On Ennui
Ennui - A feeling of listlessness and discontent resulting from lack of interest or boredom
Ennui - A feeling of listlessness and discontent resulting from lack of interest or boredom
This French term has been front of mind the past week. I have been reluctant to meditate. I feel tired and have been indulging many of my favorite distractions online. I don’t feel depressed in any way. It’s merely a black cloud that hangs over me where I’m biding my time, waiting for it to pass away.
Searching for specifics that might explain this experience, I see that I have felt resigned and demotivated at work. There is separation between my current professional engagement and where I would like to be instead. Importantly, I can identify a stance I am taking that halts opportunity to resolve this situation. I tell myself that as I am only six months into my role, I should sit tight just a little longer. I should learn the ropes before I start ‘making waves’ and let my ambitions be known. Especially as making waves is a familiar strategy that did not bear fruit in my previous role.
I can see that this attitude has all the signs of what Jung would term an external projection. Jung recognized that we do not see the world as it is but instead as what we imagine it to be. Subjective content that we find unacceptable within ourselves we project onto an object outside ourselves instead. In this case, I am rejecting my capacity to explore new projects with my manager. In response, I conjure an external world that is hostile to advancement in order to justify this inner capacity I am denying myself.
Jung states our psyche is made up of two parts, an Ego and our Self that together represent a part-whole relationship. The Ego represents our conscious awareness, while our Self also encapsulates our unconscious. Jung states our life purpose is to actualize our Self through a process termed individuation. This process involves integrating content from our unconscious into conscious awareness, and is a process that is recurring continually throughout our life, beneath our conscious awareness.
This process encompasses even the most mundane elements of our life, such as in my case my current bout of ennui, and feeling unsatisfied at work. It is most important to recognize that any negativity we feel is a necessary and inevitable part of individuation. Jung states negativity is a reaction from our separate Ego whenever our unconscious starts to intrude on our conscious state. Our unconscious is characterized by Wholeness. It is for this reason that projections take place as our Ego will tend to resist influence from our unconscious, which calls us to experience Wholeness within our being.
Just as our Ego and Self share a part-whole relationship, we can also term the challenges we face in integrating content from our Self in the same way. One case in point is the professional situation I am currently experiencing. I might resolve the issue by talking to my manager. Together we might work out a course of action, and work towards a development plan. While this may certainly resolve the situation, we can imagine that further dissatisfaction of a related sort will soon surface again in a new form. Problems of this type we might term to be a partial solution but do not encompass the whole.
By contrast, Ennui is a state that is hard to pin down, and is a feature that often recurs in our lives. Ennui along with related states such as anxiety are often termed as an existential problem as opposed to a specific problem, as they do not appear to have a direct cause. They appear to be related to the bigger questions around the human condition, rather than to specific problems in our day-to-day life. We might hypothesize ennui then to be more related to the whole, or in other words, the cause of many of the more partial dissatisfactions we experience in our life.
In summary, individuation is a process that aligns our separate Ego with our unconscious in order to produce an experience of wholeness. This process is often likened to the growth of a tree, from the latent potential contained within our unconscious in the form of a seed. The journey from seed to tree is achieved by the constant proddings from our unconscious urging us to achieve more, never allowing us to be satisfied, often manifesting in the background as a vague feeling of ennui or anxiety. Each specific step on the way there though can be interpreted as growth in the form of shoots, branches or leaves. These represent the more tangible challenges and victories that we engage with in our day to day life. Individually they may not account for much, but over time we can start to chart the growth of a magnificent tree that grows of its own accord, and represents the realization of our human potential.