Fading Away

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well - educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age” - Sylvia Plath

As I enter my 30s, I cannot say that this thought has not occurred to me. While unpacking this quote, I went back to where we all do - our childhoods, more specifically, the reliability and narrowness of it.

It’s so easy as kids to know your milestones and where you stand.?

A+ = Gold star

A- = Bronze star

Follow the rules and you are rewarded. The rules themselves can differ depending on what your family values. It could be grades, it could be creative expression, involvement in sports, and the list goes on.

But as you get older, those milestones become muddled. You can keep going but the promise of a definite reward or appreciation fades away. As you detach from your family values to establish your own, the question becomes: what do YOU value, and why?

Do you focus on the book you have always wanted to write, gaining financial independence by 40, amassing social media followers on the next hot app, getting the next promotion? All lead to different goals, different types of fulfillments.?

Since we are humans, we have to prioritise one value (at least for a time) over the other. But any path you DO pick also means NOT picking 100 others. As time goes on, those other possible paths that looked available at 16 no longer do at 34. In a world where there is so much to achieve, those closing options might make you feel a sense of loss, even if you never really wanted them.?

And then sometimes, the easy promise of childhood equating effort or process to outcome does not translate to adulthood. The means we take - education, marriage, to an end - a fulfilling career, a stable family, are not exactly correlated. A ‘good career’ can mean 100 different things and that a ‘stable family’ is not the same thing for even every family member. The true meaning of our vision is something we mostly realise on the way, when the process has already begun. The fundamental gap between our dream vision, which might mean achieving 10 things, and the reality, which means actively choosing the 6 out of the 10 and rolling with the 5 unwanted things you acquired along the way, is the cause of this pain. And there is no point in your life when you can say, “Hey, I now have everything I want. I am perfectly happy.”

That is why Sylvia’s brilliant promise can feel so hollow. Because it does not have an end point at which it can be called ‘fulfilled’. It’s just a mirage. Truth is, the world is and always has been indifferent - it’s not personal, it just is. In the grand scheme of things, one person does not matter. What the world is very good at, is showing us dreams of hope, of a place where you would in fact, be important - where you would matter. It’s easier to show that hope to an 18-year-old than a 35-year-old. The recognition of that true indifference really sinks in as we move towards middle age. When we are struggling to explain that gap - when our means might lead to some goals, but it suddenly becomes clear it is not going to be enough, or that our goals were unachievable, lofty or simply misaligned to who we are now, and might need updating.

I was recently watching Avengers Endgame the other day, and saw this dialogue exchanged between Thor and his mother, "Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be, Thor. The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are." This dialogue comes at a crucial point in the movie when Thor, like always, is in an existential crisis about who he is and how he has essentially failed as a hero. Unfortunately, this feeling of failure for not fulfilling the goals which might have been misguided in the first place is not limited to heroes. We might believe being successful and well educated would lead to a fulfilled life, but the path to a fulfilled life might not be as easily definable.

Now tackling the next part of the statement - then how DO you define fulfillment as you grow into yourself??

What is this underlying fear of fading into irrelevance and feeling useless?

I talked about the indifference of the world. Now finding fulfillment within a seemingly uncaring world is not easy. The dissonance between the world’s impersonal indifference and our need for personal importance is difficult to grapple with. If you look from far above, it can feel like a black hole in which you can pour in endless amounts of validation and achievement, and it will never be enough. However, if you zoom in, despite looking at the entire world’s content on our phone, our personhood is much smaller, slower, contained. It does not require the world. It can recognise the richness of a life through the journey of say, education and not necessarily where it led to, or a friendship even if it eventually ends. Our existence is a simple thing in a world that is manufactured to be complex. It does not need to prove its worthiness by achieving X, Y or Z. All it calls for is to be seen and not get lost in the noise. Sometimes, it is going to get that recognition and sometimes it won’t. And that is just what the human experience is going to be, middled age or not, useful or not, important or not.?

I believe a big part of why we feel the need to prove ourselves, build our legacy, feel useful and contribute in any way to the world, comes from a deep fear of feeling unimportant,

Forgotten,

Irrelevant,

Unseen.

It’s the human desire to look back and say - this is what I built. This is a symbol of who I am and why I matter and why I deserve to be here and always had.

It’s a valid fear to have. That is why we are on this app, right (wherever you are reading this)? To subconsciously feel like someone told us, "Hey, you did a good job"

“You are a cool person and here I am acknowledging it.”

“You matter”

“I see you for everything that you are and I am proud”

And this is not just needed from a friend or family member. We humans have a strange way to relate to each other despite being literal continents apart. That is why social media works as well as it does. There are few things more satisfying than the recognition of your emotion in someone else, anyone else. That does not mean that they share your pain. An acknowledgement, knowing that your presence has, for just a second, changed the rhythm of their heartbeat, fired the neurons in their brain, taken them on an emotional journey in any capacity, can sometimes be enough.??

So let me say, you are enough. You are worthy, and you have been seen and recognised for you, at some point or the other, without you even knowing. And for the times when it is not as obvious, perhaps you can remind yourself of this.?

Until then, we will try to find our small self in this complex world, as I do, writing this.