The Burden of Incompleteness (19.08.2025)

I’ve taken up singing lessons and discovered something I never knew about myself: that I can actually sing (well, within reason. I can hit the notes, which is a relief!). It has brought unexpected joy and the sense that I am existentially larger than I was before I begun. It has made me want to take up the piano again, paint again, do all those creative things I gave up at school because my father believed them hobbies, not work.

Will I find the time? Probably not. I might snatch the odd hour to plonk away on the piano or splash paint on a canvas. But to become a master?  No, that possibility has gone.

We all have this sense that we are more than we express, that we lack the time to develop the potentialities that lay within us. This can cause deep frustration and psychological pain. It may even numb us into inactivity.

Incompleteness is a facet of our reality and has fascinated the great thinkers from Thales to Marx, from The Buddha to Christ. We can’t be all that we hope to be. We can’t know all that we wish to know; there are explanatory gaps in human knowledge because the frameworks we use to understand our world are limited.  And there are contingencies too which hinder our hopes and dreams, unforeseen events that scupper our best laid plans.

There are two philosophies that offer practical ways to deal with this problem: Stoicism and Existentialism. One encourages transformation through acceptance; the other seeks meaning in triumphing over the limitations.

What do they mean by this? The myth of Sisyphus can help us. Sisyphus angered the gods and was punished with rolling a boulder up a steep hill. Each time, just before he reached the top, the boulder rolled away and he had to start all over again – for eternity.

We aren’t Sisyphus (thank God!), but we often feel the futility of life, working in the office and wondering what happened to the dreams of youth, all those things we wanted to do and all the potentialities that died on the wayside of life.

In the face of this very human experience, Stoicism tells us to master acceptance. If we want to find meaning (and peace) we must embrace our limitations and change our attitude. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, ‘love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own … external things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them, which you can erase right now.’

There is so much wisdom in this. If we keep beating our heads against the brick wall of reality, we will end up hurting ourselves. If we keep believing we have a ‘right’ to be fulfilled, we will end up in despair.  Yet, for all that, how easy is it to accept those things which frustrate us? And should we be accepting them?

The correct way to read the Stoics is to take our agency seriously and learn to use it effectively and powerfully by accepting the things we can’t control. The dangerous way to read them is to opt for ‘invulnerabilism’ (I won’t let anything affect me) or resignation.

This is why the Existentialist offers a different approach.

In his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus rejects Sisyphus-the-Stoic and opts for Sisyphus-the-Existentialist. The former accepts the damnation of the gods and thereby changes himself (he is no longer the rebel that challenged them).  The latter refuses to do this. He seeks to change the nature of the situation and turns the task into his triumph rather than his judgement. He will not let it overwhelm him and in so doing, he spites the gods. Their sentence loses its value because he refuses to accept it as such.

In other words, the Existentialist tells us to embrace our vulnerability and take risks. Our freedom is real, and because we are vulnerable, the consequences of our actions are real too. We will make mistakes, we will get things wrong, but we are called to create the world we live in by engaging with it and acting in it.  We are not called to disengage from it.

The question then, is not ‘how can I accept what I cannot change?’ but ‘what actions are worthy of my finitude?’ (to quote A. Simmons). For Bob, it might be putting aside his dreams of painting to earn money for his family; for Jane, it might be leaving her family to become the painter she has always dreamt of being.

It’s up to you.