Living day to day with the weight of existing

I think others here have dove into some pretty good hypotheses on why you might be feeling the way you are so I'm going to push the boat out and ask about one that hits closer to home for me and my loved ones. Take this with a big ol' grain of salt.

Did you get conditional love growing up where praise, affection, and love were based on you being successful or excelling at something?

This was the case for my partner and she was quite successful at it until the end of college. Well she still is but doesn't see it that way. She graduated 9th in her high school class. She was track captain from sophomore year on. She went to the #1 public university in the US with a partial ride scholarship. She excelled at the things most suburban parents push - academic, sports, music, and extracurriculars. Fast forward to today, over a decade outside of university, and she feels unsatisfied with her life. She has had the jobs of her dreams (eg. NASA), lives less than a mile from the beach, makes a very healthy salary, and still she wants more.

When we talk about how content we are in our lives, we are on two completely different wavelengths and it took nearly 4 years of couples counseling to get a better understanding of why. When she was growing up her parents gave her conditional love and she now assumes that is how everyone will behave. That if she messes something up I'll be upset or if she fails at something I'll be embarrassed or ridicule her. It's lead to friction because I couldn't understand why she wouldn't own up to little accidents or problems that would happen around the house. I was never mad, just confused. Same with most things in our life, the current iteration is sold as the best. It's a really hard place to be because it requires constant improvement, and that's not really how life works. She ran a marathon in 2023, and was so proud, but then she got injured after the race training she fell into a depression about her fitness. She's always looking for the bigger and badder thing and for a couple of folks staring headlong at middle age, I don't think it's a maintainable perspective.

I could be completely off base but try to just marinate in where you are at and the little things that delight you and bring you joy. There is an awesome episode of This American Life that talks about that feeling. The story on the tomato and coming to the US for the first time are my favorites. If you can find little things in your life that make you happy - and not just the traditional ones that we're "supposed" to derive happiness and meaning from - you might feel a bit lighter.

When I was younger I oscillated wildly between being happy and being fulfilled. When I let myself relax and be happy, I felt like I wasn't living up to my potential. When I killed myself working and had a cot in my office while writing my thesis and publishing papers, I wasn't happy.

I feel like I am either wasting my existence when I am consuming media, wasting my time attempting to create when others have voices or messages with stronger meaning, or wasting other's time when I hang around them.

It seems like maybe you have created a comfortable life, but haven't given yourself permission to enjoy it, or you don't feel recognized for your accomplishments so you feel the need to compare your efforts and abilities to others.

I don't think anyone here can give you a silver bullet. I think you need to ask yourself what you want in life, really want, not what you think others want in life or what you should want in life. There is nothing wrong with a comfortable life, with hobbies and diversions that fulfill you. There is also nothing wrong with a life of service to some mission or passion of creativity. Or a mix.

If at the end of that you realize you want to build or achieve something for your own sake, to feel fulfilled, then put together a plan and figure out how to balance that with your happiness. If you are also happy simply enjoying what you have carved out for yourself, then give yourself permission to do so.

In life we have the remembering self, the experiencing self, and the anticipating self. Figuring out how to satisfy all three at the same time is a trick that requires introspection.

Best of luck and have a great night!

I'm probably younger than you, but for what it's worth, I think I know this "natural weight of existing" or something like it. I also know the guilt or discomfort in feeling so heavy in spite of all your gratitude.

Perhaps, like me, you're looking for a problem to solve and struggling to feel free because you can't identify it. What action can I make on what object to change the conditions of the system? My revelation: abandon the search for proximate cause. We prescribe a mechanical cause-and-effect model to our interior philosophy, nominally because that's how we prove things in the real world, how we know truth. But inward light is not strictly academic or linear or knowable, and probably less individual than we believe.

Some say that desire is the root of all suffering. If we expect our natural state of being—our existential communion with an indeterminate universe—to hold with the procedures and definitions of the physical world (and the rules of all the systems we've contrived), maybe it's no surprise that we translate the ensuing incongruity into feeling ambiguously stuck, confined, or pressed upon: weighted.

This isn't "useful," but I think that's the point.

