“I have everything, and I have nothing.” People say this sentence quietly, almost apologetically. They have a job, a partner, a flat, friends, travel. They have nothing to complain about, and that is exactly the hardest part, because guilt arrives along with the emptiness: how dare I feel like this when others have real problems? People around them ask what is missing, and they have no answer. This text is for those who are looking for that answer.
Sunday evenings
Emptiness rarely appears in the middle of work. It appears when work stops: on Sunday evenings, on holiday, after a great success, in the quiet after a celebration. While obligations last, the emptiness cannot be heard. When they fall silent, what lies beneath them can be heard. This needs saying too: if the emptiness comes with deep hopelessness, disturbed sleep and appetite, or thoughts that it would be better if you were not here, see a doctor straight away or call emergency services, not in a few months’ time. But for many people, emptiness is not that. They function well, they work, they laugh, and only now and then do they feel that someone else is doing all of it in their place.
A life lived by a list
People who feel this kind of emptiness have often completed the list. School, university, job, flat, relationship, perhaps a child. Every item was sensible and every one arrived on time. The problem is not in the items, but in who wrote the list. If every decision was made according to what one should do, what is safe, what the parents would approve of and what counts as success around you, then a person has received everything that was asked of them, and has never asked what they want. Spinoza, from whom this practice borrows its name, wrote a sentence worth remembering: we do not desire a thing because we judge it to be good; we judge it to be good because we desire it. Emptiness arises when that order is reversed, when one chases what others have declared good and leaves one’s own desire for later. For a later that never comes.
Emptiness is often not a lack of things, but a lack of desire in the things we have.
An example
The example is invented and put together from several typical situations.
A man of thirty-five, a programmer, well paid, in a stable relationship. He comes because Sunday evenings have become unbearable, and he does not know why. In the first conversations he lists everything he has, as if defending himself against an accusation. When I ask him what was the last thing he did simply because he wanted to, he is silent for a long time. Then he remembers that as a boy he used to repair old radios with his grandfather, and that he would lose all sense of time. A few years ago he threw away the box of parts, because it was “useless”. The rule we then found was one he had heard at home since he was small: be safe and do not waste time. The task sounded like a joke: one Saturday afternoon, to do something with no use at all and notice what he felt. First he felt guilt, so strong that he nearly gave up. Then boredom. And then, over a second-hand radio from the flea market, he noticed that three hours had passed. The guilt had been the rule’s guard. Once he had walked past it, the rule could be seen for the first time.
What can change
Emptiness does not ease when one more item is added to the list: a new trip, a new hobby, a new goal. That only makes the list longer. It eases when one finds the rule by which the list was written, names it, and tests in life, in small steps, what happens when one does something nobody asked for. Nothing has to be torn down. Room just has to be made for what was put off. One question is enough to begin with: when did you last do something simply because you wanted to? And who told you that was not reason enough?