"There’s a passage in Ernest Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning that I keep returning to...“We touch people on the outside of their bodies, and they touch us, but we can’t access their insides, nor can we reveal our own. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it's utterly personal and unrevealable. We often want to say something deeply intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend—something about how we’re feeling, who we truly are, or how we experience a sunset—only to fall flat. Rarely, we succeed, sometimes more with one person, sometimes less or never with others. But those rare moments only prove the rule: we reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into ourselves.”

This, perhaps, is the fundamental struggle: how to translate ourselves, how to articulate our inner worlds to a world that can’t directly perceive them. How do we build bridges between ourselves and others? How do we create a home, not just physically but psychologically—a space where we can bring enough of our interior world into the exterior one to live meaningfully, to live with some semblance of existential comfort?

We often take for granted the intricate mechanisms we use in this endeavor—the basics of language, culture, and sociability. But their importance becomes starkly clear when they’re suddenly taken away or no longer as easily accessible. This is, of course, at the heart of the immigrant experience: the enigma of arrival, of moving to a new country, learning a new language, meeting new people. It’s also the plight of the artist, who, beyond pursuing truth, beauty, and self-expression within the confines of capitalism, also navigates the deeper conflict between human imagination and the material world—the struggle between the boundless expanse of our dreams and the limited resources to realize them.

The world, it seems, is constantly pushing back against our pursuit of self-actualization. Sometimes it does so quietly, subtly; other times, loudly and violently. But it always resists, as if determined to keep us small, even to erase us. This resistance heightens our awareness of what Becker calls "man’s basic animal fears": our anxieties about impotence, death, and being overwhelmed by the world or others. These fears imbue our lives with a sense of drivenness, of desperation—an obsession with meaning and personal significance. This drive pushes us to make our mark on the world, to twist it to our own designs, often in an effort to bury the rumbling anxieties beneath. It usually leads us to try to do the same with others—to shape them to justify our own uncertain lives.

We’re not just projecting our inner world into the outside world; the world inevitably presses back into us, triggering inner turmoil and chaos that cloud our desires and motivations, that obscure our clarity of self. How much agency is there really within? How much of our interior world is as foreign to us as the outside world? And as we try to convey our sense of self, how truthful can we truly be about who we are?"

LSoO