On shyness, depression, retirement, alone-time, health issues, and manual labor

As Peggy and I age, she’s becoming social and I’m becoming isolated. This is a reversal of how things have been for much of our 43-years together. I attribute it to two primary factors. One is that chronic pain has robbed me of much of the pleasure of socializing, and the longer I live a solitary life, the less thinkable it becomes that I would even try to be around people I don’t already know. Another is that Peggy’s interests and hobbies have gotten her out among people more, and since she makes a loyal companion, she has slowly accumulated friends.

Peggy just left for her last day at work as a labor and delivery nurse (she chose July 4, so she could get one last day of overtime and one last month of health insurance). She has only worked 20-hours a week for years, so it’s not like she’s at work a lot, but now that she’s retiring, she won’t be at work at all, and although I miss her when she’s gone for nine hours, I frankly don’t know how I’m going to like so much togetherness. That said, she often goes places with her friends for anywhere from a few hours to several days, plus she visits her family down South once a year, so I will have at least some time at home without her, but she will almost never have time without me, and yes, she has complained about it. In fact, just before she left, she suggested that I go somewhere, and I said that she didn’t need to worry because I would be busy building her an apartment in the garage so the cat and I can have our own space.

I’m replacing our backyard fence. This means removing posts that were set in concrete, so it’s a hard job even though I’m only working two or three hours every other day (I’m hurting so much right now that I’ll probably take some oxycodone soon). Even so, the work is worth the pain because it makes me feel useful, even manly, and I can’t give that up. Even if money were limitless, I would still want to work because I’ve always taken satisfaction in manual labor. I didn’t do much of it for years because I kept hoping that I would get past the pain if I took care of myself—and had enough surgeries and saw enough physical therapists—but having gotten over those delusions, I’m working again, because, well, why not? What would I be saving myself for if I didn’t? At 65, my workdays are limited anyway. Even my strong-as-a-bull father had to cut back when he hit his mid-seventies.

The 2 ½” cyst on my kidney that might have been filled with cancer turned out to be filled with blood from when I broke my back on November 30 (that’s a date I’ll never forget). I had to wait six months to find this out, not that I minded because I never thought I had cancer anyway, and if I had had cancer it would have probably been a slow-growing type.

I get a periodic colonoscopy next week. I dread the gallon of foul-tasting laxative, but I don’t mind the procedure itself because once they tank me up with joy-juice, lying on my side while another man pokes a flashlight up my ass doesn’t seem half bad even if I am a heterosexual.

The Cymbalta has helped both my depression and pain. I’ve taken so many anti-depressants by now that I can’t even remember them all, but they’ve certainly been interesting if only because they have proven to my satisfaction the extent to which a person’s mental state is chemically produced. I mean, really, when you can go from being profoundly depressed to being almost cheerful after taking a drug, it says a lot about what makes us as we are, and it sure the hell ain’t religion, philosophy, or simply “deciding to be happy.” (When a depressed person buys the line that, “A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be,” it only makes him feel more wretched. Interestingly, the source of the quote was Abraham Lincoln, a lifelong depressive.)

I took my first anti-depressant (Norpramin) in the ‘80s, which were the old tricyclic days. Now, everything is either an SSRI or an SSNI, and they work a lot better with fewer side-effects. The first one I tried was Prozac (which was about all they had back then), and it made me almost deliriously happy (damn near manic), but the effect went away after a few weeks, so the shrink kept increasing my dosage until I topped out. Then, I experimented with various others, most of which didn’t work. The last one I took was Zoloft, and it did the trick. I never got high on it like I did with Prozac, but it worked a lot better in the long-term. I took it for years until I got tired of not being able to cry, tired of having my highs as well as my lows modulated, and tired of not knowing what my life would be like without it. I finally stopped cold turkey, which was a really bad idea because I felt as if I had been pushed off a cliff, mood-wise.

