It

It lurks in the shadowy corners of my mind, a stoic looks on its face, waiting for me to acknowledge its existence. It frequently hijacks my train of consciousness, on occasion entirely derailing it, and anything that even vaguely resembles it leaves me with a violent shiver pulsating down my spinal cord. 

I’ve had it since I was 14. 

On particularly bad evenings, upon downing a strong mug of coffee (against my better judgement), I consider sitting down and facing it. After all, I’m not growing any younger and I can’t imagine what the people would say if they know that I, a fully grown human being, am petrified by the mere thought of it. 

I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now. 

I…I have a crippling fear of existential philosophy.

Nietzsche, Satre Heidegger, Dostoevsky – All of them. They terrify me. Everything about their work gives me the heebie-jeebies and leaves my skin crawling, from the thought that someone could use their mind to design a logical argument to explain why life is meaningless, to what said argument would mean for humankind as a species. 

As a said. It makes my flesh creep. 

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t mind sitting to have a drink with Gorgias or vodka with Chernyshevsky. They see no problem with spending the entire night reading ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ or finding parallels between themselves and Hamlet. I’ve spent the last 3 years of my life trying to figure out why in the world I couldn’t be like them, why I could barely get past Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy without needing to take a weeklong vacation from planet earth to collect my thoughts. 

For a very long time, I seemed I’d hit a dead end.  

It was a rainy Friday evening when it hit me. Being the end of the week and having no urgent commitments the next day, I had stayed up late hopping from one article to the other before inadvertently going down one of the weirdest and yet life-changing rabbit holes of my life. 

For almost 3 hours, I found myself reading every article I could find on black holes – regions of space in which gravity is so incredibly strong that nothing, not even light can escape from it. I found myself immensely fascinated by scholarship on the gravitational singularity, the one-dimensional point at the centre of a black hole at which the finite mass of matter the black hole has ever consumed is crushed down to a point that has a volume of zero, giving it infinite density. I watched simulation after simulation of what it would be like to fall past the event horizon of a black hole – The point at which the escape velocity is the speed of light. I was stunned when I learnt that if you happened to experience the minor inconvenience of falling into a black hole, at the event horizon (assuming you hadn’t been ripped to shreds by the sheer immensity of the gravitational pull of the black hole) all of time would pass right before your eyes. To an external observer, you would freeze, turn red then disappear. 

I struggled to sleep that night. 

When I eventually turned off my computer and got into bed, my head was buzzing with weird and absurd questions. What if a black hole popped into existence in the centre of my bed and consumed me? What if there was a singularity in my backyard? Was I going to die? 

That was the moment I realised it. 

Learning is scary. 

Learning is the scariest thing in the world. 

Because whenever you endeavour to learn, you put everything you have ever known on the line. Everything you have been told, everything you have deduced, everything that has been drilled into your head since the moment you were born and the comfort you have gotten from it up until that particular moment is on the line. In the split-second before you make that first entry into the Google search bar, you resign yourself to the possibility of your views being proven wildly incorrect. You open yourself up to the knowledge of others and allow their ideas on quantum mechanics, medicine, law, psychology and even existential philosophy, to aggressively question and potentially demolish your own. You open yourself up to the major discomfort that comes during the period in which you assimilate this information – That period where your brain desperately tries to extinguish the fire that Aristotle has set and starts to sift through the newfound information that it has been fed. 

And yet, it is that very discomfort that we ought to seek.

I am still scared of existential philosophy – I think I will be for a long time. The bliss of ignorance, like a long and tight embrace, engulfs me, giving me a great sense of comfort. Comfort that will undoubtedly be lost the day I leap into this supermassive black hole. But there is a certain peace of mind that comes from having had your views completely obliterated in a violent fireball of knowledge and information. Or having had them evolve to incorporate the many ideas proposed by others. 

Perhaps one day my desire for that peace will conquer my fear. 

Sincerely, 

Muku 

Photo by Jacob Granneman on Unsplash