A Hierarchy of Seriousness
There are things in life that deserve to be taken seriously.
A child is ill. Someone you love is in danger. A friend dies. A family breaks apart. A decision may genuinely alter the course of another person’s life.
These are not occasions for irony or clever detachment. They are occasions for seriousness.
The strange thing is that we often use the same emotional machinery for almost everything else.
A delayed train. A bureaucratic letter. A rude cashier. A failed plan. A motorcycle that may or may not be worth buying. A conversation that landed slightly differently than we hoped.
Somehow the machinery starts up anyway.
We analyze, anticipate, rehearse, interpret. We assign consequences. We construct possible futures. A minor inconvenience acquires weight, then meaning, then sometimes an entire philosophy.
Not the hierarchy of what matters and what does not. Most of us roughly know that.
The more difficult question is how much things should matter.
I was swimming recently in a lake. Nearby was a Spanish camper van, and I started talking to the people traveling in it. They had driven a long way. Eventually they asked whether the water was cold.
I said:
“There’s no ice on it yet.”
This was not useful information.
It was also, in some sense, exactly the right information.
The water was cold. But it was not tragically cold. Not existentially cold. Not cold enough to require deliberation, preparation or a committee.
You could get in.
You would be uncomfortable for a moment.
And afterward you would still be alive.
That should sometimes be enough.
I have increasingly begun to suspect that one of the great arts of living is not knowing what to take seriously, but knowing how seriously to take it.
There are people who take almost nothing seriously. That can become cruelty, irresponsibility or nihilism. Other people take almost everything seriously. That can become another form of madness.
Every inconvenience becomes injustice. Every disagreement becomes betrayal. Every uncertainty becomes anxiety. Every choice becomes destiny.
The first person has no gravity.
The second lives on Jupiter.
Neither seems ideal.
Michel de Montaigne understood something about this.
He spent much of his life examining himself with extraordinary attention: his fears, his body, his habits, his vanity, his mortality, his stupidity. There are few writers who have looked at themselves so persistently.
And yet he rarely seems imprisoned by what he finds.
That is what I love about him.
Montaigne could take human existence seriously without becoming terribly solemn about it. He could look directly at weakness, illness, foolishness and death without immediately converting them into tragedy.
There is a peculiar lightness in that.
Not superficiality.
Lightness.
The distinction matters.
A light person may understand death perfectly well. A solemn person may understand very little. Gravity of expression is not proof of depth.
Montaigne seems constantly aware that human beings are ridiculous and mortal at exactly the same time.
We worry about death.
We also worry about constipation.
Both facts belong to the same creature.
Philosophy has sometimes had more difficulty accepting this than Montaigne did.
The philosophers of the absurd, for example, often feel heavier.
Camus gives us Sisyphus pushing his stone up the mountain. It is a magnificent image: the endless task, the indifferent universe, the human being who persists nevertheless.
But I have always found the picture slightly exhausting.
The stone.
The mountain.
The endless repetition.
The heroic revolt against a silent universe.
One almost wants to interrupt and ask:
Could Sisyphus not occasionally sit down?
Have a sandwich?
Look at the view?
The stone will still be there afterward.
This is not really an argument against Camus. It is more a temperamental objection.
The absurd does not always require a spotlight.
Sometimes it is simply funny.
Peter Wessel Zapffe went further. For him, human consciousness itself begins to resemble an evolutionary mistake. We know too much. We anticipate too much. We see death coming. We ask questions for which the world appears to contain no answers. We manufacture meaning while simultaneously possessing enough intelligence to suspect that we manufactured it.
We are animals who became excessively aware of being animals.
There is something deeply convincing in this diagnosis.
But even if Zapffe is right, I am not sure despair necessarily follows.
Perhaps the practical response is sometimes much less dramatic.
Think less.
Not become stupid.
Not stop reflecting.
Not abandon philosophy.
Simply resist the temptation to assign metaphysical significance to every passing event.
