The Path to One’s Life

To exist in the contemporary age

“To sing, to laugh, to dream, to walk in my own way and be alone, free, with an eye to see things as they are, a voice that means manhood — to cock my hat where I choose — At a word, a Yes, a No, to fight — or write.” — Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Act II, Scene 8, 1897 *

As you may have noticed for some time now (or read on social media), it’s not that difficult to get caught up in the everyday grind, letting external factors decide for you, and to forget what truly matters. You may have realized that your main agenda at work and in life has turned into the pursuit of constant adequacy with the zeitgeist, holding as a defect or failure everything that deviates from some abstract mean. You may feel anxious when you approach the edges of the mainstream, worried that you might cross a line, somehow troubled by everything that is not already traced on a plan, and eventually of everything that you would have not already experienced.

Simultaneously, you are exposed to endless perceived options, unexpected opportunities and threats, so every choice raises the doubt to miss something, especially since everything has to happen during this lifetime, there is only one life to live, not seven, you are not a cat. We live in a “yolo + fomo” world (Miller, 2020).

Jim Gaffigan, the American stand-up comedian, humorously expressed this sense of confusion when he explained why going to Starbucks drives him insane: there are far too many coffee options to choose from, and as humans, we don’t know how to handle them (Late Night with Seth Meyers, March 2nd, 2023).

It seems as if a life with no freedom to choose may not be worth living, but a life with too much choice leads to paralysis, bad decisions and dissatisfaction (Grant & Schwartz, 2011). As the statement printed on the chest of a popular teen fashion brand’s t-shirt recently indicated: “I am free, that is why I’m lost.” (Undercoverism, 2022)

The Weariness of Being Oneself

If, as Freud thought, people became neurotic because they had to repress their socially forbidden desires, they now become depressed because they have to endure the illusion that everything is possible for them, on top of carrying the burden of “becoming oneself” in accordance with contemporary normative values (Ehrenberg, 1998).

“Man the fuck up!” - Tom Wambsgans to “Cousin Greg”, Succession, season 2, episode 2

Depressive individuals feel no motivation and have no projects. They are inhibited, impulsive or compulsive, communicate badly with themselves and with others, get frequently irritated, susceptible and recriminating against everyone (Nasio, 2012). Weary from morning to night, without future, bitter and disillusioned, they are unable to seize life’s opportunities, allegedly waiting for them to be grabbed like ripe fruit.

“Equal opportunities for all. Everywhere.” - Credit Suisse, empowerment campaign, 2022

Depressive individuals precisely lack what is applauded in today’s society. They are the exact opposite of the successful, individualistic and disruptive entrepreneur, the exacerbated competitor who launches space rockets (“The sky has no limits!”), who embodies the new social ideal, a reference point in the imaginary landscape.

Project, motivation and communication have now dominated corporate cultures, and the norm is no longer based on guilt and discipline, but on choice and initiative. Flexibility, change and reactivity have replaced obedience, compliance and conformity as the top three hashtags associated with success, and it is not surprising that some of us may become tired of having to choose, and fantasize instead about being chosen, preferring the comfort of bureaucracy, the security of conformability, sticking to routines, eventually imitating the behavior and even the thinking of others, in order to reduce existential anxiety, or at least the fear of doing and saying “the wrong thing”, even if it means giving up the ability to be free (Magee, 1974). Unfortunately, what may at first seem like a safe life strategy ends up stiffening you, you feel stuck, and despite their efforts, no osteopath will be able to relieve you.

The more you get used to seeing your spontaneous reactions automated, the more reality will seem to lose its vitality. A certain strangeness may grow and permeates your life, as a signal of the conflict aroused in the face of your tacit conformism, as if having become adaptable to everything, you were losing your ability to discriminate between right and wrong, good or bad, slowly losing the meaning you attribute to your own actions (Amati Sas, 1989). It’s as if you’ve become comfortably numb, vaguely remembering a song from your teenage years, but you’re no longer able to tell if you still like it or not.

To find some momentary comfort, you may sometimes take refuge in a dependency position, looking for someone to guide you, to bring meaning for your life, craving for a powerful leader to give you a “vision” and take decisions for you. This allows you to breathe for a while, but the hope inevitably leads to disappointment. As human beings we will always struggle with the need to be led and the desire to be free (Kets de Vries, 2022).

