You are hard-wired for it: Seeking pleasure is a result of a dopamine circuit in your brain that pushes you to engage in activities likely to have ensured your ancestors survival (pleasure derived from food, reproduction, etc), and avoiding pain helps you stay away from danger, learn and adapt to your environment in order to ensure your physiological survival.
But then you grow up, and this need to avoid pain leads you slowly towards avoiding yourself. You know you have something deep inside of you that needs to be heard and developed, but because you know it would be hard and painful to address that, you decide to ignore it. You decide to run away from yourself, from your aspirations, vulnerabilities and flaws, and to go on with your life seeking pleasures and avoiding pains.
You start to look for easy ways to have fun and enjoy yourself from hanging out with friends and acquaintances most of your time, developing addictions like drinking or gambling, to spending countless of hours passively consuming and binge watching TV. You almost always avoid whatever seems to be painful or involving hardships, and even when something painful actually happens to you, you don’t accept it and you don’t let yourself feel the pain. You tell yourself “Why suffer? What for? Let me just enjoy my life”. You completely blend yourself in the system, looking out for every opportunity to have fun, and moving away from every potential vector of pain and discomfort.
You think you’ve made it, you’ve built yourself a castle around you, with high impenetrable walls protecting you from life sorrows, and a 24 hours party going on within the fortress to keep you entertained and infuse you with pleasure.
The Encounter
But then, sooner or later, when and where you expected it the least, a snake comes lurking in from the ground. You don’t notice it, you are not even able to see it, because it simply cannot be, your walls should protect you from everything. The existence of the snake itself contradicts your beliefs, blinding you from seeing it.
But it is there, slowly approaching and slithering through your mind’s dead spot.
And then suddenly, you see it.
Your heart skips a beat, Its eyes gazes into your eyes and you become immobilized. It shakes your core to the ground, and in that instant, your whole world falls apart.
How could it be?
You’ve spent countless years building your fences, you’ve worked hard at bringing in friends, acquaintances, alcohol and entertainment inside your fort for almost your entire life, you have given up on yourself and completely followed what your society preached to you: that if you go to this University, get that job, marry that person, buy that house, you will reach the point where you will be happy forever, you will suffer no more, and your life will finally have meaning.
You have bought into the promise that there is a safe point to be reached once you put in enough work, once you do a little bit more what you are told. You have projected a parental figure on your society that the inner child within you is desperately longing for, and you have willingly followed along this conspiracy hoping to find refuge from life’s sorrows by blending in.
You’ve done all of this, but at the end of the day, a snake still finds its way to your Palace.
You are in a state of complete shock, not so because of the danger that this reptile represents, but because of the existence of the snake itself within your own land.
Chaos
“Have I done all of this in vain? Have I been living a lie my entire life?” you ask yourself.
At that moment, your entire representation of the world dissolves right in front of your eyes, and all you can do is to stare blankly.
This destruction comes with a pain that you have never felt before, an intense sorrow that you thought could never exist. A pain that connects back to all the previous pains that you have never allowed yourself to feel. A sorrow that existed as much as the snake in front of you exists.
The encounter shakes up your roots in their clinging to the ground, like a tree stricken by the storm, and the hurt experienced along is so deep that crying your heart out is not enough to relieve the pain. It completely numbs you, you feel yourself floating and levitating in the air, with no anchor to the ground, no clear sight of any landmark that connects you back to this world.
It’s as if someone pressed the pause button on your life: All of the events that lead you to this moment are flashing before your eyes, you start analyzing your believes and how you dealt with your life in the past, who you are, what you believe in, what you care about, you start thinking about everything: trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, and as a side effect gaining some knowledge about yourself.
You grieve. Not because of someone’s death, but grieving over a part of you that has died, an entire way of seeing the world that has perished.
You feel that part of you leaving your body, a version of you leaving this world, a heavy weight off your shoulders.
You let go of this version of you that is maladapted to the current reality of things, because all of what you have let yourself believe in turned out to be an illusion. There is no safe heaven to arrive to, whatever planet you are on, no matter how many fences you build around you, how much pleasure you plunge into to distract yourself from looking behind you, how much popular or successful you are, how many things you own, a snake can and will always find its way to you and your heavenly castle. Chaos is always present underneath the surface, and there is nothing you could do to change that.
You start realizing that pain and hardships are unavoidable in life, whatever you do, and therefore, there is absolutely no point to waste your precious time on Earth building fences and seeking pleasures just to avoid sorrow and unpleasant feelings. There is no point to delude yourself with Hedonistic thoughts and attempt avoiding the unavoidable.
Because Life comes with both sides of the coin, with both joys and pains, and all you can do is to open your hands and welcome whichever is knocking at your door.
Or as Khalil Gibran puts it:
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Khalil Gibran
You ponder and let this hard truth sink in in your mind for a while.
Soon later, you begin looking out for the building blocks of a new representation of the world to fill in the void created by the destruction of your previous life views.
The Rebirth
If suffering is intrinsic to life, and if seeking pleasure and distractions does not save us from suffering, then how are we supposed to bare and lift the heavy weights of pains and hardships of our lives?
The answer to this question was best articulated by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols:
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”
F.Nietzsche
In other words, the best way to deal with suffering is to find meaning in the suffering itself. And the best way to find meaning in the suffering is to have a “Why”.
When you have a “Why”, you have a personally meaningful reason for existing on this planet. You know who you are and you know what you want out of your life. You have a clear valued purpose that gives you the strongest direction and pushes you forward. You have something you are willing to bleed for.
Earlier, when you were on a life path with the principal aim of avoiding pain, a pain would still inevitably come and hit you. The event would completely break you because it breaks your shallow philosophy of life. You couldn’t find any meaning to this pain or comprehend it. You couldn’t give it any explanation. Quite the contrary, the event would totally contradict the basic assumptions of your beliefs’ system and plunge you into depression.
But once you define your “Why”, any pains and hardships that come your way, you do not seek to avoid anymore. You are ready for them. Because from now on, any suffering you will encounter in your life will be on your path towards your “Why”. Any pain you are experiencing has meaning and serves a purpose: Even if it’s not an opportunity to learn lessons from your previous life experiences and grow, it would still be an obstacle that you have to overcome to keep on working on your “Why” and on what’s important to you. Hence, it would always have meaning. It would always be but one more hurdle separating who you are and who you aspire to be.
Having a “Why” gives you the power to assign ad-hoc meaning to any pain you might encounter in your life: You are now able to frame it and decide on its significance in a way that best serves you and your goals, and not be its slave.
Having a “Why” fortifies your Mind and Soul instead of Fortifying your Castle against pains and hardships.
It gives you have a consistent and powerful answer that will always be there for you when you need it the most, an answer to the question “Why do I suffer? For what end?”
Once you define your “Why”, you are born a second time, with a new set of predispositions of your own making.
Whereas before you trembled at the sight of any pain, now you accept and welcome it into your life, you feel it in your bones, channel it towards a valued direction and make the most of it while it’s still there.
Whereas before, the existence of the snake in your castle would shake up your entire conception of the world and plunge you into chaos, now, you are not afraid of it anymore: You befriend the snake and talk to it. It might bite you and attack you first, but when you have something to bleed for, the pain is worth it.
Because then, sooner or later, you end up owning the snake, you become its Master, and all that is left for you to do is to tell it where it should take you.
