Comfortably or Uncomfortably Numb?

Hello

Is there anybody in there?

Just nod if you can hear me

Is there anyone home?

Can you name the song?  Ring a bell?  (SPOLER ALERT – I am going to answer, so wait if you are still working on it!)    

This the opening lyric to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb from The Wall album.  I was quite fond of The Wall and listened to it continually as a late teenager.  If you are a fan of the crackle of vinyl, I have the album for you!  I have often described my recent “funk” as being either comfortably or uncomfortably numb depending on the day.   Over the course of several years of receding, I found myself numb – with no clear purpose or passion.  Can you relate? 

Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, captured what I was feeling and named it Existential Vacuum.   Marshall H. Lewis, PhD, in The Existential Vacuum summarizes it this way (I added the bold):

A lack of recognized meaning and purpose in life is what Frankl calls the existential vacuum, a state he believes is the result of the frustration of the will to meaning.

Frankl describes a person experiencing the existential vacuum as living in a world in which previous traditions and values no longer provide guidance on what to do and a world in which the person may not even know what she wishes to do. A person in this situation may then simply do what others do (conformism) or do what others tell her to do (totalitarianism).  Manifestations of the existential vacuum include boredom, apathy, and sometimes noogenic neurosis, a clinical term devised by Frankl to describe psychological symptoms caused by moral and spiritual conflicts.

Man’s Search for Meaning is an anchor book for me now, packed with pearls of wisdom.  For me, it adds depth to Thoreau’s, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to their grave with their song still in them.”  Frankl emphasizes the individual journey we are all on:

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. 

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

I love the Nietzche quote that Frankl states: “Those who have a “why” to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’”

I often wonder if I am alone with my alone-ness.  I believe Frankl would say that I am NOT alone.  Frankl said that the existential vacuum is a “twentieth-century phenomenon in which many people feel that life is meaningless.”  I believe he would include the 21st century too!  He said:

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

Today, and everyday forward, I Dare to Act – I DARE to live a life true to myself, not the life others expect of me.  How about you?

In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast.  If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”