Everything Is Fine, So Why Does It Feel Empty?

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At fifty, a man who is world-famous, wealthy, with healthy children, cannot get out of bed in the morning. Nothing is missing; but there is not a single answer he can give to the question "what for?" So is meaning something to be found — or, if it was never given to us at all, are we the ones who have to invent it?

Around the year eighteen seventy-nine, the most famous writer in Russia began taking a small precaution inside his own house. On the upper floor of the manor at Yasnaya Polyana, in the room where he undressed alone every evening, a cord was strung between two cupboards. Tolstoy took it down. He also stopped taking his rifle with him when he went out hunting. He said nothing about this to anyone, consulted no doctor, confessed it in no letter. Years later, in the slim book he wrote under the title A Confession, he explained the reason for these precautions in a single cool sentence: so that he would not hang himself from that cord, so that he would not turn that rifle on himself.

There was nothing going wrong in this man's life. He was fifty years old. War and Peace had been published in eighteen sixty-nine, Anna Karenina in eighteen seventy-seven; both had taken their place at the summit of world literature while he was still alive. He owned thousands of acres of land, he had a large and loving family, and a body in perfect working order. He could swing a scythe beside the peasants for hours, ride a horse, write through the night. He had money, he had fame, he had health, and the people he loved were still living. In the ordinary sense, no catastrophe had befallen him. And this is exactly why he had such trouble making sense of his own condition: he had no language to explain why a person becomes unable to live at the very moment when everything is in order.

When Tolstoy describes that state he uses the word illness, but what he describes resembles no illness we recognise. Life, he said, came to a stop. I was breathing, I was eating and drinking, I was sleeping; I did these things without being able to help it, but there was no longer anything that could be called life. Because there was nothing I desired. What stopped him was not pain but a question. A simple question, a childish one, and for that very reason impossible to answer: and then what? He would enlarge his estate — and then what? He would raise his children — and then what? He would become the greatest writer in the world — suppose he became more famous than Shakespeare, than Molière, than every writer who had ever written — and then what? Every answer dissolved in the question that followed it. Was there anything in his life whose meaning his own death could not destroy? That was what Tolstoy could not find.

In the book, to convey this feeling, he recalls an old story that came out of the East. A traveller fleeing a wild animal across the steppe throws himself into a dry well. As he falls he catches hold of a bush growing out of the wall. Above him the animal is waiting; below, at the bottom of the well, a dragon waits with open jaws. He can neither climb out nor go down. At the root of the branch he is clinging to, two mice, one white and one black, take turns gnawing it through. The branch will give way soon, and he knows it. And at precisely that moment the traveller notices a few drops of honey on the leaves, stretches out his tongue, and licks them. What Tolstoy said about his own life was this: the honey no longer had any taste. The two mice were still there, and he could do nothing but watch the branch being gnawed away.

Now let us step out of that room and look at our own time, because what makes this story our business is not the breakdown of a Russian count. The promotion came. The raise came. The house you moved into finally became the house you wanted. Everything you spent years describing as "once this is over, I'll be able to breathe" is over. And on a Sunday evening, in the kitchen, over the sound of the dishwasher, a strange flatness settles inside you. It is not something you could cry about. It is not a crisis either. It is not the sort of thing you can explain to anyone, because saying it aloud sounds like ingratitude: what exactly is the matter with you? In two thousand two, the sociologist Corey Keyes of Emory University proposed a name for this in-between zone in the mental health literature. No illness, but no flourishing either; the person is neither sinking nor swimming, simply holding still. The most uncomfortable part of Keyes's work was this: most people in this condition never receive a diagnosis of any kind, and so nobody is looking after them.

