57: Steps towards despair: a burden to humanity

Of course we all know that if you have a roof over your head and three meals a day, you're more fortunate than about three-fourths of the world's population, depending on what sort of statistics you're going by.

We probably all try to be grateful for it, but many of us who try to feel thankful end up feeling guilty and then defiant. Guilty for getting the long end of the stick without having done anything to deserve it, and of course defiant for being made to feel guilty when it's not really our fault either.

In my case this line of thinking also had the effect of putting me under pressure to make my life count -- to compensate somehow for the imbalance that I was causing by being. But this depressed me as well. It seemed like I would, in order to stop burdening the world, have to get used to the idea of having to live in asceticism and service. Mother Teresa was pulling her own weight, and then some. I could become like her, or be like everyone else and burden the rest of humanity.

This is depressing. I preached asceticism and planned it for my own life, but all this self-denial made me wonder what I even exist for. I like nice things as much as the next guy does. Why should I be the one who goes without them for the sake of easing the burden I put on the world? I wondered on the one hand why it was so difficult for me to embrace the joy of the Lord, but on the other hand I did not really allow myself to enjoy a whole lot. During my teens I felt vaguely guilty if I was taking joy in anything other than talking about the Bible or some sanctimonious activity like that. I felt too self-indulgent, and angry at myself for being self-indulgent, and angry at God for forbidding my self-indulgence, and angry at the world for being so imbalanced that my every desire for myself meant a curtailing of someone else's desire.

Asceticism as an end in itself can easily lead to despair. If a man who eats only one bread a day in order to discipline himself and help others is doing more than a man who eats three square meals a day, then it is easy to conclude that the one who eats nothing at all is doing even more. If self-denial is the purpose of being, then it would follow that not existing would make you (if one can speak in such terms) even more purposeful, because the self would be denied to the point of oblivion. It would be my best contribution; it would save me the excruciating toil of constant self-denial, and save the overpopulated world the space and food and air that I was taking up by existing.