“I don’t think I ever wanted to be a lawyer.”
This sentence, and others much like it, is uttered in psychologists’ consulting rooms with surprising regularity. One of the prime motivators for people entering psychotherapy is a sense of diminishing enthusiasm about their lives—a feeling that, though they have continued to consume the same diet, its ability to nourish and energize them has withered away.
This fading of energy and enthusiasm is often seen in people at midlife. They spend their early adulthoods beavering away, getting little emotional return from their lives, in the belief that they are building for a bright and shiny future. In early middle age they realize that they can no longer convince themselves that they are sacrificing for an eventual prize. They have arrived at the future, and it is not nearly as fulfilling as they anticipated. If the payoff has not yet come, perhaps it never will.
How did they manage to take what appears to have been a blind alley? This book, after all, is about the pursuit of dead ends and the real estate to be found there.
Fritz Perls, famed developer of Gestalt therapy, believed that many people find themselves in a life created from a mixture of adolescent interests and the expectations of others (parents, teachers, mentors). Initially somewhat fluid, their lives harden into concrete, and they find themselves trapped in an existence that does not suit them.
Jungian analyst James Hollis seems to agree. In The Middle Passage, his excellent book on midlife, Hollis suggests that we start our lives learning how to be children and, just as we get accomplished at it, the rules change and we are expected to behave like adults. Not knowing how to do this, we look around and build our adult selves from the examples and pressures around us rather than from our inherent interests and talents. At first this seems to work: we achieve some successes and create a passable facsimile of maturity. Eventually, though, our true nature comes back to haunt us, demanding to be heard.
Hollis and others suggest that the source of much misery is the unconscious impulse to fulfill the incomplete life mission of one’s parents. Dad always wanted to be a lawyer, so we became one. Mom never achieved her dream of stardom, so we tap-danced our way onto the stage with her pushing us forward.
Whether incomplete or not, there can be a powerful desire to fill the shoes your parents made for you. They had a child, after all, because they had an image of the adult you would become. Become it.
Whether your mission is to climb upward or rappel downward in your life, it can be useful to examine the core motivations of your parents and other significant figures from your formative years. What were their goals—and which of these were thwarted or left incomplete? Out of your caring for them, or your wish to please, or your outright guilt at the opportunities you have been given, you may experience an impulse to take up their torch and live out their lives rather than your own.
If you would like to live your own life instead, treat with suspicion the concordances between your present life and the unlived lives of your predecessors. Is it simply a welcome coincidence that your true desires match up so nicely with theirs, or have you subjugated your own interests to live someone else’s life?
If you are on board with the aims of this book, however, you can use these indicators as beacons to the unsatisfying life. Tell yourself how pleased your mother would be if you married a wealthy man, which she always wished she had done. Remind yourself of the plans of your deceased brother, and set aside your own life to fulfill his. Know that your parents always expected to have a heterosexual son and grandchildren, so devote your life to creating that illusion for them.
To be unhappy, set out on someone else’s life path. It will prove difficult at first, but it will become easier with time. Eventually your own impulses and aspirations will begin to fade. You will have been on that road long enough that your own existence will have dropped beneath the horizon behind you. With it will have gone your vitality, your enthusiasm, and your motivation. Your misery will remain, like the flecks of precious gold in a miner’s pan.