A Year in the Abyss — Alex Stein

“Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress. But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to? How for the person to freely choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?” — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

I close my work laptop for the last time. It’s 5:01 PM and that means that I am no longer an employee at Facebook.

I wake up the next morning confused, and without any items on my to-do list — what is it that people do?

In therapy the next day, I tell my therapist life feels strange, like without the emails, the messages, the outlook calendar, I have to learn to be a person again. My therapist corrects me: “Alex, you started at Facebook six weeks after you finished college. You’re not learning again. You’re learning to be a person for the first time. Be kind to yourself.”

But being kind seems self-indulgent. I’m not sick. I’m not broke. I don’t have obligations to a partner, to children. And I chose this myself. How hard is it to do nothing? How hard can it really be to be totally free?

The first week is fine, if surreal. The first month is lonely but manageable. But then I lose my mind the way Hemingway describes going broke: gradually then all at once.

I felt empty. Purposeless. Having no real reason to wake up, I force myself up from bed each morning because lying there, while what I want to do, is probably not the right choice. Nothing really matters enough to complete. I feel no obligations to a boss, to myself, to anyone. I construct routines to keep myself from spiraling further. I go for runs to kill time. I make sure to see at least one friend a day because, even if I don’t feel like it, I know it’s important to interact with humans.

“It’s okay,” I say to myself, “this is the time to figure out a purpose. This is the time to decide what we really want from life.”

And so this becomes my internal refrain and the new project: I must figure out what I want to do with my life.

Simple enough. Something to focus on.

The next year would prove how wrong I was. I would spend six months falling into a state of perpetual rumination and despair — what I call the abyss. I would spend the six months after that learning to climb out of it. Here’s the story of that journey.

I. The Abyss

We all experience existential angst at some point. Many of us shrug it off. Some of us drown it in alcohol or drugs. Or Netflix. Or sex. Or working endless hours. We use these coping mechanisms to distract us from the nagging feeling that bubbles up in quiet moments that we don’t know what we’re doing or why we’re doing it.

My particular choice of coping mechanism is, at first blush, way more innocuous than sex or drugs. See what I do is this: I think about things. And then I keep thinking about them. I analyze, I probe, I strategize, I formulate arguments and challenge them. I go round and round in my head seeking a bullet-proof answer that I convince myself will resolve my doubt and make me feel better. And in doing so I reach a point where my particular doubt becomes all I can think about, all I want to talk about, all that matters to me in the universe.

You see — solving problems is good. But a pathological need for certainty, a belief that if you don’t know, you’re doomed to stay sad forever, or that even when you’re happy, you’re just one reminder away from falling back into the abyss… well, that’s another thing entirely.

But I didn’t know any of that yet.

So instead, like the good, trained Product Manager I am, I started writing strategy docs for my life.

I created frameworks and wrote Google Docs about what I wanted from my time on Earth. I read endless amounts of philosophy and psychology articles. I spent hours on Twitter devouring one moral outrage after another to try to find a place I could “make a difference.” But these days spent lost on the internet looking for someone else to tell me what to do just took me further afield. They launched what I like to think of as My Sidequests.

Knowing that I wanted to do good in the world, I became obsessed with moral philosophy, and then tried to find conclusive proof that I was a good person. I audited every choice. I became a vegetarian (that one stuck) and felt guilty for any purchase that I made (there are starving kids — do you really need a new sweater?). No matter — Twitter was always there to remind me that I wasn’t doing enough about something.
Convinced that “goodness” actually only mattered if we were free to make our own decisions, I became obsessed with the nature of freedom and free will.
Deep down the rabbit hole of free will, I read books and academic journal articles about the nature of consciousness and agency. (Fun fact: for all of our scientific progress, we still don’t know much about anything.)

At each turn, I convinced myself that a little more research would reveal the answer, and set me free from my spiral. If I could find some kind of “ground truth”, I could build my life around it.

But that’s not how this works.

These sidequests were not the real issue. The real issue wasn’t the nature of reality or God or anything else I could find to obsess over. The issue was that I felt directionless and I was looking for answers to questions that will never provide them.

Because sometimes in life, there is no such thing as certainty. And rumination, obsession, doubt —the things I collectively call “the abyss” — they’re all quicksand. The harder you fight them, reason with them, analyze them — the more you sink.

And so that’s where I was for the first half of 2021. Feeling trapped. Not wanting to get out of bed. Self-medicating with marijuana to slow down my racing thoughts so that I could sleep. I needed another plan of attack.

II. Acceptance, Second Best Options and The Road Out

So if you can’t solve a problem, how do you learn to live with it? How do you learn to live with the fear that you might be “wasting your life?”

Enter the Buddhists, or, for those of us more comfortable with the Western Scientific tradition, we can call it by the name we use in my therapist’s office: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which teaches practitioners to accept reality as it is (warts and all), and commit to living good lives anyway.

The only way to confront the abyss, I am learning, is to stop fighting it. To accept where you are. To accept this moment, this pain, this uncertainty — to sit in it, and let it work with you. To stare whatever demon you are facing directly in the eyes and say: “Eat me if you wish.”

Buddhists say that pain is inevitable, but suffering — which comes from resisting and wanting things to be different — is a choice. And after six months of this, I was really done with suffering. So I began to try acceptance of my present moment.

Sitting in meditation each day I would breathe in my experience. I felt purposeless. I felt disconnected. I felt sad. I let those feelings sit in me, and tried (am still actively trying) to accept them as they pass through me — rising and falling each day. I accepted that a definitive answer to “What is the purpose of my life?” would likely elude me, and that there would be no magical resolution or final clarity.

