[Kirism is the contemporary philosophy of life that I’ve been developing over the last several decades. It is psychological, philosophical, and existential and takes into account human nature, the human predicament, our contemporary understanding of the world, and our pressing individual and species-wide challenges. I hope that you’re enjoying learning more about it in this series of posts. To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced. To be in touch with me about Kirism, please drop me an email to [email protected].]
Life requires energy. And it takes so much energy to live a Kirist life. All those life purposes! All those daily practices! All that doing the next right thing and the right thing after that! All that saving the world! So much energy is required to live a Kirist life.
Ah, but it takes energy to live any life. Living requires energy. Without energy, human beings sink to their knees or take to their beds. No food for weeks? No reasons to live? No respite from stress? No break from overwhelm? What follows is exhaustion.
Life requires energy and living both generates energy and steals energy. A sudden passion and we are full of energy. A sudden defeat and the energy drains right out of us. This is nothing like the simple mechanics of a toy stopping when its battery dies.
Human energy is no simple affair. Say that you crave more passion in your life. You decide to throw yourself into a creative project. Your energy soars! But then you have trouble sleeping or relaxing. Was turning yourself on like that really such a good idea?
Well, you wanted the passion. But not the consequences! Imagine racing down the road with the top down and the wind whipping your hair. Lovely! But what if you are going too fast to negotiate that bend in the road? There you go, flying off a cliff!
Energy! We must get wiser about human energy. That is a Kirist goal and a Kirist practice. We need to understand what steals it, what creates it, when it is safe to increase it, what to do if our blood is boiling, and what to do if our energy has vanished. We want to learn all of energy’s peculiarities and subtleties!
It should be a subject taught in schools. There should be energy experts the equivalent of electrical engineers. There should be experts who could talk smartly about passion, listlessness, apathy, obsession, concentration, mania, distraction … about energy in all its manifestations!
Nothing is more fundamental to human life than energy. And yet we have few good ways of speaking about energy. When it comes to machines, we can talk about joules, watts and amperes. But when it comes to humans, we stand tongue-tied.
This lack of decent energy language prevents us from taking a fundamental feature of human existence into account. Imagine chatting about the relationships among celestial objects without a notion of gravity. What nonsense would ensue!
Indeed, we are rather talking nonsense when we fail to credit the extent to which states like passion, obsession, compulsion, and mania, on the one hand, and boredom, listlessness, mental fatigue and despair, on the other hand, are energy states.
We don’t even know if we are for energy or if we are against it! When we say that a child has high energy, aren’t we practically indicting him? We claim that his antics amount to a “mental disorder.” His high energy is at best a terrible inconvenience. We seem to hate energy!
Wouldn’t parents snap up a device to drain away all that energy? And what would you have then? A lethargic child. Now you have “pediatric depression.” Now a device to infuse him with energy! And then back to the one to turn him off!
Energy! What do we even mean by the word? Somewhere along the line, in Western parlance, we adopted the idea of a nervous system instead of an energy system. So, we started to equate energy with ideas like nervousness, anxiety, and mania.
That proved a fundamental mistake, one that we are still living with. Energy is different from states like anxiety, nervousness, obsession or mania. Energy is that mysterious vitality that distinguishes life from not life and living from hardly living.
Consider. When you despair, your energy dissipates. Where did your energy go? You had all sorts of energy … and then you didn’t. How can a mental state like boredom or despair possibly drain the body of physical energy? What is going on there?
You might think that this subject is maybe incidental to living, not really that important. But consider life challenges like anxiety, depression, addiction, mania, chronic fatigue, and so on. What if these are as much about energy regulation as about anything pseudo-medical? Wouldn’t that be good to know?
You heat up water in a boiler. You create steam. You give the boiler no way to release that steam. That boiler explodes. Is that too mechanical an explanation of explosive, impulsive or manic behavior? Or might that be close to what is actually going on? Wouldn’t that be good to know?
Life is certainly different from non-life. But what is that basic difference? The salient difference between an amoeba and a rock is that one is animated and the other isn’t. Something that is alive is animated and possesses energy. Life is energy.
Motorizing a toy truck doesn’t bring that toy to life, except metaphorically. Its engine allows it to move, bump into chair legs, and so on. But life is different from that and more dynamic than that. Life energy is different from engine combustion.
But different how? Is anything more important to know and yet more confusing? How did human energy get all heated up in a manic person? Where did the energy go in a despairing person? Did it drain out? Or is it still stored somewhere, as in a battery?
Wouldn’t it be good to know about all this? Kirists say that it would.
To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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