The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  Another possibility is that, if transcendence is accompanied by here-and-now oneness, then the reverse may also be true, and paying intense attention to the immediate environment may facilitate lift-off. This is the kind of attentiveness encouraged by writers like Joyce and Proust.

  For those of an active disposition, or those who distrust anything mystical and aesthetic, there is a lower-level transcendence of self in absorption.

  The American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uses the term ‘flow’ to describe a deeply satisfying state of mind achieved by intense and prolonged concentration on difficult activities requiring a high level of skill.220 The experience is similar for a wide range of apparently unrelated activities, including competitive sport, mountain-climbing, professional work, playing an instrument, artistic creativity, dancing, martial arts and sex. Again the phenomenon is well known and really only a special case of happiness as by-product.

  As with other methods of transcendence, this satisfaction has to be earned. Skill must first be acquired, slowly and frustratingly. There is no immediate gratification. Indeed, there may never be any. The learner may not have the aptitude or the discipline. But when the skill becomes automatic the miracle may occur – an absorption so complete that it shuts out self, place and time. Hours, even days, can go by unremarked. The self dissolves and disappears. And something strange happens. The activity seems to become not only effortless but autonomous – to take over, to assume control, to be running itself. So the musical instrument plays itself, the sword wields itself, the poem writes itself, the dancer does not so much dance as permit music to enter and take over the body, and the lovers do not so much make love as surrender to the vertiginous movement of the earth.

  There are many paradoxes in this. Intense effort is needed to produce the sensation of effortlessness, intense consciousness to lead to unconsciousness, total control to experience the total absence of control. And only those fully in possession of the self can fully surrender it. In fact, the stronger the sense of self, the greater the rapture in escaping its tyranny.

  As in meditation, the flow experience is a consequence of persistent, concentrated attention – and ‘attention’ is a key word both for Csikszentmihalyi and Zen Buddhism. The concept of flow is also familiar to Zen. Here is D.T. Suzuki, explaining how the master swordsman Takuan instructed novices: ‘Takuan’s advice is concerned with keeping the mind always in the state of ‘flowing’, for when it stops the flow is interrupted and this interruption is injurious to the well-being of the mind. In the case of a swordsman it means death.’221

  This repeated intense focus on a difficult activity is exactly what creates or enhances brain connections. And the pleasure of the flow high is so intense that it reduces the attractions of power, status and celebrity and, above all, of passive entertainment, encouraging instead a desire to experience a similar satisfaction in other activities. This is why theoretical physicists play the bongo drums.

  The trick is to understand that the attention and difficulty are what bring the reward. When Csikszentmihalyi surveyed teenagers, he discovered that those with least flow activity, who watched lots of television and hung out in shopping malls, also scored lowest on all satisfaction ratings, whereas those who studied or engaged in sports scored highly on every rating – or on all except one. They believed that the mall rats and couch potatoes were having more fun, too influenced by the tyranny of cool to realize that they themselves were the blessed. This is an instance of a general rule – youth rarely realizes the value of what it has.

  And how thrilling to learn, from another of Csikszentmihalyi’s surveys, that the more expensive, bulky and complex the hobby equipment, the less enjoyable the hobby. Perhaps there is a just God after all. Much more satisfying are walking and dancing, where the body is its own equipment and instrument. Walking and dancing, rhythm regular and ecstatic, the prose and poetry of the body.

  The humblest flow activity, walking, is also an effective way of creating readiness for exaltation. There is a theory that bipedalism is the source of the superior human intelligence. When the human animal got up on its hind legs, the front legs became free for gesturing, which evolved into sign language and eventually speech – and this rich new verbal language massively increased brain size. Certainly, using the four limbs as pistons seems to fire up the brain.

  Nietzsche, the philosopher of exaltation, was a fanatical walker. So was his arch-enemy Christ. Only the iconography shows Christ at rest; Leonardo da Vinci has him seated at the Last Supper – but a good teacher never sits. He would have been moving round with a word of reassurance here and a word of inspiration there. And most representations of the Sermon on the Mount show the customary static pose with sorrowful eyes and submissively outstretched arms. But Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St Matthew has Christ storming up the hill throwing freshly minted beatitudes over his shoulder to disciples scrambling, both physically and mentally, to keep up. Not the Sermon on the Mount but the Sermon on the Hoof.

  Nietzsche often walked for six to eight hours a day and had some of his best insights on these walks. And he was also obsessed by dancing: ‘I could believe only in a God who knew how to dance.’222 Nietzsche himself regretted that he was unable to boogie: ‘I know how to utter the parable of the highest things only in dance – and now my greatest parable has remained unspoken in my limbs.’223 And he described himself as the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, the horned god of ecstasy and original Lord of the Dance, the presiding deity of early rituals and worshipped under a variety of names including Bacchus, Pan, Faunus, Osiris and Shiva. Dionysus (known in Ireland as Satan) even turned up near my hometown in the 1960s – in a dance hall, of course. An ordinary Saturday night in the Mecca was galvanized by the appearance of a strikingly handsome stranger, dressed all in black, who could jive with astoundingly languid ease. All the women yearned to be with him; of course, he chose the most lovely. This girl danced all night in ecstasy and agreed to go outside but, as they were leaving, glanced down and saw, just in the nick of time, the cloven hoof. There could be no mistaking the identity of the stranger. Though, when I heard the story I wondered how, if he was resourceful enough to look like Cary Grant, dress like Johnny Cash and move like Elvis, he could fail to have disguised that stupid hoof. In an earlier era, women would have gladly followed the god into the woods but, in 60s Ireland, they remained at home – and the Mecca was obliged to close down.

