“To truly see one’s self is a greater miracle than raising the dead.”
― St Isaac of Syria
When I first decided to dabble in backcountry hiking, for my first trip I thought it would be a good idea to drive three hours north to Algonquin Provincial Park and head into the woods alone for five nights to hike the distance of roughly two marathons with no cell phone. I remember the first two nights, laying awake in my tent, staring up into the swirling darkness, pretty sure my eyes were wide open but seeing as much as if they were shut. I remember the agitation of the night; the frenzied, almost orgiastic buzz of blackflies attacking the outside of the tent, the violent gusts of wind rushing through the pine trees, the chorus of toads croaking, the loon calls echoing off the lake. The vacant, indifferent quality of the wilderness, somehow hostile, as if the dark had teeth. I remember how sore and exhausted my body was after hiking eight hours up and down hills with thirty pounds strapped to my back, how badly my feet hurt (borrowed hiking boots, lost a few toenails in the end). But, more than anything else, I remember how intensely and impossibly lonely I felt, how stupid and stubborn and selfish I was for insisting on going alone, how badly I wish I had brought someone along. I wanted this trip to be a kind of crucible, some spiritual quest. But instead, I was lonely to the point of physical pain and terribly unhappy.
I didn’t learn anything about myself from this solo trip except that I was no good alone. I was not a world unto myself and didn’t want to be. And my default certainty that the presence of other people was some sort of infectious disease to my personal development was perhaps totally false and a little deluded.
For most of my early twenties, I assumed that to know myself better I had to pay closer attention to myself. I had to turn inwards, look inside. This resulted in a lot of time spent journaling, meditating, indulging in introspection, and even some more intense stuff like psychedelics. I thought if I only had enough time to myself, if I only found the right set of habits and routines, did that seven-day silent meditation retreat or backpacked through Thailand, I would finally figure myself out, unknot my stomach, sort out my busy head.
Reason and good sense are wholly supportive of this line of thinking. It seems logical and obvious that if we want to see ourselves, that’s where we have to look: the self. And if we put ourselves first, that should be good for us, make us feel better. If we can only prioritize ourselves consistently, even ruthlessly when called for, we will finally arrive at some sensation of calm completeness. We will finally be happy. And the reason we are unhappy, it follows, is that the world simply wants too much from us. People just won’t leave us alone.
But instead of my inner searching, really my inner staring, leading to any kind of clarity or deliverance or peace, I only became more stuck in the muck and mire of my head, spinning my wheels but going nowhere, anxious and afraid as I felt the best years of my life wasting away in a kind of disoriented, stomach-level lostness. That’s the thing. If you gaze into the abyss of self, the abyss will begin to gaze back1. Even when I wasn’t in a pit, I often just felt ambiently bad, a little nauseous, like something terrible could happen at any moment. I think there is a quiet guilt that accretes, some inner knowing that we are fundamentally not meant to live for ourselves. Some innate hunger to give ourselves away, give ourselves to something entirely, utterly, unabashedly, that gets agitated left unsatisfied. The more we hoard the self, retreat into the caves of our mind, like a dragon guarding some treasure, the more guilty and bad we feel, left only with a vague consciousness of the futility of living.
This kind of defensive posture also put a strain on the relationships in my life, relationships I would all too easily view as annoyances, problems to be solved, people to be placated until they needed something from me again. Every interruption an almost personal attack, a deliberate affront against my efforts to live a good and calm and productive life. I was around other people and had what you would call friends but, despite their physical proximity, everyone else seemed very far away. On a psychoskeletal level, I was marooned in my own skull.
Humans, despite our differences, are basically identical in our hardwiring. Part of this hardwiring seems to be a default assumption that we alone are the absolute centre of existence. If this default assumption sounds like self-centredness or blatant pride (and sets your mind on all the proud and self-centred people you know who should be reading this and not you), you’d be right—but only partly. The real truth of the matter is something elusive and much more complex; a state of seeing that is so automatic and instinctive, it’s invisible. Every human alive sees this way: through the lens of self. Everything is evaluated by how it affects me, what it means for my life, whether it makes me feel good or feel bad.
