What’s Holding Us Back?

This passage is spoken by Jess, the troubled teen in Nick Hornsby’s A Long Way Down. The novel is about four would-be suicides who meet by chance and then form a kind of wacky support group.

In my earlier review of the book, I asked whether these ropes, these people and things and circumstances that hold us back, are imposed on us or are self-imposed lifelines. I have often written in these pages We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. Hornsby’s thesis, which is consistent with this idea, is that those who are going to commit suicide are going to do it, and those who aren’t really up for it will not, no matter what others might do or not do to try to influence that decision.

I have argued that the modern world is in many ways a prison, and we are tugged along within its walls for most of our lives by a tension between three forces:

• The Centre, the force of conformity and obedience to and dependence on the status quo, at every social level (work, family, the political and economic system etc.)
• The Edge, the force of rebellion and individuality and self-sufficiency
• Disengagement, physical but mostly intellectual and emotional, the force of anomie and, often, hopelessness

Our fears pull us towards the Centre, our instincts pull us back towards the Edge, and our exhaustion pulls us towards Disengagement, and giving up. Play by the rules, make your own rules, or drop out of the game entirely.

Few of us spend our whole lives in any of these three places or states. When we are driven by insecurity (especially when we are raising a family) we gravitate to the numbing safety of the Centre, though those who are deeply insecure may spend much of their lives there, looking in vain for appreciation that that is the place they belong. During rebellious youth, and often again in reflective old age, we retreat to the Edge, try to find our own way, prove in vain that we don’t need anyone else, or at least don’t need the Man. On the cusps of these shifts we may slip into despair or nihilism and be drawn in that third direction, disengagement, hardly a part of the real world at all.

This is not surprising behaviour in a prison: When there is no chance for parole, the prisoner is likely to vacillate between acceptance (“this isn’t so bad when you get to know your way around and move up the pecking order”), resistance (“they will never do that to me again”), and despair (“I just can’t take this any more”).

My sense is that we largely create our own ropes, our own lifelines, which keep us from going too far in any of these directions. Instincts and idealism keep us from falling too far into the Centre and being eaten up by the system. Realism keeps us from sliding too close to the Edge, since if we over-estimate our self-sufficiency in this crowded world of dependence and scarcity we can easily fall off. And hopefulness keeps us from falling into a genuinely self-destructive state. We have been endowed with all of these qualities of human nature ñ if we were not, Darwin’s law would have made us into mindless robots, antisocial anarchists, or suicides, and our species would be extinct.

We see pockets of all three in modern society, but our nature keeps most of us from emulating them. Our nature, not liberal education, keeps us from falling irretrievably into the Centre. Our nature, not moral upbringing, keeps us from falling off the Edge. Our nature, not religious prohibition (or psychological healing), keeps us from just ending it all. Hornsby’s novel implies that it is we ourselves, not the systems and people around us, that construct our lifelines. Nature would never rely on human social constructs to keep us walking that delicate balance between the three extremes. She has programmed us to walk that balance intuitively.

So when we do something that surprises us, or when we fail to do something that we think, rationally or emotionally, we should be doing, this is not a result of social pressure, procrastination or other human ‘weakness’. We are simply doing what we must, then what is easy, and then what is fun. We are holding ourselves back.

Another Hornby novel, How to Be Good, is about a couple who, in different ways, sever their own lifelines, the self-restraints that are holding them back. The novel’s hard-working liberal wife embarks on a dangerous and tumultuous affair, and her husband, a cynic under the recent influence of a strange faith-healer, undergoes a metamorphosis, gives away all his money and vows to live a completely unselfish and generous life. The wife, seeing her bitter husband transformed into the man she once loved (except perhaps more so) is filled with remorse for her indiscretion and then filled with renewed anger at her husband for his lack of self-control. Their marriage survives as both characters pull themselves (not each other) back from the brink. What is telling (and what makes the book funny) is that the swings to extreme behaviour immediately strike the reader as such unnatural behaviour, not just in the context of the protagonists’ previous behaviour, but for any human.

What is holding us back? What is telling us not to walk away from a struggling marriage, not to have a fling with that new person who so delights us with their attentions and appreciation of us? What is telling us not to quit our jobs and go on a trek to Nepal or Nashville, or sign up to work with the terminally ill or the masses in struggling nations? What is keeping us from blowing up dams and fire-bombing SUV dealerships and kidnapping Exxon & Monsanto execs to hold for ransom for a trillion dollars in renewable energy and permaculture investment? What is it that will have us tomorrow doing much the same as we did today, instead of pursuing our lifelong dream, our passion, or instead of ending it all?

It is, I think, those survival lifelines we have crafted for ourselves. Our instincts are telling us we need these lifelines, these anchors, and that this is the wrong time (and perhaps there never will be a right time) to do the thing we’ve always dreamed of doing. Weare taught to distrust our instincts, but somehow we know better, and we do what they tell us.

And what happens when we lose our self-constructed lifeline? Exactly what happens now: We will do what we must. Things are the way they are for a reason. As Jess says, It’s not our choice.