The Unavoidable Pain

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it is by better accepting your limits, facing some of your frustrations, and becoming more aware of your finitude, that it is possible to act again. To embrace some suffering is unavoidable.

No work could be born without confronting the inevitable failures, the false starts, the aborted attempts, the endurance necessary to interact with the reality that always resists us (Dejours, 2021).

By daring “to pause between stimulus and response” (May, 1963, p. 103) and finding the courage to face responsibility, you eventually acknowledge the fact that you have to make your own decisions about what to do and what to choose to ignore, and that it is not possible to transfer this responsibility to someone else (Yalom, 1980, p. 221).

To accept responsibility is not a trivial endeavor. It brings you face to face with your most unacknowledged fears, fears often rooted in your past, when you were still looking for permission to live your life, craving for attention and reassurance, making you ignore from time to time the empowered adult you have become since then (Hollis, 2005, p. 256).

Internal precariousness is the price to pay to regain a sense of living and to experience freedom, as the “capacity for choice within the natural and self-imposed limits of living” (Schneider & Krug, 2010, p.13), as well as to continue to blossom and become more whole.

Spoiler warning: The path to freedom is not a quiet and always pleasant journey, it is a bumpy road and the heart is intensely put to work.

The Experience of Existential Freedom

Freedom implies responsibility, and only when you are able to assume responsibility, both a source of suffering and pleasure, will you be able to encounter the life that wishes to come into being through you (Hollis, 2005, p. 257).

As you practice more spontaneously listening for excuses in the people around you, endlessly recounting self-limiting stories about why they can’t change, you begin seeing those excuses more clearly in yourself. As you slowly, cautiously, free yourself from the chains of some self-imposed limitations — and this is perhaps one of the biggest accomplishments one can achieve (Rothman, 2020), you begin to feel more often than not at peace with how you wish to be and how you wish to relate with others.

The process often begins with accepting personal responsibility for one’s actions rather than trying to excuse them or blaming others.
By growing out of the existence of a merely functional being, you regain your ability to think. You emancipate yourself and are now able to welcome leadership within yourself, ushered into an adult-adult conversation with your own powers (Whyte, 2001, p. 47). You embrace spontaneously and more fully instants charged with affect, you welcome more serenely the past in the present, and you are not as much determined by it anymore — this backward return has the feel of a reunion and of a reconciliation, and it carries you forward (Pontalis, 1997).

Making choices and decisions are less frightening and your options become clearer.

Beyond the sole achievement of results, your work evolves into a conscious practice that is continually testing your sense of responsibility, and as such, also your identity, opening a pathway toward a greater sense of coherence, wholeness and relatedness to the world.

As you recognize your strengths and weaknesses more honestly, having had a peak at your deep-down hidden “dark spots” (where you aren’t Mr. or Mrs. Nice Guy, this typically pleasant and likable person who avoids at all cost causing trouble or dissension), you live more truly and begin to ‘ex-ist’ out of a life of conformity, routine, and repetition. You feel closer to yourself, and if some of your wounds still hurt from time to time, they are no longer denied, and may even become drivers for your actions in creative new ways (Corcos, 2023).

Ultimately, responsibility makes it possible to regain a sense of wonder, to bring back meaning to one’s life and work, and therefore to feel more alive, and maybe even to enjoy living and working more, that is to say, to improvise, to call upon the intelligence of action, and also imagination, relating to the present as well as to the past and the future, to then take a stand according to what you incarnate and what is dear to you.

Spring is here.

Welcome to an endless journey.

* In his heroic tragedy Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand presented a fictional character with talents as a swordsman, poet and writer, whose eloquence is rivaled only by the length of his nose. Cyrano de Bergerac, “born” at the end of a century in a France on the threshold of modernism, when the airplane and the car were about to change the world, reactivated values dear to the nation, such as the taste for beautiful actions and noble sentiments, as well as the cult of verbal jousting. Historically, directors have been accustomed to giving this role to middle-aged actors, whereas in 1640 the historical Cyrano was only 21 years old.

I am an organizational psychologist and executive coach with an online and private practice based in Geneva, Switzerland. I engage in reflective conversations with individuals who wish to think through leadership and work challenges to gain new perspectives and dare to look within to unlock their own potential.

References
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