There is an older and even more irritating piece of evidence for the same thing. In a famous study published in nineteen seventy-eight, people who had won a large lottery prize were compared with ordinary people. The winners, as one might expect, did not report any striking leap in their overall satisfaction with life. What is more, the pleasure they took in small daily things — talking with a friend, reading a magazine, eating breakfast — was found to have fallen. When the big thing arrived, the small things lost their flavour. The human mind quickly treats every ground it rises to as the new zero point, and goes on looking upward from there.

So the cord in Tolstoy's room is not some curiosity of a distant century. It is the same emptiness, arriving together with every advantage a person happened to possess. And the first lesson of that emptiness is this: solving the problems of life does not solve the meaning of life. They are two separate jobs. When you finish the first one, the second stands in front of you more nakedly and far more loudly, because all the busyness that was covering it has been cleared away.

The man who asked this question in its harshest form treated it not as a breakdown but as a problem in logic. Camus opens his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, published in nineteen forty-two, by saying that the only serious question in philosophy is suicide. Because in his view all the other questions — how many dimensions the world has, what the mind is, whether knowledge is possible — come after the question of whether a human life is worth living. First that is answered, and then one thinks.

What Camus calls the absurd is not the idea that life is senseless; this fine distinction is usually missed. The absurd is neither inside the world nor inside the human being; it is born in the encounter between the two. On one side stands the human mind, which wants meaning, which wants explanation, which wants everything to have a reason. On the other side stands a silent universe. The absurd is the name of the gap between them. As long as the demand continues and no answer arrives, the absurd is alive. If a person gives up his demands, or persuades himself that the universe has spoken after all, the absurd disappears — but for Camus this is not solving the problem, it is escaping it.

And it is here that Camus closes off the two exits that his contemporaries, and we ourselves, are so fond of. The first is bodily escape: suicide. Camus rejects it, because it is not a way of removing the absurd but a way of removing the consciousness that carries the absurd; it does not resolve the contradiction, it erases one side of it. The second is intellectual escape — what Camus calls philosophical suicide. It is the act of hurriedly inventing an absolute to fill a silence one cannot bear, and then suspending one's reason before that invention. Camus's objection is not to belief but to the leap itself; not to faith, but to jumping over the weight of the question instead of carrying it.

Only one thing remains: to live in the emptiness knowingly, by standing in it. Camus calls this revolt. And to describe it he chooses the most helpless figure in Greek mythology. Sisyphus has been condemned by the gods to push a rock to the top of a mountain. When he reaches the summit the rock rolls back down under its own weight, and he goes down and begins again. For eternity. This is the most terrible punishment the gods could conceive: labour that is useless and without hope.

Camus looks not at the part of the story everyone talks about, but at the part nobody talks about. After the rock has rolled away, while Sisyphus walks back down the mountain. In that walk there is no work, no effort, no distraction; there is only consciousness. In that moment Sisyphus knows exactly what he is doing. And for Camus his tragedy and his deliverance lie in the same place: he is crushed because he knows, but because he knows he stands above his fate. The man who sees his fate becomes its owner. Camus ends the essay by saying that one must imagine Sisyphus happy — which is not a call to glorify suffering, but the only dignity left in the hands of someone who refuses to run.

To find today's version of this, no mythology is required. Monday morning, the same road, the same traffic, the same lift. The inbox that took four hundred lines yesterday is full again today. The kitchen that was tidied yesterday is a mess again today. The washing that was done yesterday is back in the basket. A large part of modern life is the repetition of work whose results do not last; you push the rock, and the next morning you find the rock again. The "and then what" that stopped Tolstoy takes an everyday shape here: why am I doing any of this?

Camus's answer is not comforting, but it is not an evasion either. The universe is not going to give you a reason. If you are waiting, stop waiting. You will set the reason yourself, and you will set it knowing perfectly well that you invented it. Because for Camus meaning is not a treasure that has been found but an attitude that is sustained; you go on pushing the rock, not because you believe the pushing has some cosmic reward, but because you have seen that stopping has no reward either. And this is where the tension reaches its peak: a person with no guarantee of any kind gets up in the morning and walks toward the same mountain anyway.

