[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
The French existential writer Jean-Paul Sartre, in trying to explain his concept of nothingness, argued that life is as much about what isn’t there as about what is there. He gave as an example the following. Imagine that you are to meet your friend at a party. When you show up at the party, your friend isn’t there. Isn’t your experience of the party as much defined by him not being there as by who is there? Isn’t it even completely defined by him not being there, to such an extent that you leave quickly in order to find him?
To a smart teen, this poignant, painful experience of nothingness might sound like “This town has nothing to offer me” or “My family has nothing to offer me.” If he is a privileged teen, he may have every one of his material needs met, from an attached bathroom to a tennis coach to a stabled pony. And he may still experience his life as having a hole in it, the hole made by what is not there.
What “something” needs to be added to rid oneself of that feeling of nothingness? The right something. There is a puzzle, the felt experience of life, and there is the missing puzzle part, which must fit. If you are missing love, a cream donut will not fill that hole. If you are missing intellectual stimulation, a situation comedy will not fill that hole. If you are missing the sensation of speed, a sitting meditation will not fill that hole. In these instances, what you need is love, a great puzzle to solve, or a bicycle ride at top speed.
Ah, but how hard it is to know what is missing. In Sartre’s example, it seems at first glance obvious what is missing. It is your friend—let’s call him Joe. But is it that simple? Is it your friend that is missing and producing the feeling of nothingness? Or is it friendship? What if someone—let’s call him Max—walked up to you at the party, began chatting with you, and you found him interesting? Would you still be missing Joe? Or would Max have filled that nothingness hole?
You can see what a difference it makes whether it is the one or the other. In the first instance, you go looking for Joe. In the second instance, you circulate and stand open to meeting a Max or a Jane. In the first instance, you stand bereft. In the second instance, you might even be enjoying yourself.
How are you to go about identifying what is missing? In school, you are offered classes with names like “calculus” and “Spanish.” But you are not offered a class called “identifying the exact cause of your experience of nothingness.” That is why school itself can feel meaningless, because what is absent—existential richness—may better define your experience of school than what is present. That you are not taught about existential holes is the hole in the program.
Consider some ordinary Sunday. You go over to your friend’s house. He is playing a video game. How boring! You go over to another friend’s house. She wants to show you pictures of her cat. How boring! You go over to another friend’s house. He is mowing the lawn. How boring! You begin to want to pull your hair out. Can life really be this nothing? Nothing is going on anywhere! How galactically boring!
This puts you in a bit of frenzy and seems to pull from you the need for some crazy escapade. Can you see how the experience of nothingness can lead to all kinds of trouble? It can make you reckless. It can make you antic. It can rule your life. All that nothing is really quite something.
For Parents
It is a natural consequence of being smart to feel that life is missing something. Your teen may respond to this felt sense of nothingness by sinking into a dark mood or by acting recklessly. It would be quite the astounding question to ask your brooding or acting-out teen, “What’s missing?” What parent thinks to ask such a question? Nor is it likely that your teen will know how to respond. But maybe she’ll have something to say, in which case that question would have proven one brilliant conversation-starter.
For Teens
Think about your own life. Is it more defined by what’s missing than by what’s present? If this idea strikes you as worth exploring, here are some prompts to help you explore.
- Think about your own life. What important thing is missing? Does it have a name? Something like “adventure” or “love” or “creation” or “grandeur”? What is missing?
2. Are several things missing? Name them all.
3. If, say, it’s adventure, love, creation or grandeur that is missing, what could help? What can fill an adventure gap, a love gap, and so on? What is the right something-ness to address your particular nothingness?
4. Might what’s missing be the sort of thing that can only be addressed in the future? If, say, what is missing is an intimate encounter with thermodynamics and you need a ton of calculus first, what can you do as you wait for that encounter?
5. Can the hole be filled vicariously, by reading, watching, or thinking, or can it only be filled by living? Is the only way to fill the hole made by your craving for Rome or an Arctic adventure getting on a plane or joining an expedition? Or can you bide your time by reading a mystery set in Rome or by watching a documentary on the training of huskies?
For the person intending to meet up with Joe, that party is defined by Joe’s absence. Likewise, for you, life may be defined by what is missing. Joe is nowhere to be found. Is what you’re missing anywhere to be found? And how will you go about looking for it? No one has yet dreamed up perfect answers to these questions. The challenge of nothingness is with us.
[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: Shutterstock