I feel like I am either wasting my existence ... wasting my time ... or wasting other's time

Material, interpersonal, and existential gratefulness is important. However, the mantra of "be grateful for what you have" that we are taught as children is a bit close-ended for me.

I don't see gratefulness as just a feeling (I feel grateful), nor just as an action (I express my gratefulness), but more of as... information for other emotions. I find my thoughts to be parallel, layered, mirror-wise. To me, being grateful for some tangible thing or fact of life is a pathway for listening to and inhabiting other conceptions—not just an end in itself.

If I used one word to describe the opposite of the "weight," as I experience it, I would say "imagination." I think that mindfulness can reveal emotional pathways that make that more apparent. There is something about creativity as a behavior and emotion which seems to unlock delight: a dreamlike lightness that I automatically had when I was very young that has been slowly whittled away in my world of specificity. But I find that it's still there, as long as I look.

The "wasting my existence when I am consuming media" part jumped out to me. Sorry if I'm stealing the blog from you in this post, I feel like this flashed the past 8 months or so for me and hopefully my thought process helps somewhere along the way.

A little over half a year ago I was trying to learn some AWS in response to instability at my job. I wasn't sticking to the self-guided lessons at night, and in general I found I wasn't able to focus even on just some fun things like games; I was pretty down over it, and I'd had some periods in my life before, so I didn't want to get trapped in it again. I found a therapist, thankfully the first one I'd really call good in my life.

I'm lying to bury the lede here - I went to therapy first to figure out some grounding stuff, because I had my first three month-old child in the house and I was getting really riled up when I wasn't doing a good job at that... He and I both evened out when his sleep got in line around month five. But once my wife and I finally got free time back in our lives, then I was having a ton of trouble paying attention at night. Which I was still stressed me out, and the things that typically cheered me up weren't, which stressing me out... It was rough. I have ADHD and SAD, so I asked my therapist what to do, from the perspective of things like focus techniques.

After talking it over with her, for some reason it didn't occur to me that, y'know, I'm a new parent? I've got a shitload going on? Internally this didn't line up; I was just thinking - not even thinking, feeling - things like. "This time is precious." "I can't believe I didn't get anything done tonight." "Why am I not enjoying this?" Everything I was thinking was completely fuckin setting myself up for failure, and it was so obvious from how I talked about it, but I just did not hear it until it was parroted back. I can't even recall the conversation that flipped the switch, but something she said made me realize just how damn hard I've been on myself about this part of my life despite having a newborn in the house. It sounds like the "stop doing that" doctor joke thinking about how immediate the change was in my attitude, but it really felt like one sentence later a balloon in my chest deflated. That weight you talk about was completely gone once I reframed it to "you have a kid now, chill out and let yourself be tired." That snowballed into realizing I'd been like this my whole life.

I started keeping a log of what I did every night after that point, and instead of being critical about what was in it I just accepted whatever was in there as good. It lasted a week, and it was basically just noting that I played video games, hung out with people, and once I just said I "rested". I stopped tracking it after a week because I stopped feeling such a cloud over myself at night. Just yesterday I felt the negativity bubbling up again about not getting anything done; I immediately reminded myself that gets me nowhere. Instead I just went to sleep early, and I feel no regret about having done that. Tonight - even after work, the baby, and a weird improv mess of a roast took up most of the day and night - I practiced both guitar and bass, I played some motherfuckin Pokemon, and I just watched anime of my own volition for the first time in years. I'm happy, and if I don't get that level of productivity tomorrow that's a-okay. I'm just ecstatic to call that all productivity now.

This is the module for reflecting on self-criticism and self-compassion which she sent to help hammer it in, even if sounds kind of obvious surface-level reading through it. Maybe it'll help. But whether that's the root problem for you I'm not sure - from what you're telling us, you have a positive view of your life. I did too, though, I just didn't give myself the space to relax in it or notice the things like calling media consumption "wasting your existence." I think part of why I'm writing this out is, there may be some kind of negative pattern here that neither you nor I can see or really unearth without a constant back-and-forth. My wife is a therapist, and she jokes that it's odd that therapy is like surgery where you can't do it on yourself; part of that, I think, is we can't see our own blind spots when we're us. You may want to find a good therapist who can maybe pick that out for you.