A few days ago I was buying groceries. The supermarket was quiet, and as the cashier scanned my things, I began commenting on each item.
Spaghetti.
“I actually mostly like spaghetti.”
Chocolate.
“Sometimes I eat something sweet after spaghetti.”
And so on.
At first she rolled her eyes.
Then she smiled.
Then she smiled more.
By the end, the entire transaction had become a small comedy routine.
Nothing important happened.
That was precisely the point.
For a few minutes, two people stopped treating an ordinary commercial transaction as something purely functional. The world did not improve. No great insight was achieved. Nobody was rescued. No problem was solved.
We laughed.
That was enough.
Perhaps we underestimate how much unnecessary seriousness accumulates in daily life.
Modern life is particularly good at producing it because almost everything has become a project.
We optimize our careers, our relationships, our communication, our health, our parenting, our productivity, our sleep, our diet, our exercise, our personalities.
Even leisure has become strangely demanding.
Did I use my weekend well?
Was the holiday meaningful enough?
Did we create good memories?
Am I sufficiently present?
Eventually a person can become anxious while relaxing.
That is quite an achievement.
And consciousness itself makes the problem worse because consciousness does not naturally know when to stop.
Give the mind a small event and it can build a cathedral around it.
Someone does not answer a message.
Perhaps they are busy.
Or perhaps they are offended.
Perhaps the relationship has changed.
Perhaps I said something wrong.
Perhaps they have always secretly thought this about me.
Perhaps this reveals a fundamental pattern in my relationships.
Twenty minutes later, a person who is simply taking a shower has become evidence of existential abandonment.
The mind is very talented.
It should not always be encouraged.
A hierarchy of seriousness means reserving our full emotional weight for things that deserve it.
If something happens to my daughter, the hierarchy disappears.
That matters.
Immediately.
Biologically, morally, personally.
There is nothing to relativize. No clever joke is required. There are moments when seriousness is not a psychological habit but the correct response to reality because something genuinely precious is at stake.
And precisely because such things exist, perhaps we should be more reluctant to spend the same emotional currency on everything else.
A parking fine should not occupy the same psychological category as illness.
A bad meeting should not feel like bereavement.
A strange look from a stranger should not require three hours of interpretation.
A motorcycle purchase is not a referendum on the direction of one’s life.
And a cold lake is simply a cold lake.
This is not the same as saying that we should take life lightly.
That would be too easy.
Life is not always light.
It can be brutal. People disappear. Bodies fail. Families fracture. Plans collapse. Love can hurt. Chance has no obligation to be fair.
The tragic is real.
But there is an enormous difference between acknowledging tragedy and manufacturing it where none is necessary.
Perhaps maturity consists partly in learning the difference.
This is where, temperamentally at least, Montaigne comes closer to what I want than Camus.
Camus seems to ask:
The universe is absurd. How shall we confront it?
Montaigne seems more likely to say:
Yes, probably.
What are we having for dinner?
I prefer the second question.
Not because it defeats the first.
It does something better.
It puts it back into proportion.
Most things do not require solving. Most moments do not carry a hidden message about our lives. Most inconveniences are not symbols. Most failures are not verdicts. Most uncertainties do not need to be eliminated before we continue.
Sometimes existence does not require a philosophy.
Sometimes it requires soup.
There is a peculiar freedom in refusing to give every event maximum significance.
A person can be responsible without being solemn.
Attentive without being anxious.
Serious without becoming heavy.
One can recognize the absurd without turning absurdity itself into another burden that must be carried heroically up a mountain.
Some stones should be pushed.
Some should be walked around.
Some are useful for sitting on.
And some should simply be left where they are.
That, perhaps, is the hierarchy.
Take the important things seriously.
Take the tragic honestly.
Take responsibility when responsibility is yours.
And do not waste the full weight of your existence on things that never asked for it.
When someone asks whether the lake is cold, look at the water.
Look at the sky.
And say:
There is no ice on it yet.