I did get one lasting benefit from Zoloft. Before Zoloft, I had been shy all my life—extremely shy in some situations—but I haven’t been that way since Zoloft, although I stopped it about ten years ago. I can’t say that I never feel shy at all anymore, but it’s rare that I do, and I never feel crippled by it. I remember when I was so shy that I was sometimes afraid of the sound of my own voice (when I was a child, I stuttered and couldn’t pronounce various letters, including the one that makes up half of the letters in my name, and it left me with a lasting scar), but those days are long gone. Now, I just don’t care all that much about what kind of an impression I make. I think age has also helped keep my shyness at bay because I saw it happen that way with my father who was a lot more shy than I ever was.

The picture is of Peggy the last time I roofed this house. She didn't help much because she was touring Alaska with Walt (see last post) for much of the time. Actually, I rather like having her go away when I have a big project because it gives me the freedom to focus entirely on my work.

Are atheists more rational?

I find it easy to criticize most forms of theism because I consider any claim to the existence of a benevolent and supernatural deity to be unprovable and self-contradictory. Criticizing atheism is more difficult because the burden of proof lies with those who make a claim rather than with those who challenge it. Most people consider this obvious in the case of the Loch Ness Monster, but they somehow manage to overlook it where God is concerned. Perhaps, this is why a lot of what passes for an attack on atheism is really an attack on the character and personality of atheists. For example, we’re often accused of being arrogant, immoral, intolerant, and argumentative, and some of us are, but our detractors paint us with too broad a brush. Even so, I consider it likely that, as a group, we really do differ from theists in various ways, although my thoughts about this are mostly based on my own observations, and can’t therefore be taken as gospel. In this post, I want to discuss one of those ways: how atheists regard rationality.

I think it safe to say that nearly all atheists are rationalists inasmuch as they hold that beliefs based upon logic and evidence are more likely to be true than are beliefs based upon authority, intuition, emotion, and mysticism. For instance, when I recently wrote about my fear of death, an atheist friend offered an argument reminiscent of that of Epicurus who said,

“If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?”

I find this argument to be as flawless as it is meaningless, but without intending to disparage my friend, I will go further and say that it is irrational to ascribe to rationality the power that many atheists imagine it to have. Surely, David Hume (pictured) is well-considered to be the epitome of rationalism in the modern sense of offering arguments that are rigorously logical and evidence-based, yet even he wrote that,

“Reason is…the slave of the passions.” 

I suspect that some of the atheistic emphasis on rationality comes from the fact that atheists want to distance themselves as much as possible from those whom they consider credulous or superstitious, and this leads them to judge left-brain activity as superior to right-brain activity. I think it might also be true that most atheists are left-brain oriented by nature, and, like all people, they tend to regard as superior those attributes that they find within themselves.

The fact that I am a right-brainer seems to be a minor liability among atheists because so much of what right-brained people think about is relative and imaginative rather than sharply defined and logical. This is why I am attracted to the liberal arts rather than to math and the sciences (at least in any depth). I often see this in my relationship with Peggy whom is my superior at understanding math and science, whereas I’m her superior at understanding religion, symbolic literature, and philosophy, things that often strike her as arcane, convoluted, nitpicking, and even nonsensical. My right-brainedness might also explain why I’ve have had a much harder time letting go of religion than most atheists.

I also differ from most of the atheists I’ve known in that they assume a correlation between rationality and happiness. I would challenge them to prove this because I’ve seen no evidence of it. For example, my friend, Walt, is irrational about money in that he never saves, and he only cares about how much something costs so he’ll know if he has enough money to buy it. Years ago, he had a desperate need for money, so he borrowed from me. I assumed that he would learn from the experience and become more rational, but it was not to be. One day, he and I were talking about our differences, and he argued that he would feel less anxiety if he were abandoned penniless in the middle of a foreign country where no one spoke English than I would feel if I were abandoned in the same country with a million dollars in the bank, and he was right. All my providence regarding money doesn’t make me happier (although I would definitely be unhappy if I were broke).

Likewise, Walt doesn’t worry about his house when he’s away from home despite the fact that he has done nothing to protect it from burglars. I’ve put a lot of thought and work into making my house unappealing to burglars, yet I still worry, although again, I would worry more if I hadn’t taken these measures. Despite Walt’s irrationality about various things, he is happier than I as can be seen in the fact that he's more cheerful, confident, generous, and spontaneous. Even so, I wouldn’t trade places with him because I’ve seen so many bad things happen in his life that never would have happened to me.

