The void
An existential crisis is a window to the void, not necessarily the void itself.
After experiencing an existential crisis, the natural inclination is to deny it — to pretend it never happened and to build up mental walls in your thought habits so as to avoid stepping off that path and peeking into the void again. That’s what a careful person would do.
But for some, that little peek might have been too much already. For those of us born into a fundamentalist religion or household for instance — for us, that little peek may have created fissures and cracks in the walls of faith that our parents or clergy spent perhaps decades erecting. It might take weeks or months or years — it might happen all at once in a single moment, or in tiny bits and pieces over a long period of time, or in several large chunks years apart, but those walls are coming down.
And when they’ve fallen, all that will remain is void — the absence of faith and belief, of any pretense of value, purpose or meaning. Nothing.
The trauma of this nothingness can be devastating, but it’s especially world-shattering for those whose very identity was tied to that sense of purpose and meaning. If you’ve always felt like you knew why you existed, the sudden lack of such confidence can feel like the ground beneath your feet simply vanished, as if you’re floating through the vacuum of space with nothing to hold onto.
“When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
So while achieving that state — even for just a moment — may be inevitable once you’ve glimpsed the void, it is difficult to survive there very long without going mad, but trauma is only the sharp end of the abyss. Within the abyss you can also find freedom. Having absolutely no purpose or meaning also means you have none of the obligations intrinsically tied to that purpose or meaning. The gift of that lack of universal purpose or meaning is the double-edged sword of both the freedom and the obligation to generate your own purpose and meaning, to create the purpose and meaning of your world, of your various communities.
The inherent reality of a human being is that like a body needs nourishment, a soul — or psyche or whatever you want to call it — needs purpose. So once all the dogma and doctrine and belief have crumbled and blown away like dust, you have to then build something else in their place — knowingly, consciously recreating your own purpose and meaning based entirely on criteria you decide.