It’s hardly a conscious choice. But think about it: everything you experience, everything you’ve ever experienced, appears before your two giant floating eyeballs fixed in your big overdeveloped head, coming and going, entering and exiting, as if all the world’s a stage. (A friend in university who played more than a little too much Call of Duty used to refer to other people as NPCs, or non-playable characters, which would crack me up, but really, he’s not far off). Your life is witnessed by you and you alone, filtered through your memories from the past and your hopes for the future, frames that deeply and literally dictate what you see and what you are completely oblivious to. Consciousness is an intensely private, isolated, unshareable thing. There is so much inside of me that I just can’t express. My own emotions and worries and wants are so real and vivid and pressing and close, while the emotional realities of others often seem distant, opaque, easy to ignore—that is, if I even bother to consider them at all.
We are all trapped in the prisons of our perceptions, uniquely alone, a kind of skull-sized sovereign2.
I’m not saying people literally think this stuff, like they would mention it in conversation or even admit it to themselves. This kind of basic self-centredness is so uncomfortable to confront, it’s easiest to pretend it doesn’t exist. No one literally believes they are the centre of the universe or that the world revolves around them. No one thinks they worship themselves, or that self-worship is a good and positive thing. What we’re talking about here is this unconscious certainty, this default mode of operating, invisible as the air we breathe and equally easy to forget, that only what takes place within my own mind interests me and nothing outside of myself has any real significance. It’s got something to do with the assumption that everyone else is like me, or should be.
While it seems alluring in theory to be the most important and central thing, the reality of living as if you are absolute centre of experience is cold and miserable enough for people to spend their entire life seeking diversion, in smartphones and shopping and television and drugs and gambling and gossip and sex, recoiling from dullness or boredom, to forget the weight of that terrible truth. To deny they’re terribly, terribly lonely. Not yet dead but not quite alive; staring down the prospect of a life lived without ever having loved anything more than themselves; seeking out any available anesthetic against boredom or loneliness which increasingly feel like the same thing; pretending as if the Information Age was really about information. This way of seeing has much to recommend it, all kinds of pleasure and thrill, but also cements its victim inside an empty prison, entirely alone, entirely alienated, meaning and purpose feeling like a fable, a lie told to children.
I know this is vague and abstract, so let’s make it personal.
Every morning I wake up, I have to continually challenge the blind but certain assertion that I am the most vital person in human existence, the main character in a cosmic plot, and everything that happens, good or bad, is really all about me. I have to pull back the blanket certainty that I am deeply and literally at the center of being, something I can assume so automatically that it hardly seems like there is another way of seeing. It’s not hard to get lost in my head, imagining and planning and falling in love and getting ready for things that are going to happen and where I need to go next and what I might say and what sort of subtle but sincere impression that might make and how that will unfurl into some glorious, predestined future. But without making this centrifugal movement of self, which is not an act of intelligence but something else entirely, I am destined to go through my average adult day, impatient and offended and mildly annoyed at the inconveniences and interruptions and basic existence of others, who all seem like they’re just in my way. A part of me likes the idea of being important, no doubt. But that is the same part, call it pride or vanity or “the ego”, that doesn’t mind hurting people or lying or cheating to get what I want, believing I am smarter or different or fated or whatever. This part, not coincidentally, also makes my life lonely and hostile and terribly unfun.
The more time I spend fussing over myself, staring into the mirror of self, trying to fix myself in isolation, believing I can will my way to inner peace, the more unconsciously certain I become of my natural default setting that I am the most important and central person in existence, where other people are the problem and not me. In short, I become a slave to my head. And the more I make myself an object of attention, the more I become occupied, to the point of obsession, with all my problems and brokenness and impossible to untangle inner complexity, in a way that only makes it all thicker and worse.
In a strange way, when I began to attend to the external world, when I began to make the people in my life the main object of my attention rather than myself, I felt happier, somehow simpler. When I stopped monitoring my every thought or action and engaged with something fully in the real world—having a friend over for dinner to talk through his anxiety or building something useful out of wood or getting lost in the forest for a few days with my brother—the idea of self disappeared in the background which felt healthy and good. I became more useful to others. But also, people kept telling me I seemed more like myself.
