Most of us don’t realize the moment when life isn’t enough—it just begins as a quiet feeling something is missing.
What happens when the life you built isn’t enough? For many people—especially later in life—that question doesn’t arrive gently. It shows up as a persistent dissatisfaction, or a deeper, harder-to-name unhappiness. What I’ve come to see is that this feeling often comes from a single, invisible source: living on the surface of our own lives, without even realizing it. It’s not that they’ve decided to live on the surface, or even know that’s where they’re living, they just aren’t familiar with the different purposes of the early part of life, and the later part of life. Richard Rohr, in his excellent book, Falling Upward, draws a clear line between the purpose of each of these two stages of life. He describes the purpose of the young part of our life as “building the container.” Another name for that container is our ego. The ego usually gets a bad rap, and justifiably so. The ego is also an absolute necessity for being a human being.
Simply, the ego is the collection of ideas you have about yourself. Most of those ideas are untrue on an essential level. They give us an idea of who we are so we can function and get things done in our daily lives. Unfortunately, the ego also keeps us from seeing who we really are, underneath all those ideas.
This takes a serious toll the older we get because the purpose of the second part of our life is to fill the container we’ve built when we were young. (Then, in the latter stages of of our older lives, to have the grace to winnow the contents of the container, and let go of what we no longer need, what no longer serves us.) So many of us just keep working on the container. Regardless of how much time and energy we’ve devoted to building our container, at some point, we can’t help but notice an alarming fact: the container feels empty.
This experience can be summed up by the feeling, is that all there is to my life? This is an alarming realization, and one that, at a certain age, most of us are probably familiar with.
Unfortunately, the common response to this moment of panic is to work even harder on building the container. As long as we focus on continuing to build the container, it will remain empty, so the feelings of deep unease continue. What’s the common response? To do more things that take up our time and distract us from this existential panic. So we fill our lives with activities that cover over this uncomfortable realization, and the container remains as empty as ever. And when we wake in the middle of the night, the panic can seem stronger than ever.
When Life Isn’t Enough
As a society, we’re notoriously inept at filling the container, which involves taking a deep look inward, at what’s always been true about us since we drew our first breaths. To be clear, this looking inward has nothing to do with sorting through the contents of our personal psychologies. That’s just doing more work on the container. Now it’s time to look in a different direction.
Without this step, we remain in the first part of life, because without this step we are unable to see beyond ourselves. (Need an example? Donald Trump.)
It’s this inability to see beyond our own littles selves that is the true source of misery in older people. The ability to see beyond yourself is, finally, the source of contentment and connection in older age. There are no substitutes.
If this reflection resonates, you might also enjoy If You Can Laugh at It, You Can Let It Go
— another look at how we can step out of the patterns that keep us stuck.