My point is that I see rationality as a tool that enables us to accomplish things that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish and to avoid mistakes that we couldn’t otherwise avoid, yet it’s not a tool for happiness, and even someone like Walt can employ it as well or better than I when he feels the need, so it’s also not an even/or proposition. This is why some very smart people who are rational in every other way can still base their lives upon irrational beliefs (e.g. religion, excessive optimism, excessive pessimism, or an unrealistic sense of self-confidence), and why people who pride themselves on rationality in regard to these things, can still behave irrationally in other areas (e.g. money, relationships, health-care, and managing their emotions). As I see it, ours is simply not a rational species, and this includes atheists. To quote Hume again, this time in full: 

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” 

Another problem with rationality that many atheists appear to overlook is that it either cannot produce, or is limited in its ability to produce, love, purpose, art, music, and literature, and it’s also powerless to give us an appreciation of these things, yet without them, we would be little more than machines. As it is, we are all composed of two cerebral spheres, and some people—to their detriment—are overly dominated by the right, and others—to their detriment—are overly dominated by the left, and each group devalues the other. This makes them blind to the influence of the other sphere on their own behavior as well as blind to how they sabotage the gifts that the other sphere has to offer. I think it likely that differences in cerebral orientation are like differences in sexual orientation in that whatever you’re born with is permanent, and your job isn’t to change it but to use it wisely in order to be the most balanced person you can be.

If not now, when?

My blog isn’t popular among atheists. I  can think of many reasons why this might be so, but perhaps the main one is that, while I’m terribly critical of religion, I’m far from being enamored of atheism. Most of the atheists whom I have known considered their loss of religion as an occasion for celebration (like being cured of a disease) rather than of grief. When it comes to the secularization of the public sphere, I would agree, but in my private life, my loss of belief in God was—and still remains—the greatest trauma I’ve experienced, even though the God in whom I was brought up to believe is not a God in whom I would even want to believe (given the immense suffering in the world, I can’t imagine that there even could exist a God in whom I would want to believe).

In summary, I’m not a “happy atheist” kind of person, but that’s the image that the atheist community is trying to push on society in order to win acceptance. While I’m very much a real atheist intellectually, I can’t rid myself of the emotional need to believe that life has an objective meaning, that is a meaning that can only come from God, because to think of it as a mere flash of awareness punctuated at either end by infinite nothingness makes it absurd (this isn’t a view that most atheists appear to share). Also, I don’t agree that most of the world’s problems would disappear if everyone became "rational" (that is, atheistic) because, people being people, we would still be violent and oppressive. As theists like to point out, Stalin and Pol Pot were mass murderers, and while I consider it significant that they didn’t murder in the name of atheism, neither did their freedom from religious superstition make them better people. I’ve also noticed that a great many lesser known atheists are intolerant and abusive. Given what we have endured at the hands of theists, I am sympathetic, but I am also frightened and ashamed that so many of my fellows seem consumed by anger (for one thing, it seems so irrational).

I’ve been talking here of those atheists who join atheist organizations because they constitute most of the nonbelievers I’ve known, and I would guess that they’re the ones who are most likely to see non-belief as central to their identity. As my readers well know, it’s central to my identity too, but not in the same laudatory way. While most atheists like to think of themselves as exemplars of rationality, I consider them as nutty as anyone else except, perhaps, in the area of religion, although I must admit that religion is a big area and a major cause of nuttiness. Still, it’s not a person’s entire being, and what really matters isn’t what one professes, but how one behaves. Too many atheists are haters, and this means that their ascendancy to political power might not mark an end to religious intolerance but simply a reversal of whom is dishing it out. For example, if militant atheists ran the country, I’ve no doubt but what religion would be classified as a mental illness, religious people would be discriminated against socially and in the workforce, and the children of religious people might conceivably be taken from their homes. No matter which end of the spectrum they occupy, the reign of fanatics is always the same.

