"On Making Friends with Fear", an open letter by Justin Meyer
Photo credit: Kaia Miller
I spent a year in desperate search for the meaning of life.
I had never pondered death much before - it had always seemed like a distant concept. I could brush it aside through spiritual beliefs that I had taken for granted. At some point during March of 2022, it became not so distant. I was suddenly hyper-aware of everyone’s mortality and felt as though I was falling uncontrollably through time. Spirituality and religion became a complex mythos that humans had devised in their innate desire for self-preservation and survival, ways to cope with our own mortality.
I took on a feeling of meaninglessness and all the existential angst that accompanied it.
Perhaps it was my brain finally processing the years everyone had just spent living through the pandemic. Days of staying inside created a monotony in our lives that left everyone questioning where the past few years had gone. Perhaps it was graduating college a year earlier than expected. I would finally leave behind the education system after essentially my whole life, and the sense of structure that came with it. Perhaps it was celebrating my twenty-first birthday, the last birthday that our society ties a celebratory milestone to (Being able to legally purchase alcohol is generally seen as more exciting than being able to rent a car at the age of twenty-five). A birthday that also symbolized that I was probably around a quarter through my life, given that I was lucky enough to live the typical lifespan.
Maybe it was all of those things coming together to create the perfect storm. I became obsessed with the fact that everything and everyone around me is impermanent. I can’t say that I felt sad, more so disconnected from reality. I felt like I was watching time go by like it was a movie instead of being an active participant in life. It seemed silly to me that people were putting so much effort into things. Getting degrees, buying houses, and working their way through careers that they didn’t really like but gave them some sense of financial security. You couldn’t take these things into the afterlife, so why did it matter so much to have them? I felt increasingly alienated from reality.
I spent a last summer in Boston before moving to Brooklyn, New York. The existential crisis didn’t go away, though it became less prominent in my mind, instead lingering in the back of my mind.
Nature has always been somewhat of a sanctuary for me, so I often walk in the park nearby. I’ve taken up listening to podcasts on these walks, and now and then, they spark ideas for music projects. One afternoon, I listened to one where the speaker brought up making friends with fear. I cannot remember who it was now, but I thought it sounded like a great concept for a song. It’s a simple yet important concept, especially in our society. We spend a lot of time trying to avoid negative emotions, burying them and hoping they won’t resurface. We feel bad, and then we feel bad for feeling bad. Making friends with these feelings really means that we should accept them, even welcome them, instead of avoiding them at all costs.
In doing so, we can rid ourselves of the notion that we need to feel better. We don’t have much control over the thoughts that pop into our head, so why add to them by making ourselves feel bad for it? It is okay to sit with these thoughts and the feelings that accompany them. In doing so, we can usually overcome them faster and grow from them.
After a year of searching for the meaning of life, my conclusion is that there isn’t a one-size fits-all answer. There doesn’t seem to be a singular, grand purpose that we should all aspire to. Instead, we are all here to create our own meaning through each of our unique perspectives. The past year has taught me to embrace the unknown and the impermanence of things. Luckily, even existential dread is impermanent. Making friends with fear and welcoming all of life’s experiences, positive and negative, allow us to live in the moment and appreciate life. The present moment is all that really exists, so we might as well enjoy it.