Start reading Being, the new book from the award-winning authors of Mortals

Read an extract from Being by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies.

How do you find meaning in a world that offers no certainty about its existence? Psychologists Rachel and Ross Menzies have the answer in their new book Being which will turn your existential dread into existential clarity. Read on for an extract.

Prologue

If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.

Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941)

To never truly know the private moments and desires of those around you. To labour to achieve, while understanding that time will destroy all that you build. To live out your days with a chattering inner voice that will critique all your choices, highlight your inadequacies, and be an ever-present harbinger of doom. To accept that you are no more than an evolved ape— a meat sack— on a small rock in a tiny galaxy that will eventually explode as it collides with its neighbour. And to do all this while knowing that the spectre of death is inevitably coming for you and may call at any minute. These are the pains of Being, the price that one must pay for arriving in this world as a human rather than a hamster or a herring.

On your arrival, at least for a short time, you were free from these existential dreads. At birth, we do not experience these psychological torments for many reasons, but chiefly because we don’t even know that we exist. In fact, we don’t know that anything exists. Throughout the first months of life, the human infant suckles and sleeps in ignorance, experiencing sensations in a non-judgemental way. An infant has no idea that their sensate world is being created by objects that remain intact when they are out of view. Soon enough, this begins to change. Through a series of iterative developmental leaps across the first two years of life, children develop a rudimentary understanding of object permanence. They come to recognise that objects, including themselves, remain a part of the world even when they can’t be seen, heard or touched. From around eight months of age, a child will search for familiar items when they are hidden from them. Importantly, the child learns that Mother exists, even when she leaves the room. With this development, the infant can go forth and explore the world on their own, for the safe embrace of Mother is never far away. She (or an alternative guardian) is believed to be a permanent fixture— a beacon of security that will always be there. For a short blissful time, the child appears to grow in confidence.

But gradually, driven by four subtle changes in cognitive development, children begin to realise that their assumptions about object permanence have been overly optimistic. Between the ages of five and ten years the child will learn that all living objects, including mother and father, brother and sister, are destined to die and disassemble. Nothing is permanent; nothing is safe. Unfortunately, as the child’s recognition of death grows, so does the emergence of an ‘inner voice’— an internal commentator that can create anxiety and worry even when there are no immediate threats. The inner voice can conjure goblins in the garden, burglars in the bedroom, sharks in swimming pools and so much more.

To make matters worse, early education will ensure that the developing child understands their insignificant place in the cosmos. Modern youth are no longer comforted by the geocentric beliefs of Aristotle, Ptolemy and the Persian and Arab astronomers of the Islamic Golden Age that placed the Earth at the shining centre of the heavens. Now, thanks to Copernicus, Kepler and the scholars who have followed, the modern child will be taught that our planet does not sit still, motionless at the centre of all things. They will learn that we live on a relatively tiny rock in a planetary system dominated by a single small star. Further, they will come to know that our sun is just one of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is one of two trillion galaxies in the known universe. By the age of ten most children will clearly understand that we are indeed a speck of dust, a mite at the arse-end of nothingness.

All of this is a lot to take in, particularly for the young who must forge lives under the weight of these truths. How do we deal with the shocking revelations and cognitive developments of the opening decade of life? How do we cope with a life filled with imagined threats from an inner voice that won’t shut up? How do we find meaning, choose a life path, an identity, face loss and hardship and, ultimately, the loss of self that comes with death? How do we deal with the heavy weight that cultural, subcultural and parental expectations place on us as we grow? How can we find authenticity in a world that has its own plans for us? How do we find peace and joy while understanding that there is no inherent meaning in anything we do?

These are the problems of Being— the dilemmas that arise from simply being human. Each shall be closely examined in the chapters of this book as we search for solutions to the human condition.

Life can be a painful journey from womb to tomb. But, as we shall see, it doesn’t have to be.

Extract from Being by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies, out now.

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Being

by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies

How to find meaning in a world that offers no certainty about its existence, from the award-winning authors of Mortals.

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