Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

The philosopher L.A. Paul talks about “the vampire problem” i.e. how do you choose whether you want to become a vampire when you can’t know what it’s like until you become one?

While becoming a vampire fortunately isn’t a life choice that we have to confront, we do sometimes need to make major life decisions without being able to fully anticipate how it will change us.

In Ben Kuhn’s blog post “Staring into the abyss as a core life skill“, Kuhn defines staring into the abyss as “thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favour of breaking up with your partner”. He observes how the people he most admires are those who have demonstrated an ability to directly address difficult truths in their lives.

I have friends who have changed degrees, ended relationships, and left jobs in ways which at the time felt like huge admissions of failure. But pretty much without exception they have been far better off for doing so. It’s not sensible to only ever make decisions you think other people are going to understand, but the expectations we can hold of ourselves or others, and the idea of “sunk costs” can be incredibly strong pulls keeping us stuck.

Just the phrase “staring into the abyss” has helped me be more intentional about identifying decisions I need to make or probe. It’s easy to postpone decisions until there is some reason they need to be more urgently addressed or there’s “more information”. There’s more satisfaction to writing on your to do list (as I did this week) – “Stare into the abyss: what do I actually find restful and how can I improve my ability to properly get rest”. I’ve now got something to experiment with.

On this topic of experimenting (and please forgive my quoting a second philosopher in a single blog post), there’s a famous book called “Philosophy as a way of life” in which Pierre Hadot argues that philosophy in antiquity required vulnerability i.e. it had to be lived. Hadot says the three big primary questions of philosophy are:

• What is the nature of the world?
• What are human beings?
• What does it mean to live?

These questions have to be lived: you need to run them as experiments, and there are no ways to resolve these questions finally.

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I recently read Henry Oliver’s book ‘Second Act’, which profiles the lives of late bloomers (“someone who successfully changes the balance of their life” – what a lovely definition).

One of the people profiled is Audrey Sutherland (1921-2015), a remarkable adventurer, paddler, and outdoor writer known for her solo wilderness journeys (often in an inflatable kayak).

What’s unusual about Audrey’s story is that she balanced her adventurous pursuits with a career as a school counsellor in Hawaii, where she raised four children as a single mother. She began her serious wilderness expeditions in her 60s. Over the three decades that followed, she paddled thousands of miles along the Alaskan coastline and other waterways.

I can’t really relate to passing out trying to scale a 20m cliff and returning a few years later to try again, but I really like Sutherland’s sense of practicality (“It isn’t really a question of can you or can’t you, but of deciding what you really want to do and then figuring out how”). When she gave talks Sutherland would get people to close their eyes and think about what they would go and do with five million pounds. She’d follow this up with “Now forget the 5 million pounds and just go figure it out.”

Sutherland makes it sound very straightforward, and changing the balance of our lives doesn’t often feel as simple as “figuring it out”. We can’t solve the vampire problem completely because we can’t know exactly how our choices will transform us. But we also don’t need to solve it. Choosing the path forward often isn’t about having perfect information or waiting for ideal circumstances. It’s about being willing to look directly at difficult questions, to live them as experiments, and to trust that even if we can’t see the whole journey ahead, we can enjoy the process of taking a next step.