The Emptiness of Human Interactions-Are People Real?
In the wake of a brutal break-up, I've recently been contemplating the meaninglessness of life and of people's words and actions. I've been trying to wrap my head around the events of the last two months--trying to make sense of all of his diametrically opposed statements, explanations, claims and actions over the course of the last two months. I've been trying to figure out where my own sense and judgment went so wrong, in the hopes of avoiding another incident of such emotionally devastating proportions. So I turned to Shakespeare.
No one can capture the utter meaninglessness and futility of human life and the excess of empty vanity and self-consumed egotism behind human interactions quite as brilliantly as Shakespeare does:
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
- Macbeth, Act V, Scene V
A poor player, indeed. In my contemplations, I have questioned whether any person I've ever interacted with is actually real. In what, if anything at all, are our words and actions rooted? And if what our words and actions are rooted in, if anything, is precarious or changeable, or, in other words, if they are rooted in anything but our eternal soul, does this not make us all actors? If we cannot or do not, at the absolute minimum, give our words and actions meaning by staying true to them, then, by my reckoning, we are not real.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
- As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII
Why are humans so fond of entertainment and so skilled at acting? One recent morning, in my determination to discover the reason why I have suffered so deeply and for so long each of the four times I have been in love and then dumped by the man in question, I had a fleeting vision, a realization; I had fallen in love with someone who never existed. An illusion, a fabrication of my imagination, as it were.
Have you ever watched a movie and become so enamored of one of the actors in the movie that you felt like you loved or were in love with them? This used to happen to me all the time, until I became conscious of what was actually happening. Take the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, for example. There are three male actors in that movie that play absolutely spell-bindingly masculine, gallant, and/or disarmingly charming male characters--my favorite of these is the less obvious James Norrington. The most obvious "heart-throbs" in the movie are Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. This phenomenon applies to men as well, but I'm writing from my female perspective.
This is a phenomenon where you fall in love with an actor based on a role he plays in a movie, on a stage as an actor or "entertainer" of any kind. Could I say I fell in love with Johnny Depp, or Jack Davenport, who plays James Norrington? In my ignorance, I might. The way we obsess over celebrities and those who make their livings pretending to be people they're not, I would say there is a strong argument to be made that I am not the only one who falls victim to this false illusion. The fact is, I became enamored of James Norrington--a mere figment of some writer's imagination. The moment you realize that Jack Davenport is not James Norrington, that's when the cognitive dissonance begins. James Norrington doesn't exist--anywhere. It's hard to separate an actor from the role he is playing. Our hearts get entangled with a mere "avatar"--a character that the actor is pretending to be, but a character which doesn't even exist. We love an illusion.
I am suggesting that all of us are avatars, or actors in our lives playing a role. Empty words. Empty actions. If for no other reason, made empty because of ulterior and ego-driven motives. And when we fall in love with another person, we are falling in love with an avatar, a false projection. We do not love that person, because that person is not real. The way in which we are perceiving that individual that we think we love is not true. The person we love is a fabrication of our brain--like Captain Jack Sparrow, the person we love does not exist in reality, only in our minds.
Shakespeare seems to have had a profound understanding of this human condition and how it perpetuates the inevitable, utterly meaningless existence we are all living. In all realms of life, politics (i.e. Macbeth), love (i.e. 12th Night) and business (i.e. Merchant of Venice), Shakespeare's plays cut to the quick of the dark cruelty (Macbeth, Merchant of Venice) and mischievous games and reckless abandon (12th Night, Midsummer Night's Dreams) with which we interact with one another to drive our egoic agendas, which create the illusion and the emptiness that we are. Meaningless, all of it, because all words are spoken, all acts are taken by a soul pretending to be what it's not.
I can't posit all of these thoughts for contemplation without adding this last point--that this human condition is inevitable in this world and applies to all living here, for the system upon which all human society is currently founded requires of us all that we live in our ego, put up walls between our Earth existence and our soul, and spend our lives thinking about and engaging in empty, pointless endeavors, or else we will die.
Ultimately, the conditions we live in warrant compassion for both ourselves and for all others we live among.
First banner photo courtesy of Robert Wallace's Flickr page.
Second banner photo courtesy of John Strathdee's Flickr page.