We Are Privileged Explorers

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Unusual questions that the Seer answered in retreats during the past years:

I’m a behaviorist and a counselor. I’ve wondered why suicides are so prevalent, in my experience, in the age group of people in their thirties and late twenties. Can you explain please?

The Seer:
As you may know, Erickson the famous behaviorist, places those who are in their thirties in the seventh psycho-social stage of development. This stage that occurs in middle adulthood has the challenge of resolving the key conflict of generativity vs. stagnation.

People of this age group want to feel they’ve contributed something to the world, and so successfully navigating this conflict involves accomplishments like raising a family, succeeding at work, and volunteering in the community. During this stage of middle adulthood, people who aren’t able to do this often feel disconnected from the rest of the world; a sense of isolation.

This seventh psycho-social stage is the beginning of a quest for meaningful living — feeling as though they’re living a meaningful life that matters.

This quest is a futile one for those that have depth of contemplation, because of our inability to judge what is meaningful from our limited vantage point of the complexity of life, such a quest is doomed to failure. The ultimate insight is that all our actions can either be seen as equally important or equally unimportant. The seeker of such an answer must therefore realize that there is no meaning to life — the loss of the illusion that life can be meaningful, can trigger an existential crises unless it is replaced by the realization that it is the quality of the journey that we are privileged explorers of, and that the search for meaning is but an attempt to pacify reason’s addiction to know.