The Screaming Void, and Other Dangers upon Becoming a Teenager

If you live in a strong society with certain rites of passage intact, well…more power to you. For most people in this modern world, teenage years are understood to be a time of tribulation. I’m not talking about hormonal tidal waves and only-semi-developed-prefrontal-cortexes, either…though I’m sure you’ve heard all about that. I mean an over-the-edge and into-the-abyss epic loss of innocence, that many adults aren’t properly prepared to talk about.

But, why should that be? What is this loss of innocence, actually? What does it mean? And, what can you do about it?

I propose to you that reality is a lot stranger than you have been led to believe. There are fundamental, irreducible mysteries to life that don’t get systematically addressed in our society anymore (only anecdotally and confusingly), which shape the terms of our existence.

When you were a younger child, you navigated some of these mysteries naturally with grace and aplomb because your perceptual gates weren’t as fixed by a process of summary definition; also, you simply didn’t know quite how strange what you’re looking at really is, because you didn’t have a reference point. (For example, many people recount having seen a ghost or something uncanny as a child, yet having not been frightened by the experience because it didn’t seem eerie and ominous. Or, perhaps, everything seems eerie and ominous when you are a child, and whaddyagonnadoaboutit?.)

Now you are older, and you have been provided a framework for perceiving and understanding reality which is woefully incomplete. What you have is a map with blank areas…or, rather, a map with continuous and reassuringly certain features which does not match the contours of the ground beneath your feet. Your map has been provided by your own cognition shaped by years of reinforcing experience and expectation, and also given by supplied education and indoctrination.

It is a crisis of identity and a crisis of epistemology — how can you be certain of anything? You must become your own investigative journalist; and, disconcertingly, you find (like Woodward and Bernstein) that many people are not giving you their full truth. It might all seem very head-scratching and even cloak-and-dagger.

Let’s understand first that there’s not a conspiracy. Most of your parents also did not benefit from a communal rite of passage into the deeper mysteries. Even if they were not trying to protect you (which they are), many of them don’t have language to talk about what it’s really like to strut for an hour across life’s stage.

Yet we will try.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the two questions that preoccupy almost everyone. Do I matter? Does anyone truly care about me? It may not be obvious at first glance, but these are both actually compound questions.

Let’s take the first. Do I matter? In order to truly answer this question, we must first better understand what it means to “matter,” to “be important.” Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Surely, we mean “to be important to someone else, or something else”…? Ah, but how important? So crucial that their life depends on you? There are a few people who do get to experience this type of high-stakes relationship. And, do you know what happens? Neither person tends to be fully expressed or happy. Instead of feeling mutually important, it often comes to pass that both parties wind up possessed by a sense of futility, arbitrariness, emptiness, and resentment. The natural significance seeps away for both.

Alternatively, it can play out that the frame of reference in which such total and mutual dependence and importance exists remains a white-hot ember of experience, one that has no avenue of continuity or integration. Think of soldiers saving each other’s lives on the battlefield. Where can we go from there? People find it extraordinarily difficult to extrapolate or build on to such experiences. War has an addictive quality because soldiers often subconsciously seek out the same conditions again and again to recreate the arena of that high-stakes significance. The effect has been used to build armies from generations of family members.

For the rest of us, the importance of another is not so acute. Life has a way of resolutely persisting in the face of loss, adapting, making do. We can miss each other terribly; but the kind of importance that doesn’t require your actual continued presence is not satisfactory to the yearning behind the question do I matter?

To the rescue comes the goal of belonging to some larger purpose, one that will endure the obliterating effect of time, and signal to others that you were alive and cared about something. Yet, many people only ever dimly sense that something larger, and it’s rare to find a person who radiates the joy of participating in something truly grand. And here’s where we begin to see that a keystone of culture is missing, a crucial truth has been inverted, and the arc of our multi-generational life has collapsed. Your parents, your teachers, your friends — they don’t know what is so important that it’s worth giving your life and everything that you are to it…or even several lifetimes to it. They haven’t necessarily found it for themselves.

What, then, is the flipped truth? Consider this: human beings are hunters. We are optimized with binocular, parallax, color vision, above all other senses. Our simian ancestors prepared us with incredible depth perception and (perhaps more importantly) the ability to edit out confusing details in our visual field. Constantly, every waking second, your cognitive mind is filtering some four million bits of incoming information down to a few thousand. (Is this also happening in your sleep? Interesting question. What awareness lies beyond the edge of our dreams? The paranormal implications are too rich for us to pick up at this moment.)

There is even an optical illusion — the Cheshire Cat Effect — which happens because when one of your eyes detects movement, your brain will prioritize the perception of that movement over the perception of a motionless object, even if your other eye is fixed on it. In your visual field, the still object will fade and disappear into the moving background.

This is your perception bias, your personal and species history of perception-ranking. It is everything you have known, really: two eagle eyes focused in front, a radically simplified peripheral vision, and secondary senses that have their own acuteness, but struggle with pinpointing directionality. (Sense of smell, though, famously can pull hard on the memory, and move us through time.)

What is the point of all this? It comes down to something that seems to make humans unique on planet Earth, and is directly connected to our desire to belong to something larger that has meaning. We create a filtered cognitive model of the world we are in, moment by moment. At some point, that model became so abstract that we began to imagine two (or more) different scenarios playing out into the future from any given moment, where the background circumstances to those scenarios would remain the same. In other words, what would happen in the foreground events of a situation would not necessarily or inherently change the background of the situation. It is into those foreground choices that we shoehorn all of our considerations of what is important and what has meaning.

