Nausea: The existential ‘ick’

Walk to class on a sunny day. See tourists stumble across campus. Wave back at someone waving to the person behind you. Visit Berkeley. Notice how offensive the weather is today — how harsh the sun feels or how cold the shade seems. Laugh at someone riding an electric scooter. Go to a career fair: watch kids in suits suck up to tech execs and quant firms. Go to a philosophy class: watch that intolerable guy in the back uncurl three fingers in the air before smugly attempting to correct the professor. Listen to anyone blowing their nose. Glare at the girl talking too loud in the library the day before your midterm. Realize that you are surrounded by mouth-breathing, scooter-riding, overambitious iPad kids.  Remember that this is as good as it gets: the tailored gardens, abundant fruit trees, temperate climate and Romanesque architecture at your highly selective university. What a grotesque thing a rose is.  

You are not a misanthrope, pessimist or bigot. You like to think that you would take a bullet for a stranger. You tell yourself that you love humanity but hate people. You are not a criminal, a genius or alone. In fact, you make up the crowd. But for a moment, the world disgusts you. Philosophers diagnose you with Nausea; the modern world calls it the Ick. You don’t know what it is, where it came from, or how to get rid of it, only that you have been stripped of the rose-colored glasses everyone else seems to be wearing. You can think of nothing more repulsive than intoxicating yourself into believing that things are alright.  

The Ick strikes suddenly. Imagine this:

You see them in the dining hall — their hair, their smile, their eyes. They seem confident, intelligent, athletic and aware. You recognize them from somewhere — the perfect excuse to strike up a conversation. Finally, you decide to go over. That’s when you see it.  An extended forefinger tunnels deep into the left nasal passage. They pick their nose. Just like that, the dream dies.

You tell stories you want to believe until the Ick brings you back to reality.  

Absurdity becomes obvious when stories fall apart — when perfection picks their nose, when somebody buys a scooter, when Stanford Football wins a game. These moments disturb us because they call our sense of reality into question. Sartre traced the origins of Nausea to the recognition of our total existential freedom. Without any sacred commandments or absolute authorities, the status quo becomes laughable, our rituals arbitrary and our institutions symbolic at best. The stars may fall at any moment, but we accept the stories that tell us otherwise. For Sartre, this is the foundation of Nausea: living on terms other than your own.

Unevaluated assumptions give the world power over us, so we, the existential elite, examine everything.  We deny the value of anything mundane, incomplete, small or imperfect. We become hardcore haters to distance ourselves from the ignorant, mouth-breathing masses, and doing so, guarantee our own unhappiness. If nobody matters, neither do you. Consider the language we use to describe waiting: we stand in line, we move through line, but we never admit to being the line itself. The same is true of traffic and lovers. We refuse to become a part of the scenery, so we lie, cringe and critique. We — the mouth-breathing, nose-picking masses — fight losing battles. We know that our Nausea is intensely hypocritical and completely trivial, yet we give it free rein. I hate the cold, the clouds and the sky; large crowds, crying babies and happy couples; chalkboards, roundabouts and electric scooters. This is no freedom, though we are all of course free to think whatever we want.

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