I definitely get it. Birth is a not a choice, and slowly decaying meat is a horrifyingly limited and fragile anchor to existence. No amount of medication, drugs, or therapy will "fix" this because it's just a fact. Our brains pick holes in happiness because that's how previous meat survived. Sure, there are ways to try and counteract that, and I hope people's suggestions or your own ideas will work for you as long as you need, but I think acceptance may be the only reliable and persistent one.

In the end, I think you should pet your dog about it.

I think humans are wired to always want more. You can see how it’s useful evolutionarily if you are satisfied after hunting a large animal, you may soon find yourself out of resources with no other options lined up.

Maybe it would be useful to also think about what your next goal may be instead of just trying to feel gratitude for what you have?

I have no idea how to word this, as every similar post that I've seen has had an obvious cause, in some way shape or form. I, on the other hand, feel pretty shitty even writing this up know that others have actual problems that I am taking that visibility from.

I want to challenge these presumptions. Hopefully in a helpful way!

Why does there have to be an obvious cause? Or even a cause at all? It's nice to know, sure, but in my view problem that needs to be fixed is different from the cause or root of the problem. Like someone else says, maybe you have a depression - the cause of which can be very difficult to find. But the problem is a chemical imbalance in your brain, which is what we can work on attacking. I'm in therapy and while I did need to talk about causes for my problems to get diagnosed, I would never get better if we kept talking about it. Instead, it is simply accepted by now that I have been dealt a shitty hand, and it doesn't matter why. The important thing is that I now have to play it to the best of my abilities or my problems won't be solved.

I will also say that you shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad. "Children in Africa are starving, stop complaining!" is a line I'm sure we've all heard. But the extent of your suffering and/or happiness does not detract from, nor validate, anyone else's even worse suffering and/or even higher level happiness. Your visibility as a human is just as important as a human anywhere else on the planet.

I do think it's generally helpful to be thankful for one's privileges, but you are just as entitled to take up space in this world as everyone else is, because again, someone feeling worse does not mean you can't also feel bad. Perhaps that's a thing to look into as well - that you feel you should be fine, that you are somehow obligated to be happy.

My life is very different from yours but I do see some resemblances and relate to parts of your post, so hopefully it's not just projecting when I ask: do you feel lonely? Unfulfilled? Empty? Because yes, it's important to identify the cause or root of the problem. But working on the problem itself is the next, important step.

Everyone has their own truth, so I'm going to share mine. Maybe there will be pieces you like that you can apply to your own truth.

I think everyone has a little twinge in their heart, where they feel like they're not enough. Or they feel that the current moment won't last forever. Or they feel there's something they should be doing. It can feel like an empty hole. Or it can feel like an itch. Or a nagging voice in the back of their mind.

So they search for whatever will fill the hole, scratch the itch, silence the voice, except nothing ever does, at least not for long. You can be distracted from it for a bit, but it doesn't last long, does it? What an unsatisfying feeling that is, to finally feel at ease for a moment, only to realize it's fleeting and will soon fade away.

Well, I think that unsatisfying, itchy, nagging, empty feeling is precisely what it means to be human. We know in our heart of hearts, the core of our being, that our time on this world won't last forever. It will all come to an end someday. So of course we want every moment to count! To matter, to amount to something, but we'll never know if it actually does though, will we? Because unfortunately there's no scoreboard for life.

I'm here to tell you my universal truth. That there is only ONE thing you are truly responsible for, and ever will be responsible for: Existing. That's it. That's all the universe has you on the hook for. It's just physics, really.

But just existing is pretty boring right? So we fill our time with family and friends and dogs and jobs and successes and failures... Because they make our boring duty of existing a little more interesting while we pass the time.

So cut yourself some slack. There's nothing you need to be doing. There's nowhere you need to go. There isn't something you need to be. You're doing it. You're doing everything right. We all are. Next time you feel that feeling, observe it for what it is: the feeling of being alive, and having the choice to do whatever you want until your duty is done.

The solution to what you're talking about is devoting yourself to your community.

In a few more words than that (not going to get into it too much), the weight you feel is social responsibility. You have, according to the contents of your post, huge amounts of privilege and capacity to influence the world around you in a positive way - find a way to make use of it. Do some volunteering in your community. Go sit down with a homeless person. Go hang out at a community centre and see what needs to be done.

And also, if you want to 'temporarily remove the weight', that's what psychedelics are for. Try eating a gram of mushrooms and wandering around in a forest on a nice day.

It seems like there are a lot of folks on Tildes with similar experience, myself among them.

I know for me the answer lies in my childhood, which was filled with macro and micro trauma, and also a philosophical response I didn't even realize I had fostered and perfected in myself.

My childhood was filled with a lot of conditional praise, as indicated in the other comment. At one point I was a contender for valedictorian (and would have been close if I hadn't switched to a nerd school that didn't have class rank), a serious church youth leader, voracious reader, smarter (in certain limited ways) and better informed than nearly anyone I met.

My childhood was also filled with physical and sexual abuse, lots and lots of neglect, lots of hidden family secrets, lots of unexpressed, arbitrary, chaotic and inconsistent expectations that resulted in disproportionate punishment when not met.

On top of this, my family was very well known and respected in the community, still today I meet people who will tell me how awesome my parents were. I smile and nod, because it's not those folks fault, but inside I rage. Actually, I rage less now, because I have done a lot of emotional work around these issues. Much distance to go yet, but it's a little better.

That inability to relax into the moment, what you describe as a weight that interferes with dog, stars, and beer, has always been pervasive for me. I always felt from everyone and everything, incomplete, and also helpless. Incapable of passing the bar, which I can't even define, let alone work towards.

And that's when I found Jesus.

No, just kidding. I mean, kinda not, but, I was trying to be funny, this is not a proselytizing witness statement. I'm happy to share my religious journey (which is very much still unfolding), but that's a tool for me and I don't need others to adopt it for it to be successful for myself.

What really happened is I discovered how the various personalities that suffered the worst abuse have coalesced into reflexive personality traits that react to triggers that look like the abuse. In common parlance this is "inner children," language I use because it's helpful, but the concept there is really just a simple hook for a more complex phenomenon.

It's a good hook, though, because a good way to process the abuse is by acting like a loving parent would to children caught in the grips of the abuse. Patience, affection, gentleness, consistency, unconditional validation, all the things I didn't get as a kid.

Another good hook is about feelings: I will either talk them out, work them out, or eventually act them out. That last one gets me into lots of trouble. I spent many years in "meditation," thinking I was on a spiritual journey. But really I was just avoiding the feelings and isolating myself from everyone. Eventually the piper demanded payment, and then led the rats back in with a whole lot more beside.

This may not be your journey at all. But the weight, as you describe, feels so familiar to me I though I would share. Side note, lots of people with experiences similar to mine take a long, long time to recognize it, because the memories are buried and locked down to prevent having to feel the associated pain. Many of those folks will, when asked about their childhood, will say it was pretty good and normal, but won't tell you much (because they don't remember much). Often their memories will start sometime in their teens, when they became physically able to assert themselves. For myself, the process was a little different. I remembered the circumstances, but had somehow normalized them. I was in great denial about the impact they had in my present life, how so many of my dysfunctional behaviors wore reacting to/ trying to prevent repeats of old trauma.

Edit: I almost forgot the cool philosophy thing associated with all this. In the process of self-defense, I came to the philosophical notion that bad feelings were bad, and more importantly, meant failure. It is certainly true that "bad" feelings are usually associated with "bad" events. But here's the truth I acknowledged with my mouth but never my heart: "bad" things happen, often, and often at random. By failing to acknowledge it with my heart, I maintained the belief, and resultant self punishment, that the bad things that happened to me were all my fault.

What I am coming to understand is that what is important with bad things is to fully feel-and constructively express-the bad feelings. Only once that is done can I discern what responsibility I have regarding the happening, and what influence I might have over change.