So my project changed from define my life purpose to find something that interests me.

And that started to make a difference.

I stopped my quest to methodically examine different industries or global problems, and instead focused on whatever grabbed my attention. Though I always hated science in school, I found myself excited by quantum physics (Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli was my book of the year for 2021). I started reading science fiction again. I explored AI not because I wanted to build a career there, but because I found writing code gratifying. I fell down the crypto rabbit hole, not because I saw a chance to make a quick buck, but because the design of economic institutions was my favorite part of studying Econ in College. I trusted that if I found something I loved, and it aligned with my values, I could build a good and meaningful life even without the confidence of “having found my purpose.”

With each passing book or experiment, I could feel parts of myself coming alive again. Reminding myself that there were things to be done, experiences to be had — and if I just kept going, I might find one that would stick.

I’m not sure what’s next. In fact, I’m very, very uncertain. But I’m recognizing that feeling unsure, feeling lost, feeling confused — that’s what being human is. And I hope to stay human for a while longer. And if all of this sounds cliche, then I remind you of another favorite quote: “Important things are inevitably cliche.” (Chuck Klosterman)

If you find yourself experiencing something similar — whether it’s just existential angst or something more gnarly — while trying to find your “next thing” or your purpose, I put together a few tips. I’m not certain they will work for you, just as I don’t know that they will help me the next time I confront these questions. But I’ve found them helpful so far — and I hope you might, too:

A Few Tips for Fellow Travelers

Surrender to purposelessness. There is no direction, no to-do list to prioritize. You will waste time. You will throw away work. That’s the journey you have signed up for, and it is the only way to get where you want to go.
Learn to Meditate. Not to clear your mind. Not to learn to pay attention to your breath. Learn to sit still and focus on what’s happening inside your body and your mind even, and especially, when you’re not actively doing anything. Put down your phone and all of the distractions, and just observe what happens. Is your mind wandering? Good. You have a brain that’s thinking. Note it. Keep going. Is it uncomfortable to sit still? Good. You have tension in your body from being alive. Note it. Keep going. Do you feel happy, sad, restless? Note it. Keep going. If you’re not in touch with your gut, you can’t learn to trust it. If you don’t acknowledge restlessness or anxiety or pain or even joy or excitement, you won’t be able to hear the signals you need to navigate the abyss.
Therapy. If you have the means (and the lack of mental health resources in this country is one of our great modern tragedies…), I can’t recommend it highly enough. The idea that you need to be “sick” to utilize it is foolish. We’re all human, we all experience pain, and if you’re on this journey you’re going to spend a lot of time in your head. Find a trained professional to help you navigate it so you don’t just go in circles (or drive your friends crazy by repeating the same problems over and over again…).
Look for hints of flow. Start books. Throw them away when they’re boring. Play video games. Don’t feel a need to finish them. Learn to code. Stop if you really hate it. You’re not chasing completeness, you’re chasing a spark. Find and follow things that capture your attention. 99% of them won’t lead you to the next thing, but you’ll at least develop a sense of the feeling you’re looking for. If it doesn’t feel like play, it’s not the thing. Throw it away and keep moving.
Set routines and commitments. Life has lots of paradoxes. One of them is that total freedom is its own kind of prison. Set constraints so that your mind can relax on the basics, and focus on where you want it to be free. Go for runs. Set a meditation schedule. Set a regular dinner or date night. Bind yourself to some structure so that free time feels like a gift rather than a trap.
Set meetings. People think they hate meetings at work. But especially, if you’re alone, you’ll find very quickly how much worse it is to not have pre-programmed socialization every day. Build your own. Do it right away.
Get the fuck out of your home. We learn through forming connections, and having novel experiences. We feel best when we have some time around other people (and I’m saying that as an introvert). COVID makes this hard, but not impossible. Getting space at a WeWork was the single best decision I made last year. Find a coffee shop or somewhere to do work and be around others. Seriously.
Let go of certainty. Humans hate uncertainty. There are studies that the fear of something bad happening is more stressful than a certainty that it’s going to. Our default setting is to want to know, and to mentally prepare. Practice letting go of that while acknowledging you never will fully be able to. Tell yourself it’s OK to not know the answer. Remind yourself that no one knows the answer — no matter how wise or scientifically minded or spiritual. Remind yourself that we’re all trying to figure shit out together. Beware those who would offer you simple solutions to life’s unending questions. As a great Zen saying goes, “Not knowing is most intimate.” Feel that intimacy of not knowing with your fellow humans.
Do not - under any circumstances - set a timeline for “knowing” something. I know this is hard to imagine, especially when you want reassurance that this period of uncertainty will end. But inspiration doesn’t work like that. And the more pressure you put on “figuring something out soon”, the more you’re always going to feel like you settled for “Good enough” rather than arrived at the sought-for destination.
Find your people. I cried in front of a lot of friends over the last year. Not my favorite thing. But not a single one of them made me feel shitty for it. Find those friends who you can share how you’re really feeling — those are your people. Hold onto them.
Start with values not rigid rules. Avoid saying things like, “I have to work in X.” Focus more on identifying the things that feel important to you — my list is Compassion, Connection, Curiosity, Contribution, Freedom and Self-Development. Find yours. When in doubt, even of these values, act according to what you chose. You’ll be glad you did.
Finally - your mileage may vary. Every self help book, every philosophy, every study on well-being - is true for some people and not for others. All advice (especially this advice) may work for you, and it may not. You’ve chosen to figure out what works for you, and that means you need to experiment. Other people can offer hypotheses, but the only way to know is to experience.

Good luck and godspeed.