it can happen to anybody. After all, the rest of us can be haunted by the idea that we haven’t accomplished as much as we could. But Tolstoy was one of the greatest writers who ever lived and knew it. Wealth and fame and accomplishment do not spare anybody from the valley.
THE REST OF US
There are people who go through life without ever stumbling into the valley, and more power to them. But most of us have had to endure some season of suffering, some season when we had to ask ourselves the fundamental questions.
Suffering comes in many forms. Some people are busy at work but realize they’ve lost the thread of their lives. Some people suffer a heartbreak. Some people lose a loved one, which makes them feel as if some bright future is forever lost. Others get knocked sideways by a heart attack, cancer, or stroke. Others experience failure or scandal; they’ve built their identity on some external performance, and that is now gone.
For some people this feeling is not a dramatic crisis. It’s just a creeping malaise, a gradual loss of enthusiasm in what they are doing. The Jungian analyst James Hollis had a patient who explained it this way: “I always sought to win whatever the game was, and only now do I realize how much I have been played by the game.” A person may fight ferociously to win success, to be better than everybody else, and then one day find it all seems empty and meaningless. “Unable to value, unable to enjoy,” one of Tolstoy’s characters says.
In an essay for Oprah, writer Ada Calhoun described the way many women even in their thirties and forties feel adrift, like they’re misleading their lives. One of her friends, forty-one, told her, “Sometimes, I have these moments of clarity, usually during lengthy conference calls,” she said. “This voice in my head suddenly starts shouting: What are you doing? This is pointless and boring! Why aren’t you out there doing something you love?”
In his book Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz describes his own descent into young despond. He grew up in a family of engineers and scientists and assumed that science was what he wanted to do with his life. Before a single class in college, before permitting himself to live with a single moment of uncertainty, he decided to double major in biology and psychology. Before stepping foot on campus he’d locked up three-quarters of the courses he would take there. By the time he realized he should have been an English major, it was too late to change, so he graduated with a degree in two subjects he had no desire to pursue professionally.
Lacking a clear goal for his life, he parked himself in a place that would allow him to keep his options open. He applied to law school, and then when it was clear that he had no interest in the law, he applied to journalism school, which he had no interest in either, and then took a job at a nonprofit. “So there I was, a couple of years after college, bitter from the fact that I had thrown away the chance to get an education, working a job that meant nothing to me, my career essentially dead in the water, my self-belief in ruins, with no idea what I wanted to do or where I should go next.”
People generally go through a familiar process before they can acknowledge how comprehensive their problem is. First, they deny that there’s something wrong with their life. Then they intensify their efforts to follow the old failing plan. Then they try to treat themselves with some new thrill: They have an affair, drink more, or start doing drugs. Only when all this fails do they admit that they need to change the way they think about life.
THE TELOS CRISIS
This is a telos crisis. A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile. Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.” If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks. But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse. As Seamus Heaney put it, “You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass.”
In my experience, a telos crisis comes in two forms, walking and sleeping. In the walking