Everything Fades

A few years ago, I spoke at an executive event. I was buzzing at the end, and when many stood in line to ask me questions, I felt like the self-help icon Tony Robbins, if only for a few minutes.

I got into my car with the broadest of smiles, but by the time I arrived home, all that goodness had dissipated as I crashed to a feeling of ordinariness.

Last night, I finished the television series Beef. The show is about a road rage incident between Amy and Danny that leads to a feud that eats both their lives.

Amy chased the American dream: a picture-perfect family, a beautiful home and a successful business that sold for millions. Meanwhile, Danny lived quite the opposite, hustling and just about surviving to keep his head above water.

Amy believed she’d be happy and at peace once she achieved her dream, while Danny wanted to survive long enough to catch a break.

In one of the later episodes, Amy throws a party to showcase her husband’s art pieces, to which Danny manages to get an invite. There he confronts Amy, asking her how she feels after achieving all her dreams.

“Is it nice? Having money? Being successful? Like, does the ground feel more solid?” Danny asks.

“Everything fades. Nothing lasts. We’re just a snake eating its own tail,” Amy says.

“Everything fades, nothing lasts” is how I feel in many situations. It’s how I felt arriving home from the talk, after celebrating the publication of my last book, and a few hours after a padel game, especially if I’d won.

Perhaps the truth isn’t that we suffer because everything fades, but rather that we cling to what fades. This feeling of unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha in Buddhist terms, is driven by our craving and attachment, or tanha, to an expectation that is not real.

The feeling I got after the applause and the people waiting in line to speak to me was all about inflating my ego. For a few moments, I’d felt like a king, and without knowing it, I didn’t want that feeling to end. I clung to it for as long as I could, but ultimately it faded, and when it did, I was down.

I’d outsourced and attached my happiness to the positive reaction of my audience. Of course, that didn’t last long, as it was illusory and outside of me. It feels like a universal law that for every high, there is an equal and opposite low.

In Beef, Amy had attached herself to the belief that the American dream was her ultimate goal in life, but when she achieved all that, she found a hollowness and an emptiness that couldn’t be filled.

Danny defined himself by his suffering as a dutiful older brother. He romanticized it as noble, remaining certain that his emotional rescue was simply a matter of a future financial windfall.

In Buddhism, anatta is the teaching of non-self and a step towards true acceptance. Anatta says we exist like a river. There is no fixed, permanent self hiding underneath our experience. The ego is a construct that creates isolation.

How I felt on stage was a passing state, not who I am. I mistook my state for an identity. Likewise, Amy thought she was the serene businesswoman, and Danny, the noble son. But neither identity was ever solid enough to survive what came next.

In the final episode of Beef, stranded in the desert, Amy and Danny are forced into a literal and spiritual detox. They lose their phones, cars, status and clothing. When they accidentally consume psychedelic berries, their egos temporarily disappear.

For the first time, they stop trying to project who they think they should be. Danny stops trying to be the competent provider; Amy stops trying to be the calm, successful businesswoman. In this state of total vulnerability, their consciousnesses merge.

They look at each other and realize they are the same. They speak in each other’s voices. This is a breakdown of the ego, collapsing the illusion of separation that caused their feud.

However, in the last scene of the series, Amy rises from her chair in the hospital and climbs into the bed beside Danny, who lies unconscious. We don’t know if Danny will live or if their merging will hold.

Later that night, I had a small epiphany. Perhaps the finale was playing on my mind. In the desert, with nothing left to perform, Amy and Danny were finally present in their own lives.

But as I looked out the window, I saw myself standing outside mine while it was happening.

I was on the sidelines.

I was not in my life.

So the simple solution is that I get in. I start doing things and appreciate them. There’s no hero, no millions, no NYT bestseller list. Just do the things that I enjoy doing and appreciate the fact that I can.

I rise early, meditate, read, journal and write a bit. I go to work, do what I must and focus on things I enjoy doing. I exercise, play padel, smoke my cigar and reflect, go out and converse with loved ones.

That’s acceptance. Right?

I dunno.

But isn’t it time that I accepted living inside my own life? I’m fifty-eight. What the fuck am I waiting for? Just get into my life and start living it.

And yet, I still struggle with it all.

Where is my NYT bestselling book? Or that villa overlooking the turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea?