How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Vampirism
If there is one truth the pandemic confirmed above all, it is how much humans hate uncertainty. We crave stability, and when we do venture out of our comfortable lives, we want to know every twist and turn of the paths branching out in front of us.
Yet certainty is an illusion. Life is just a compounding sequence on probabilities. A cruel fate that, to be trapped in a brain that demands certainty as it moves through an endlessly uncertain universe.
We all have well-honed strategies for coping with this misalignment. Most often, we simply deny the uncertainty, push it into the deep, dark caverns of our subconscious. We know that there is a chance we will be in an accident and our child will be killed each time we step into the car, but we don’t allow ourselves to think about that possibility for more than a moment. One of the reasons the pandemic was so hard is that it ripped the veil off that strategy. The uncertainty was thrust in our faces so often by the media and experts and the other certainty-craving humans around us that it was much harder to banish it smoothly to the subconscious. And so even once it was clear that the risk to children from Covid was far lower than from driving in a car the possibility of the disease was a much greater burden on the minds and actions of many parents.
Another coping strategy is to attach ourselves to people and ideas and communities that offer certainty. In the extreme, this strategy results in cults and conspiracy theories. But it also explains our polarized politics and many bitter, entrenched conflicts within families.
A favorite coping strategy of our well-educated, high-achieving tribe is cost-benefit analysis. Every decision in life, every moment of uncertainty, can, we assume, be crisply assessed through a consultant’s spreadsheet. With enough research and skill, we can determine the path that will guarantee our happiness.
This is, of course, an illusion as well. We know that thoughtful analysis can at best reduce uncertainty, but we quickly bury the remaining uncertainty in our subconscious like so much else, basking in the warm glow of the feeling that we have successfully controlled the world.
By far the most powerful and important of the coping strategies, though, is to cling to the familiar. Whether we are considering our future through analysis on PowerPoint slides or something more invisible and intuitive, we hunger to paint a vivid picture of what our lives will be like down each potential path. This is comparatively easy when we are buying a house in a city we know: we can easily imagine our lives in that neighborhood, that building, that room. It grows harder when we are considering a move to a city or country we have never lived in.
But another cheeky design feature of this life is that the most important decisions are the ones we have the least ability to comprehend. Maria Popova explores this conundrum in her review of a thought experiment by the philosopher L.A. Paul. In this experiment, we are offered the chance to become a vampire with all the fun superpowers and immortality but without all the killing people and draining their blood. As a bonus, all our friends become cuddly superhumans as well.
At first blush, it seems the cost-benefit analysis will be easy (immortality is quite a benefit). But Paul writes:
“The trouble is, in this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one. And if you can’t know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, you can’t compare the character of the lived experience of what it is like to be you, right now, a mere human, to the character of the lived experience of what it would be like to be a vampire. This means that, if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future, you can’t do it rationally. At least, you can’t do it by weighing the competing options concerning what it would be like and choosing on this basis. And it seems awfully suspect to rely solely on the testimony of your vampire friends to make your choice, because, after all, they aren’t human any more, so their preferences are the ones vampires have, not the ones humans have.”
This would be one of the most important (and, I suppose, final) decisions of our lives, yet we struggle to understand or even imagine how it would alter our experience. Analysis fails us; becoming a vampire would (ironically) require a leap of faith.
I love this experiment because it captures so many of the other important moments in our lives. The best-known equivalent is becoming a parent. Before we have children we are often beset by parents spouting vague platitudes about how it is an amazing, life-changing experience we cannot understand until we’ve done it. We may understand that conceptually, but we don’t have any real sense of the many ways our experience of being in the world transforms until our child is born. Becoming a parent is a leap of faith on behalf of future selves: ours and our children’s.
Many people fortunately choose to step into the unknowable and become parents. But there are many similar leaps throughout life that people often sadly refuse to take. People stay in jobs and relationships for years or decades longer than they should. The status quo may be making them miserable, but they choose that known misery over the great uncertainty of the vampire—the potentially more joyful, fuller version of themselves they will become without the job or relationship.
The vampire analogy is so apt because it is not an offer to become some grotesque or completely alien creature. We would still appear human, the selves we have always been. But we might be and feel radically different, a version of ourselves both so familiar and so foreign. And a sense of menace surrounds our possible immortal selves despite the exercise’s claims of magnanimity, just as menace often surrounds most important leaps to our future selves (ask any footloose young adult anticipating their first child).
This unknowable and frightening combination of familiar and foreign reminds me of Richard Rohr’s emphasis that there are stages of spiritual development. Each consecutive stage is so alien to the experience of those in the earlier stages that it is largely indescribable. This continues until we reach the ultimately unknowable and menacing stage: death.
Inner work is similarly unknowable and menacing. I encounter many people who recognize that their anxieties and neuroses are undermining their happiness and relationships and work but are too frightened of what they might find and who they might become if they truly invested in the descent into themselves.
I understand that fear. My recent period of change was the hardest thing I have ever done. I spent portions of it feeling that I had lost a sense of who and what I was. For some time, I was in more pain rather than less and was desperate to return to numbing myself with work and entertainment. I have begun to emerge on the other side not a vampire (sadly) but profoundly transformed. Though much of who I am now is familiar, important aspects of my life and experience would be unrecognizable to myself of ten and certainly twenty years ago. The pain I felt during that metamorphosis was often the confusion and horror and, eventually, fierce resistance of those previous versions of myself as I stepped towards new approaches to work and relationships and spirituality. I wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone, but I am so deeply grateful for having made the leap.
We are called to change throughout our lives, sometimes dramatically. We are called to let the previous versions of ourselves die and evolve into something new. The question is whether we answer that call, whether we have the courage to follow it into the unknowable.
How do we answer those calls when we have jobs and marriages and children? How do we know which calls to answer when there are so many snake oil salesmen and false prophets? Jumping blindly into every unknown in search of transformation is how we end up in cults and conspiracy theories and mountainous bills for unproven supplements.
I will share deeper reflections on this later, but in short, we must first experiment and expect some failure and iteration. And then we must trust what we can think of as, for lack of a better word, our “true self.” Some deep combination of our intuition and our reason knows which paths we are called to, and which are traps. We must find the space and time and sources of support (therapy, community, etc.) to allow that deepest self to speak to us. This is fiendishly hard amid the frenzy of the modern world, but is always possible if we are willing to work towards all the unknowable beauty and joy (if not vampirism) it is calling us towards.