This probably seems so obvious and self-explanatory that you’re wondering what I’m on about.

Here’s the thing: you’re constantly missing what’s happening in the background, because its movement is not noticeable to your hunters’ eyes. In reality, world is kaleidoscopic — one colored crystal shifts in the prism and the entire repeating pattern is changed. Everything, from the smallest leaf to the furthest star, is connected through the most intimate of interdependencies. To put it another way: there are no independent variables. Everything matters. There are no alternate scenarios where, on the one hand, you get a burger and fries, or on the other hand you get tacos pescados, and the world stays the same in other respects.

Ridiculous, huh?

O teenagers! Do not doubt this! It might sound crazy to you (how can it possibly matter what I have for lunch??), but the mental abstraction of a billion “what-if” different futures, different memories, different imaginations playing out against a static background is at the heart of our confusion and our despair. Albert Einstein recognized this. He said,“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”

I’ll wager that no one in your life — no one — is truly preparing you for this other reality and its implications. Either deliberately or inadvertently, forcefully or gently, just about everyone you know and meet and read and watch on screens is pulling you down the same rabbit-hole of illusory isolation and woe.

…Unless you are already deep in the tunnels of existential sadness through your own thinking. But don’t worry: it’s actually pretty easy to rescue yourself from this predicament. We’ll get to that in the next article. But — what about the second question?

Does anyone truly care about me? This question also has assumptions built into it. Whereas the first question reveals an unnecessary bias for sorrow and loneliness, this question is easily answered — but bittersweetly. You are cared for, and cared about…but the cast of characters doing the caring is not at all as stable as you might think or hope.

There are, in fact, two axes of illusion when it comes to this question. Let’s take the first. When you are an infant and a young child, your parents seem to you quite monolithic, larger than life, legendary, even eternal. They probably still seem that way to you even now that you are a teenager. The arc of your parents’ own passing existences doesn’t register in your schema of time — you mark the defining era of their lives, or so it would seem, because of the enormous splash you make in the pool of their lives, not to mention your own. How can you see beyond the bonfire of your own persona to look into the approaching night that comes to take your parents?

Your first two decades will seem to you like an enormous vista of time. The learning curves are steep, the memories are strong, the infinity of a moment is especially available to a child. This same period of time is, for most older adults, a time of acceleration — the river currents picking up subtly and incrementally, and the raft begins to drift more rapidly downstream. You feel it before you see it.

Whoever nurtured you and cared for you as a child made a huge investment of energy in you, to launch your life. In some ways, they entered once again the colossal canyons of childhood time with you, to be there with you in your experience. But time has not stood still for them, and they have not been left unchanged.

It is a normal cognitive bias to assume that the audience of your life remains static, that true love and care means that the beings who are in love with you are held suspended in the prism of that relationship…but they are not. The set of people who were alive with you when you were born, and when you first walked, and when you rode your bicycle, and took the epic camping trip…this is not the same set of people who are with you now, or tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Far from creeping at a petty pace, the future arrives as the familiar is slipping away on the wheel of constant change.

Some children first notice grey hairs on their parents. Later, it will be faded or shifted memories; memories that you feel you recall more clearly than they do. The truth is, those who do care about you are vanishing from you, even as those who will care about you are approaching you from the mists of the unknown future.

In Paul Auster’s story Smoke, a writer tells a fable about a skier who crashes upon a remote mountainside and dies. His son, a little boy at the time, grows up without his father, and likewise becomes a skier. One day, the boy — a man himself now — skis down the same mountain that claimed his father. Halfway down, the man pauses beside a boulder, and discovers a body frozen solid in a block of ice at his feet. He kneels down, and feels he is looking in the mirror. He realizes the frozen man is his father, forever preserved at an age younger than the man is now. The man has become older than his father.

Most of us don’t get such a stark handing of the torch; but there is the eerie experience of discovering a photograph of a parent when they were younger than you are now, or seeing a video with you in it as a child where your parent is younger than you who are now looking at the video. (This moment is coming to many of you in the future!) Life is a dance of appearing and disappearing, of flowing and ebbing across many scales of time and place, including the duration of one life.

The film Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? has a haunting sequence in which a young Buddhist monk and a boy of the mountain monastery venture downhill to the abbey in the valley, to watch a temple dance performance. They leave behind an old, grandfatherly master monk sitting through the night in zazen meditation, awaiting his imminent death. While the young monks see a dancer all in white swaying and undulating to the beats of the temple drums, the silhouette of the old monk is studied by the camera, seen through the shoji screen of his cell: motionless, resolute to face the mystery of life and death.

The dancer pulses and frets, moving ever more toward the shadows. The old monk’s shadow bows slightly forward, and falls against the shoji screen door, which opens a little toward the night. The drums have stopped, now, and the dancer, moving in the eternal silence, steps backward slowly, slowly, drifting in a long shot into the darkness, until she is at last no longer visible.

Even before they are gone, you will eclipse your parents and those who care for you, in a brief, shining epoch of your maximum presence on Earth, full of power — the assumptive “movers and shakers,” the ones who shape how the world unfolds. Then, you will be elders, pulling anchor from the harbor of ambitions and setting sail for the deep.

What will you care about then? I guarantee it will not be in the same way as you care now. Deeply compassionate, light of touch, letting life shape its subjects. This is the lesson of letting go. It makes life a harmonic symphony of vertiginous strangeness and wonder, with descants of joy and childhood ebullience swelling in concert with the powerful, long, lyrical melodies of the mid-wheel, joined by the elegies and whispered refrains of the other horizon. It is full of care…if you can listen for it.