But an objection appears at once. All of this assumes that meaning is invented by human beings. What if the source of the emptiness is not the silence of the universe, but a person's own intention?

This question was asked eight hundred and fifty years before Camus by a man seated in the highest chair in the Islamic world. Al-Ghazali was born around ten fifty-eight in the city of Tus in Iran. In his early thirties he was appointed by the vizier Nizam al-Mulk to head the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad. This was the greatest intellectual position imaginable in the world of that day. Hundreds of students followed his lectures, his legal opinions were heard at the seat of the caliphate, his books were being copied while he was still writing them. He stood at the summit of theology, jurisprudence and logic; in order to refute the claims of the philosophers he had first learned philosophy better than they knew it, and only then written his critique.

In ten ninety-five, roughly four years after taking up the post, something inside this man collapsed. It began differently from Tolstoy's collapse: al-Ghazali's crisis showed itself first in the body. He climbed into the teaching chair and could not speak. His tongue seized up. He became unable to lecture, unable to eat; by his own account, food would not pass his throat. The physicians of the age examined him and finally said, with an honesty that is startling even today, that this was not a bodily illness, that it came from the heart, and that no medicine would cure it.

Al-Ghazali's own diagnosis is harsher still. In the small book in which he described this period of his life years afterwards, Deliverance from Error, he writes that in those days he was probing his own intention. He was teaching, but why? He looked for the answer and found the one he did not want: for position, for standing, for the sake of hearing his own name spoken. The things he knew were true; his knowledge was sound; but that knowledge was not changing him. The crisis described in Deliverance from Error is not a crisis of knowledge but a crisis of the break between knowing and doing. When the distance grows between what a person knows and how that person lives, knowledge becomes heavy and crushes the one carrying it.

He remained in this condition for about six months. Then he did something that is hard to understand, for his age and for ours. He gave up his profession. He distributed most of his wealth, keeping back only enough for his family's upkeep, left someone in his place to teach, and walked out of Baghdad. He disguised his departure as a pilgrimage, because he knew the circle around the caliphate would not let him go. He went to Damascus. He withdrew into seclusion in the Umayyad Mosque. From there he went on to Jerusalem, to Hebron, and then to Mecca and Medina. This absence lasted about eleven years. The man who had been known across the world while lecturing at the Nizamiyya lived for years as a traveller nobody recognised.

The fruit of those years became one of the most widely read works in Islamic thought: The Revival of the Religious Sciences. The idea at the centre of that book is the exact answer to al-Ghazali's crisis. In his view a person's sickness begins not because of what he does not know, but because he does not live what he does know. The heart is like a mirror; what accumulates on it is not ignorance, but habit, display and self-deception. For this reason the path al-Ghazali proposes is not the acquisition of new knowledge but a discipline, a constant, tedious, daily exercise that turns the knowledge already possessed into action.

And the most important part of the story is not his withdrawal but his return. In eleven oh six al-Ghazali stepped back into the teaching chair; this time he began lecturing in Nishapur. He returned to precisely the work he had fled. What had changed was not the work but the intention of the man doing it. In his own words, he was now doing the same thing, but he was no longer doing it for himself. He died in eleven eleven in the city where he was born, in Tus.

The difference here matters, because Camus's question and al-Ghazali's question look in different directions. Camus asks what one should do if the universe is silent. Al-Ghazali, from within a tradition that does not consider the universe silent, says that the real noise comes from a person's own intention. For him the emptiness was not coming down from above; it was coming from his own chair. But these two men share an intuition, and it is that intuition which reaches us: emptiness is most visible at the summit. When all the goals that keep a person occupied have been used up, what remains is the question of why he is doing any of it. Tolstoy's fields, Camus's rock, al-Ghazali's chair — in all three the stage is the same. The top has been reached, and at the top there is nothing but wind.

