How to Generate the Perfect Existential Crisis

Or: How to Harness Our Biological Imperatives to Make Your Stories More Compelling

In my last post, I wrote about Lillian Fishman’s Metropolitan Review article about how she used to chase new experiences, like Hannah from Girls, but more recently found herself wondering, like Eileen in Beautiful World, Where Are You, if she should have ‘done the Christian thing,’ married her boyfriend, and started a family in her twenties. And it set me off writing about how our DNA’s whispered instructions influence our stories—our fiction, our essays, the tales we tell ourselves as we search for fulfilment…

Here’s a snippet:

Our DNA’s whispered instructions are often called biological imperatives, and usually listed as survival, territorialism, competition, reproduction, quality-of-life-seeking, and group-forming. We can see these imperatives play out in the dilemma Fishman explores in her essay, as the women she’s describing go about forming friend groups and families, seeking a quality of life that feels somehow ‘better’, competing with their peers (or their parents) in one way or another, seeking erotic encounters and romantic partners, and trying (or trying not to) get pregnant.

These instructions we receive are always vague, and often feel contradictory. Take territorialism—we feel impelled to explore and seek out new pastures, new resources and possibilities AND we feel impelled to set up camp, call it home, and secure it, protect it. When our DNA is telling us to venture forth AND to make a home, how are we supposed to know what to do?

How does all this connect to the Story Energies? How can our Energies be harnessed to tell stories where a character is suddenly faced with one of these existential crises that are often so compelling to read about?

Let’s begin with…

We all tell ourselves stories that give our lives meaning—that offer us a sense of who we are, of what is important, of what we should be doing on this earth.

Maybe this is: Young, liberal, educated woman in New York, who believes that an oppressive, patriarchal society has been reducing women to wives and mothers, and who wants to go out, embrace experiences, and be her true self.

Or maybe it’s: Youngish, liberal, educated woman in New York, who is starting to wonder if the secret to happiness is a stable relationship and a clutch of kids, and who suddenly finds herself wanting to settle down, get her UTI removed, and maybe start looking for a house in the suburbs with a yard.

Or maybe it’s: Old dwarf, who believes in gold and mountains, and who wants to let the elves and humans be overrun by the orcs and goblins because what’s that to him?

If we give our characters a firm sense of who they are and what they want at the beginning of the story—even if that ‘want’ is something vague or hazy like ‘experience’—that charges them with Potential Energy. And if we understand the assumptions on which their convictions are constructed, we can more easily send their certainties crumbling down around them.

And if those assumptions align with a biological imperative—to explore new territory, for example, or to secure a home and get reproducing—they can feel even more ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ to the character, and it can be even more upsetting when they are challenged.

From Kyss, by Edvard Munch

The natural and social forces acting upon the people who inhabit a particular place always help shape their identities, their beliefs, their hopes and dreams.

Maybe that’s a wave of feminism, washing over a character through the books and websites they read, the classes they take at Barnard, the sacrifices made by her mother’s generation to give her and her friends options they never had.

Or maybe it’s a set of concrete financial realities—rents, property ladders, college and retirement funds—that can only be ignored for so long.

Or maybe it’s the fact that the same coffee shop you’ve always gone to is suddenly crammed with glowing parents, and incredibly tiny babies in unbelievably adorable outfits…

Or maybe it’s the biological reality of a uterus’s built-in timer, counting down…

This tension that exists between our imperatives to explore and to settle down plays out at all sorts of levels in our society and culture. There is so much we can explore, these days, thanks to education and subcultures, low-cost airlines and video games. And, yet, no matter where we turn, we will find groups forming, walls being erected, homes being protected…

Birds and mammals evolved the capacity to form bonds with our young about 250 million years ago. [This is, I think, one of our most interesting stories, but maybe I’ll return to it in more detail in a future post!] And there’s an argument that my capacities to form bonds with my friends, my football team, and my iPhone are all variations of this same tool I developed to prevent predators running off with my infants.

But even if my love for my new sunglasses is essentially the same as my love for my mother, there is something about those familial bonds that is particularly primal, and hard to shake off—even if we set our minds to cutting ties with a parent, or not having kids at all…

Like all good jokes, the secret of any crushing existential crisis is timing.

Maybe this crisis of confidence erupts at exactly the wrong moment, or perhaps the tension generated by the pull of an alternate way of living—which feels like it’s slipping away—can become unbearable.

And even though tension usually faces forward, as we worry if something is going (or not going) to happen, Elastic Energy can also stretch backwards through time, to sickening effect. What if those choices we made were terrible? What if we have wasted the best years of our lives?

We can try to be reasonable about these things. To stay rational, in the face of what feels like a massive existential crisis, and think our way through it. But as any neuroscientist will tell you, our emotional responses are an inevitable part of any decision our brains make¹—there is no such thing as a purely logical choice. And when we think about it, we don’t, in fact, need neuroscientists to tell us that we can’t ignore our emotions, especially when we’re going through a crisis. Those whispered instructions from our DNA will make themselves known to us, try as we might to ignore them.

So when we’re writing a story about a character undergoing an existential crisis, don’t forget to consider their emotional responses—flushed faces, racing hearts, upset stomachs, creeping skin et al. And remember that these emotions will likely play an important role in driving the story forward, and in what it feels like to be along for the ride…

So… are you ready for your Existential Crisis? If so, try this…