I’m not talking about self-neglect or martyrdom, but a fundamental shift in the posture of my heart to be more concerned with something outside myself than with my own interiority and problems. I’m talking about a willingness to make the small, unsexy sacrifices, doing what would be all too easy to avoid and justify to myself that I’m too busy and bogged down and tired and important. It’s something like stepping out of the spotlight on a soul-marrow level. Because, in all honesty, I don’t want to be the object of attention. I am simply not that interesting or important a subject.
This basic idea has been codified in myths, proverbs, and parables since the beginning of time. It’s as old as Eden. We all instinctively agree with the idea that we are not meant to only live for ourselves. That life is found not in selfishness, but in love. That’s what a hero is: someone who sets aside their own wants and whims and wishes, someone who lays down their life for a friend. This is the idea that Tolstoy became obsessed with in his later work: “I know now that people only seem to live when they care only for themselves, and that it is by love for others that they really live.”
You find yourself by forgetting yourself. Or, more accurately, you realize there are more worthy things to find. You realize there are things more important than self-knowledge. In that threshold crossing, I believe, the true self is unmistakably glimpsed. Maybe that is a way to understand what He meant: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”
Aristotle has a passage where he talks about how self-knowledge isn’t found in introspection. It’s not something located in your head. Knowing oneself is related to active perception, Aristotle says. Self-knowledge, the kind that leads to wisdom, is a result of being aware of how you act and react in the world and simply paying attention as if you didn’t fully understand yourself or what you are capable of. As if you are a mystery to yourself, an enigmatic thing, something unknowable and capable of surprise. It’s almost a kind of listening. An “Oh, so that’s what I’m like!” paying more attention to what you actually do than what you think about or dream of doing.
And, here is the kicker, nowhere do we have more contact with reality and are forced to confront ourselves and witness what we’re really like than in human relationship.
I know it sounds flowery and cliche and fake, but I really do believe that we see ourselves most clearly in the eyes of the Other. That we can only grow into the fullness of what life has for us under the shelter of their steady gaze, which both loves us fully as we are but also sketches the silhouette of what we can and must grow into, as the edges we thought were limits crumble and fold. We cannot become what we are meant to become alone.
It is the relationships in my life that make my days worth living. It is the love of others that keeps me from despair, that brings both the outpouring of everything good in me as well as the impetus to change, to be worthy of that love. It is friendship that has nurtured parts that I didn’t even know were in me, but are good and noble and kind. I’m not going to pretend like it’s easy, but there is something nourishing and redemptive to figuring out how to be in a room with other people, how to care for them, notice their emotional particulars, even grow fond of their flaws. In learning how to bear the psychic cost of being around other people, recognizing the existence of other human interests entirely aloof from my own yet just as real and legitimate, loneliness is transfigured and treated. There is something irreparably, inseparably human about it3.
The love we hoard rots our insides. But the more we pour out, the more we are filled. That is the fullest potential for what human relationship can be: a pattern of mutual self-giving, mutual emptying of self. That’s what marriage is, or should be. That’s why Juliet said to Romeo, “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”
None of this is all that thrilling or complicated or intense. It’s nothing like taking ayahuasca in the Peruvian jungle or reading Nietzsche (then making sure everyone you ever talk to knows you read Nietzsche). It’s almost offensively simple, close in. But, I believe it’s where real life resides.
Mind you, this isn’t a truth you hear talked much about. Our culture won’t tell you to be less self-centered. The world of money and things hums along happily on greed and selfishness and craving and this inflated idea of self-significance. Nowadays, you see all this stuff about learning to love yourself and treat yourself and believe in yourself and prioritize “self-care”. (A narrative most fiercely and fervently fought for by spin studios and online therapists and luxury resorts, who all want to sell you something4.) The fact of the matter is, if you go about your day-to-day life in a strange but certain posture that you are the most important thing in existence and that your happiness is paramount, it is very easy to sell you stuff. It is very easy to control you with a kind of oppression that you come to love, mostly for its convenience5.