Now let us come to the place all three of these stories quietly point toward, because something there changes direction. All three men searched for meaning, and none of the three found it by searching. They found it at the moment when they stopped searching and shouldered something.

The person who put this reversal most plainly was someone forced to test it in the hardest place there is. The Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was sent to the camps with his family in nineteen forty-two; he was held at Auschwitz and at camps attached to Dachau, and he lost his mother, his father, his brother and his wife. After the war, in nineteen forty-six, he poured his observations from the camp and the approach he had developed into a book written in nine days. The central move described in that book, known in English as Man's Search for Meaning, is this: stop asking what a person expects from life, and begin asking what life expects from the person. For Frankl the question is being put to us; we are not the ones being asked to define it, we are the ones answering, and the answer is given not by speaking but by taking on the concrete task of that particular day.

Frankl's most often repeated observation comes out of what he saw in the camp: he writes that the likelihood of survival was not determined by physical endurance alone, and that those who had a piece of work waiting to be completed, or a person waiting for them, held out far longer. Meaning, for him, is not an abstract formula but something particular to each person, and it comes from three places: a work done or a thing created, a person loved or an experience lived, and the attitude taken in the face of a suffering that cannot be changed. All three require not the search for something, but stepping in underneath something.

One of the most persistent followers of this idea in our own history of thought is Nurettin Topçu. Topçu, who completed his doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne in nineteen thirty-four, wrote a thesis that was translated into Turkish under the title The Ethics of Rebellion. What Topçu calls rebellion is not destructiveness but the moment a person stops conforming to the crowd and living by ready-made moulds, and takes responsibility for his own act. For him morality is not something thought but something done; a person becomes a genuine self only to the degree that he takes responsibility. This looks toward the same place as Frankl's idea of answering the question life puts to us: meaning is the shape of the burden a person takes upon himself.

Now let us return to Tolstoy, because we have not told the end of his story. After those years in which he hid the cord he did not kill himself, and he died in nineteen ten at the age of eighty-two, at a railway station; that is, he lived more than thirty years beyond that dark period. According to what he says in A Confession, what pulled him out was not a new philosophy. He looked at the educated and well-off people around him and saw that they too, like him, had nothing to hold on to. Then he looked at the ordinary peasants working the same soil. Their lives were harder, poorer, shorter; but they did not treat living as a problem. Tolstoy read this not as superiority of intellect but as a bond: they were not thinking about life, they were carrying it. The burden itself was concrete enough to drown out the question of why the burden existed.

This does not mean "stop thinking and get to work." But it does say this: meaning is not an answer standing above life and waiting to be discovered; it is something inside life, shaped by the responsibilities a person takes on. Al-Ghazali left his chair and came back to the same chair eleven years later with a different intention. Camus chose to keep pushing the rock in a world that offered him no guarantee. Tolstoy silenced his question not by solving it but by binding himself to something larger than himself. The place all three arrived at was not a laboratory but an ordinary day.

And here is where the most annoying feature of the feeling of emptiness comes out: its remedy is usually not magnificent. What makes a person's life meaningful is most often too small to be worth recounting. Getting up in the morning and doing your work genuinely well. Being present beside someone you are responsible for. Calling the parent you have not called in months. Standing in front of a student, an apprentice, a child, and passing on something you know. Taking on a task in your own neighbourhood. None of this looks like "the meaning of life," because we assume the meaning of life will be something large, one-off and luminous. Yet the shared discovery of the man who hid the cord, the man who pushed the rock and the man who left the chair is this: meaning does not sit in a single place, it sits scattered through the work being done.

So the answer to "everything is fine, why does it feel empty" is not to find the thing that is missing. Perhaps the question is put together wrongly. The things that are fine are the things we possess. The empty place is the place of what we give, what we take on, what we name and then step underneath. However long the first list grows, it does not fill the second. And the second is filled not by searching, but by getting under something tomorrow morning.

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