  More than any other thinker, Nietzsche devoted himself to the pursuit of transcendence in all stages of intensity – zest, intoxication, joy and exaltation – and this is both his strength and his weakness. Nietzsche is the great aerator of life, the tonic in the G & T (Schopenhauer is the slice of lemon). Nietzsche effervesces, dances, leaps but, when the fizz dies away, there is nothing left. There is little to retain and use. Nietzsche’s main function may be as a non-pharmacological mood enhancer, a thinker more to be snorted than studied. He himself used books as illegal stimulants. The aim was not to learn but to get high and stay aloft. So his famous Will to Power, a book title chosen not by Nietzsche himself but posthumously by his editors, was really only a form of personal intoxication: ‘The first effect of happiness is the feeling of power.’224 Note the key phrase ‘the feeling of power’. I have come across this phrase nine times so far in his work – but I have yet to find him praising the exercise or wielding of power. Indeed, he had nothing but contempt for those who sought worldly supremacy: ‘They all strive towards the throne: it is a madness they have – as if happiness sat on a throne! Usually filth sits on the throne.’225 He despised those who had struggled to gain power over others and admired the saints and ascetics who had struggled to gain power over themselves. What he sought was a purely personal transcendence.

  His mistake was to try to make a temporary condition permanent. He went mad, if not from then certainly in euphoria. Perhaps God, annoyed at being written off as dead, decided to show this so-called Ubermensch who had the
livelier sense of humour and made the lifelong denouncer of pity embrace in tears a dying horse being whipped by a coachman in the street.

  The other thing to remember is that Nietzsche was frequently play-acting, being outrageous merely in order to shock. And, from the Marquis de Sade to William Burroughs, the standard way to shock has been to extol cruelty. But no one genuinely cruel would make such a public profession. You do not have to pretend to be what you are. The Nazis, whom Nietzsche is accused of inspiring, never boasted of being cruel. Instead they boasted of being the benefactors of mankind. But the danger with playacting is that it is interpreted literally by the naive. Nietzsche himself foresaw this misunderstanding: ‘The high spirits of kindness may look like malice.’226

  Nietzsche is like the Zen masters who jolted their disciples into attention with koans, combinations of paradox, illogicalness, surprise and shock – one of the most famous, attributed to Linji, is: ‘If you meet the Buddha kill him.’ Sometimes the jolt was not just mental, as in this koan of Toku-san’s, which I would love to use to bring instant enlightenment to my own students: ‘Thirty blows of my staff when you have something to say; thirty blows just the same when you have nothing to say.’227

  Nietzsche is the only Western thinker to have the key Zen quality of zest – and this alone makes him worth reading: ‘Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book- I call that vicious!’228 This ‘vicious’ at the end is so unexpected but perfect that it provokes the rare and wonderful thing – a laugh of sheer delight.

  Another lower form of transcendence, zest is more an attitude than a state, so it can be cultivated. It requires first detachment and then the paradoxical engagement that detachment can facilitate, a combination of curiosity, attentiveness and analysis. Zest loves the world but refuses to take the world at its own valuation and finds this usually solemn and self-important valuation ridiculous. So zest is essentially subversive. It is a gleeful delight in the absurdity of the human condition and an ironic acknowledgement of the infinite comic genius of God.

  The quintessentially zestful character is Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – an intermediary between his ridiculous squabbling fairy masters and the equally ridiculous squabbling humans, Puck is a mere functionary, an administrator with little power to initiate or control – and, as is frequently the fate of administrators, he is given incomplete knowledge and then blamed for inappropriate action. Yet he never complains. Indeed, an example to all resentful employees, he enjoys both his work and his unsocial hours, relishing the absurdity of humans (‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’229) and absurdity in general (‘And those things do best please me that befall preposterously’230).

  Puck is a sophisticated and ironic Lord of Misrule, the character in medieval carnivals who mocks and satirizes the established order. And satire and mockery were often features of the early ecstatic rituals. Zest has long been a feature of transcendence and has always involved irreverent humour.

  How to become blessed with zest? Seek it out – it is found most often in art forms that favour short bursts. This is why it is rare in philosophy (Nietzsche turned increasingly to aphorisms) and also rare in novels (though there is Terry Southern’s classic short novel, The Magic Christian, which has a perfect Lord of Misrule for the capitalist age in billionaire prankster Guy Grand).