The way you embody an other-centred ethos is to actually and literally lay down your interests to serve others. To let yourself be interrupted. Even to honour the interruptions. (After all, what is love if not an interruption?) There is no other way around it. And not to be overly religious or propagandistic, but that truth sits at the centre of Christianity. The centre of the cross. That is what Christ embodied: the sacrifice of self for the Other. That is the goal of faith, to learn to live by love. As Augustine wrote, to translate cupiditas into caritas, self-centred love into other-centred love.
I don’t mean to suggest this is somehow easy or automatic. What’s hard is not just knowing this but keeping it upfront and conscious in my daily, busy, demanding life. Every day I get caught up in myself, in the maze of my head, tangled in the straitjacket of my thoughts, consumed by my concerns, as if all that is inside of me is ultimate reality. Every day I am called, invited rather, to the altar—to die to self. Some days, I don’t succeed. Some days, I don’t even feel like trying. But thank God I have good people in my life, people who love me, who remind me of this truth through their love, a love that confronts and counteracts the loneliness, even when I am undeserving of it. People who save me from myself.
By being in communion with others, in spirit and in truth, sometimes as simple as asking how your day was and really listening, or being vulnerable about how ashamed I am of my weakness and swallowing my upset pride, I am wrenched out of self. I lay down the spiraling loneliness, the dark tangled mass in my stomach, all my imagining and intellectualizing. The weight of aloneness is shrugged off like a heavy, ill-fitting winter coat. I relax into a naturalness and ease I cannot find when I am lost in abstract intellectual stuff or thinking about myself. Every time it is roughly equivalent to repeating the trauma of birth. Every time it works.
Even now, I still have too much time to myself. I hope and pray for a wife, for a family, for people to place even more demands on me, demands that pull me further outside myself. That call me to put my book down and my ideas aside, to sacrifice things I thought I could keep and be love-struck and exhausted in the best way possible. I’m not saying it will always be easy or fun or make me disneyland-happy. But I know, in a way I can’t explain, that is the way to life.
My backcountry hike in Algonquin could have gone much worse if I hadn’t met two other hikers when I was standing at a river crossing trying to find the trail, lost as anything, who knew the way forward and invited me to tag along. I spent the next two days hiking with them and had a great time. I look back on this now as mercy and allegory and a superb sense of humour.
Write you again when I can,
Writing has been terribly hard as of late. I was sick and busy at work and felt I couldn’t piece my head together. But I tried to be thoughtful and patient with this essay, giving it as much time as it needed to become something verging on great (by my standard—although reading Tolstoy certainly does not help my confidence here). What was cut is 5-6x longer than the final piece.
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Nietzsche: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
I’m paraphrasing Shakespeare here and I’m not sure if Shakespeare is kind of like the Bible, where you can reference it and people just kind of know it’s Shakespeare but anyways I felt like I should point that out.
Of course, we have to be careful to justify serving others by what it does for us, how it makes us feel, because then we are trapped in the same unconscious service of self. It doesn’t help to try to overcome selfishness with self-interested reasons.
The point is more: it is true from my experience that I am at my best when I am most concerned for the best of others. The real way I take care of myself is by caring for others more than I care about myself.
You see this applauded and approved of, when someone decides to take themselves on a cruise or whatever, we all ooh and aah and pat them on the back like that is a great thing, like an unlimited buffet and a conga line and laying around on a pool chair until they melt into a puddle of sweat and alcohol, plus all the other strictly scheduled “managed fun” that assures they never have a moment to think for themselves or be quiet or bored, herded around poverty-stricken tropical islands like children on a field trip to the zoo, will finally heal them of their exhaustion. As if the antidote to exhaustion is rest.
Profit is not the origin of self-worship, that is something as old as Eden, but the profit incentive does magnify self-worship in spiritually sinister ways.
The other day, I walked by an orthotics store with a big neon pink and yellow billboard on the roadside reading “INVEST IN YOUR ‘SOLES’ IT JUST MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE”. I think that captures the essential idea here.
Thank you for writing this, this is a great reminder on the posture to live
when you see the title and you just know you’re gonna love it