Tallies of the membership of atheist organizations indicate that most atheists are non-joiners (at least of such organizations), so I don’t know how the majority feel about their non-belief, but I would make the following guesses: Some are in the closet because they fear ostracism if not overt persecution. Others consider the effects of religion on society to be salutary, and to this end, a small number belong to churches. Others are pantheists whose main difference with atheists is nomenclature rather than content. Still others are like my wife, Peggy, in that the religion/atheism dichotomy is of no interest to them (if you want to see someone go to sleep in three-minutes flat, try talking about these things with Peggy). Various others view atheist organizations as having a negative focus (I would argue with this), and choose to put their energy into other things. 

As to how many are like myself in that they view their atheism as an inescapable fact rather than a cause for celebration, I have no idea, but, surely, there are many such people who either never join an atheist organization, or else join only to feel that they lack the required boosterism. No doubt some are also—as am I—offended by the open mockery that many members of such organizations express for theists. However much I fail, I try to avoid this. For one thing, contempt alienates rather than instructs. For another, when I show contempt, it’s like when I openly curse someone—something which I have sometimes done—in that however satisfying it might seem in the moment, I later feel degraded.

I wish I had it in me to write a book because books about atheism are popular now, yet few of them are written for people such as myself, people who are sincere in their denial of religion/spirituality but who also find it impossible to be okay with life without God because life without God means life without divine guidance, life without immortality, life without ordained meaning, and life without the assurance that everything will eventually work out for the best. As hateful and contradictory as the fundamentalist God of my childhood appeared, he at least offered the promise of these things. By contrast, the atheistic view is that we owe our existence to unreasoning natural processes and then we die. Period. Finis. Deader than a doorknob. 

It’s popular among non-believers to deride as selfish and egotistical those who say this isn’t enough. Maybe such atheists are like frightened children whistling in the dark, or maybe they believe what they say. Damned if I know. I just know that if I were given a cake with a bit too much salt only to have it thrown in the garbage after I had but tasted it, I would consider it a pretty paltry gift, and so do I regard life without God, i.e. I came from eternal nothingness into a world that is marred by cruelty and injustice, and in less than a moment, I and everything I love will go back into that nothingness. For this I am supposed to celebrate atheism? I don’t think so. However grand the cosmos and however wonderful life can be at times, it doesn’t atone for what it lacks. But I should end on a positive note.

If you were to ask me what I admire most about my species, it is simply that we as individuals endure so much without killing ourselves. Maybe the reason is what Schopenhauer called blind will. I say this because it’s hard to make a case against suicide, yet relatively few of us go that route, and many of those who do are in horrible shape and nearing the end of their lives anyway. Whatever the cause, we humans are tough and adaptable, and while the same can be said for a lot of other animals, we’re the only ones who appear to have a choice. I see in myself a tenacity that I can’t explain, and which seems to come largely from my desire to keep learning and simply to see what happens next. I want my life to have a conclusion, and I don’t just mean death, but a conclusion in terms of wisdom. I’m aware that life doesn’t usually work this way. People die at age 20 in war, or at age 50 of a heart attack, or at age 80 of a stroke without appearing to have learned much or concluded much. They’re alive one moment and dead the next, and their lives resemble nothing so much as a novel with an unsatisfactory ending. This, to me, might very well constitute the ultimate tragedy, and so I say with Thoreau:

“I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

This—along with my curiosity and my obligation to Peggy—is what keeps me going. My best guess is that there’s really very little left for me to learn, and that how one regards one’s life is a matter of disposition rather than either philosophy or what I will call spirituality for the lack of a better word. Yet, I’m afraid I’m a bit of a loser in the disposition category, so all this leaves for me is knowledge of whatever kind and however obtained. In this regard, maybe, for me at least, the search is the destination, but whether this is true or not, I can’t help but think that I was made to be the person I am, and that I am not a mistake. I am actually much more disappointed in the shallowness that I find in other people than in the angst that I find within myself because it seems to me that most people walk through life like so many mules with blinders. I believe that much of the evil we do is the result of our shallowness because who can contemplate life deeply without making a determined effort to act wisely in the short time that is left? After all, if not now, when?