NOEMAYA

Most of life is ordinary and dull, with a bit of extraordinary sprinkled over it. Not everything is critical or worth serious consideration. And that’s probably what makes most of it intolerable to people like myself, addicted to intensity. This progressive illness of ours, extending initially to the innocent thrill-seeking of adolescence, can encompass all aspects of one’s life. In my case, initially, it was the intellectual life: seeking profound meaning in all moments and encounters. And then it enveloped simple things, things that are supposed to remain dull and simple, like a relaxed afternoon with a friend or a lazy stroll around the neighborhood. As for me, the absence of intensity started to feel threatening. “Something is wrong,” I thought.

The extraordinary that is dispersed across one’s life, you try to suck it all in at once, and you are left with a more lasting dullness. Unbearable. Ugh!! Instead of perpetual, small payments, I’d rather get it all in advance. And we know the rest.

But let’s forgo the jagged description. I am not trying to diagnose anyone or myself, or make a general statement about life. That’s become the less interesting thing for me: to populate the world with more ideas and theories about life. I am more interested in my own experience than haphazard generalizations; and by the way, no one knows if a multitude of similar experiences needs to make up a type or universal form worthy of study or analysis. Maya is ultimately inscrutable.

For me, and some I know, this addiction to intensity also manifested in our interest the life of the intellect, in spirituality and pursuit of truth. It was always exciting to read about transcendent things and religious feelings. In science, theoretical physics and abstract mathematics took me to the same exciting place. I used to read math during summer and on my school breaks. Friends found it quite odd, and I told them that reading math makes me feel so hyper, akin to being on the sunny side of cocaine.

But excelling in all such things required commitment, and commitment meant going all in, with the exciting and the boring aspects alike.

I’d take random classes in college because the ideas in them were exciting to me. But when it would get to writing a paper, attending critical discussions, or getting through less exciting chapters, I couldn’t pull through and would withdraw from the class.

And now I see there’s not much wrong with much of that, as it seemed to be guiding me along a certain journey, sometimes. My father used to call me a hyper monkey, jumping from one branch to another, when it came to my interests, as I would have 50 bookmarked books around my desk that were left unfinished, and the subjects varied over a very wide spectrum of topics. I would give up a book quickly if it didn’t interest me, and I felt I could decide that based on just one paragraph! And talking about interest, much of it was about the excitement rather than genuine interest, really. You understand what I am saying here? If you are interested only in some aspects of a person and intolerant of their other aspects, then you are not interested in the person; you are more invested in your feelings than the other. So was the case with my attitude toward ideas, books, projects, and persons too for a while. Again, in certain areas this might have helped me, for example, in philosophy, eventually leading me to phenomenology, which I never found to be boring, and it has been a home since then though I got from it what I needed and now rather drop the framework around it.

But over time, and as I established myself as an adult in a reasonably attractive life, I found more dissatisfaction in day-to-day stuff: interactions with people, meetings I had to attend, making dinner, having a regular evening after work, etc. I had to make everything intense. Love had to be passionate all the time, and if it wasn’t, I felt it was over. If for a day or two I didn’t have an appetite for phenomenology or something profound, I felt that my life had become meaningless and mediocre. “If it wasn’t intense, it wasn’t worth it”, became the natural thesis of my world.

I somehow equated intensity to safety and reality. If it is not intense, then it is not real. I don’t know how or why, but I don’t care much about it either, for this whole pursuit of why and how, I see now, is part of that same thrill-seeking, the intense need to understand and encompass.

If an experience wasn’t intense enough, I would abandon it. It became quite difficult to pull through. The feeling was something like this: if I am not running, I would fall.

Of course, understanding things felt quite amazing. I don’t know what your experience is, but when something clicks in my mind, I feel united and whole again. The more abstract and complicated it is, the more pleasing the experience of seeing the whole in the part. The high of understanding is the best high in the world. So much joy, the very thief of joy.

Again, nothing wrong with that. Nothing is wrong with anything really but only when these attitudes become chronic, and even that in certain persons, certainly myself. And from experience, I know there are readers who will rush to take care of things and rescue understanding from this bloodshed I have started. But there’s no bloodshed; nothing is being slaughtered here. This is not a general statement of life or humanity; it is a flow of my experience: that I latch onto the intensity that comes along with universal comprehension, and when it is about most of everyday life, which is meant to be lived than understood, I either burden it with unnecessary meaning or withdraw and give in to unhealthy impulses.

All that to say this: I am weaning off of this whole thing. And like any other addiction, I have my own withdrawals. I seek to live without making a big deal out of every moment, without making shit so philosophical and impactful; to cope better with boredom and maybe even invite it to dinner. To let the mundane be what it is and not force it into an artificial object of investigation.

This began with a painful inner call, first starting with a distaste for all ideas, for any sort of ideation about life, for having definitions and prototypes of a right living, of truth, of the meaning of life, things speaking of which make me nauseous even right now as I write. And one day, as I was scrolling through a bunch of YouTube reels about psychology, nonduality, and all that stuff that has populated the internet, with so many experts talking about how to calm your nerves, reconnect with the divine, find acceptance, how to find a meaningful life, etc., it occurred to me that all this is so ironic, to me: we are, as humans, the most advanced and evolved form of life, at least within our solar system and maybe even beyond. And yet we seem to be so clueless about life and how to live, and we are begging from someone or something on the outside to instruct us on how to live!

The life in us has lived for billions of years and done such a fantastic job in survival and optimization, producing an astonishing end product so far, and yet we seem to think it should not be trusted, that it may fail at any moment if we weren’t guiding it, that we need to interfere and educate ourselves and constantly monitor and improve it, take classes, read, meditate, etc. For more than 99.9% of life’s journey toward what we now are, our thinking had zero role and our interference was not needed. Something seems awfully wrong here, in this path of self-regulation.

And ironically, there are more anxious people around than ever. This is what I saw for a moment: life at its best form is begging someone to explain to it how to live! The beggar king…

Again, it seemed wrong that I was so concerned with figuring it out; others are not my business.