  Zest is most at home in poetry and jazz – and it is no coincidence that both are rhythm based. But the spontaneous directness and brevity of good poems and jazz solos make them seem easy. It looks and sounds as though anyone could do it. So anyone and everyone tries, with the result that 99 per cent of poetry and jazz is depressing crap. It takes time and energy to seek out the real thing.

  Good jazz solos are especially hard to find. So I went to a legendary New York club more in a spirit of pilgrimage than in the hope of being inspired. And the club was indeed dispiriting – a dank, dark, shabby basement selling overpriced wine that tasted like antifreeze laced with gall. The musicians were heavy, disabused, middle-aged black men, required to invent and astonish twice nightly, with three shows at weekends. Who could? So they coasted along, desultorily supported by a white-haired drummer who had once played with several of the long-dead greats and was now obviously reconciled to going through the motions for a living. The audience, sparse and white, responded with as little enthusiasm, and the musicians acknowledged the thin applause with weary nods. This is life. You make do. You get through.

  But, towards the end of the final set, one of the saxophonists suddenly stepped forward, spread his legs, drew breath and, rising up on the balls of his feet, blew ferociously, searingly, mockingly, superfluously. It was an electric shock that jolted everyone out of the mood of torpor and competence. That slumber of habit and routine was not life. This was life – complex, surprising, defiant and zestful.

  This time the audience response was sincere – but the soloist was deaf to it. He threw himself down on a banquette and listened to the sweetest applause, from within. Though it must have been sweet too when the old drummer, hitherto Mount Rushmore grim, leaned across with the sticks to tap lightly on his arm.

  PART IV

  The Applications

  11

  The Absurdity of Work

  Solemnly, in the fading light of late afternoon, a group of people form a loose circle standing a few feet from each other and turn expectantly to their leader, who produces a giant ball of twine and, taking hold of the loose end, throws the ball to one of the circle, crying, ‘Mike, I thought that idea of yours was pretty good.’ Holding on to the twine to maintain a link, Mike tosses the ball across the circle, saying, Jo, I thought you presented really well.’ Jo also takes firm hold of the twine before throwing the ball on to Chris with a glowing comment on his performance. So the ball, gradually diminishing, and accompanied always by praise, travels from Chris to Jill to Dave to Sue to Bob to Jen to Zak and so on around the circle until the last person throws back what remains to the leader, who grasps an end of the twine firmly in each hand, like a set of reins, and proudly regards this complex web of affirmation, declaring, ‘I’m just so lucky to have such a wonderful team!

  This ritual, known as ‘the web’, closes the ritual of ‘the away day’. Both are new rituals of the religion of work, a relatively late addition to the great world religions, but one rapidly gaining converts and with a growing number of fundamentalists.

  So nowhere is detachment more necessary than in the workplace. But nowhere is detachment more difficult to achieve. For this is what pays for the house and the car, the dinners in restaurants with big, heavy spoons and starched napkins, and the holidays in bougainvillea-smothered villas in Provence. The alternative could well be socializing round a fire built in an oil drum. And the massive investment of time and energy in work creates a desperate need for an adequate return – so there is a tendency to overestimate the value of colleagues, the work itself and one’s own contribution. It is easy to develop the illusion of being an indispensable member of a great bunch of guys doing a great job of work.

  In fact, the great victory of the work religion has been to increase the pressure to conform while almost entirely removing any awareness of conformity. Once people worked in order to live; now working is living. As with shopping and travel and communication, the means has become the end. Your job is your identity and status, your life. Long gone is the notion of work as a tedious necessity that supports the true life. Now everyone wants a job. Kings, presidents, assassins, priests, poets and prostitutes – all claim to be merely workers getting on with the job. And so the religion of work grows in confidence. How laughable the twentieth-century predictions that technology would permit everyone lives of leisure – and the fears that we would be unable to occupy adequately all this free time (Hannah Arendt agonized about the future of a society of workers deprived of work). How shocking to think that, in the Middle Ages, people worked only for part of the week and half the year, whereas 70-hour week
s with few holidays are now common in major US and UK corporations. As Erich Fromm remarked, ‘There is no other period in history in which free men have given their energy so completely for the one purpose: work.’231

  The secret of successful religions is benign paternalism. In return for surrender of freedom, the religion provides the appearance of loving care and the ability to satisfy all needs. So the corporations have become self-contained worlds with their own shops, cafes, bars, restaurants, gyms, hairdressers, massage rooms and medical facilities. The workplace is the new village, a community offering not merely employment and status but all essential services, a rich, varied social life and fun, fun, fun, fun.

  The sibling society needs social networks – and the workplace is a ready-made, obliging social network. Why look elsewhere for company? Or romance? The taboo on workplace relationships is weakening. According to the job-search website CareerBuilder, the percentage of workers who feel it necessary to keep an office romance secret is falling steadily: ‘You might have heard the warning, ‘Don’t dip your pen in the company ink’, but, for today’s worker, that advice is considered outdated.’