Superheroes don’t exist: accepting confusion and contradiction offers hope

Trigger warning: discusses suicide / suicidal ideation.

In the pits of despair, there’s often a human craving for simplicity. As an antidote to complexity, anger, confusion or contradiction, we urgently seek a simple solution. We want clear rules, bad people and good people, heroes and villains, fair and unfair, right and wrong.

Maybe we want to be rescued by a superhero from the burning building of ourselves, to just please be fixed or solved or maybe even diagnosed. Then we won’t feel this horrible confusing weight of dysfunction any longer.

It plays conveniently into the vast profits to be made from anxiety, uncertainty and deficiency. Let’s find a solution, says the sometimes rational human brain. People have long sought solace in authority, in a leader, in black and white tribal ideas of good and evil, us and them, natives and immigrants, men and women.

That way lies clarity and certainty, meaning, purpose and progress. A way to understand our life and the world we live in. But an endless search for perfect sense can lead to ruin.

Inevitable confusion and contradiction

Life inevitably contains unresolvable confusion and contradiction. People can feel unable to accept or reconcile uncertainty, because it is too painful and bewildering. There must be an explanation. Everyone else seems so sure of themselves. Why can't I be so sure? Not being sure might equate to failure and disappointment, guilt and shame, loss of control, and having to trust.

Not having control of full understanding is intellectually painful and destabilising. Today's world is bursting with data, information, ‘science,’ opinions, authority, people telling you what you're missing and what you must do to fix it. The idea of blissful ignorance has all but evaporated. Perhaps it’s been displaced by avoidance. But open ignorance and confusion and contradiction are terrifying and humiliating. You must always know and be sure. Here's a secret: you don't.

Consider these scenarios

A 20-year old still living with one parent, who wants to feel supported and cared about by that parent, without having to directly ask for their support or care. But they also feel easily suffocated by that parent. They desperately want their own independence, with space to freely grow and develop. An awkward web of difficult contradictions.

A 30-year old who is enjoying their independence, a good job that occupies much of their time, and the freedom of living alone. And yet they sometimes feel lonely. That 30-year old experienced an abusive relationship. They recognise the need to connect with others, but there are trust challenges.

Loneliness versus connection can be a lifelong confusion and contradiction, as present aged 18 or 30, as it is at 75. We want to be seen and we want to connect, and yet it can come with risk or threat or challenge that makes it difficult. We want to protect ourselves from any potential pain that threatens our world view.

A 40-year old parent of three kids has a responsible job and a perpetual dread of letting people down. They are responsible for everyone and they prioritise everyone’s feelings over their own. They know they should actively make time for themself, perhaps for them and their partner, but they just can’t. They would feel too guilty. They don’t feel there is ever the time, and they can’t allow it to be a priority, because it comes with the risk of letting someone else down.

Intimate relationships are most easily exciting when they are new and fresh and different, rather than seasoned, and familiar. Challenging conventional norms through an open relationship, promiscuity, or unfaithfulness can invite danger, unpredictability and instability. Midlife can present this confusing ‘stick or twist’ dilemma of acceptance to many. What is a good enough relationship? What is intolerable? This can equally be applied to other major life projects like careers and properties. Consider the broader tension between acceptance and change. Do we accept a difficult situation, or do we seek to change it? The answer is rooted in belief and control. If we believe we have the power and control to elicit change, or not.

Life is full of confusion.

What happens next

Complete certainty about important life decisions is impossible. As is certainty about our past, present, and future. Memory can be complicated, and sometimes unreliable, leaving us to work with just our emotions and beliefs. But still we feel that nagging need for certainty. Confusion and contradiction is irritating at best, acutely painful and mortally threatening at worst.

It can be why addicts attach to their comforting pastime of preference: such as alcohol, drugs, sex, violence, work, or food. It can obliterate confused feelings, blur the edges, turn the lights off, present a fleeting pleasing escape, or basic beautiful distraction. Absorption in work can be promoted by well-meaning supporters of people who are grieving. Work can be considered as a regular, healthy, even necessary part of the grieving process: just avoid the pain. Keep moving forward. All the confusing distortion will eventually fade. And there is some sense in it.

Tragically, this confusion can also be why people take their own lives. Reconciliation and reason can’t be found, and perhaps it won’t ever be found, and the idea of that is overwhelming.

Life asks us to accept and integrate all our positive and negative experiences, and to find stability in purpose or occupation. When we can’t find a manageable balance between the two, when we are unable to functionally integrate the positive and negative, life gets tough. Suicidal ideation offers a comforting escape route when people are unable to accept the painful noise any longer.

Comfort in not knowing

There is the desire for a classic superhero to fix everything, or a president, or perhaps a therapist to conjure some verbal, herbal or physical medicine. We cling to hope wherever we can find it: music, film, books, sport. We must live in hope. 

But maybe there’s also hope in not having to know. You don’t need certainty, because life is full of complication and uncertainty. Of course it’s comforting to believe that someone is driving, that they must know what they’re doing. And yet SatNavs, weather forecasts, AI, world leaders, social media influencers: they are all wrong sometimes.

Open agnosticism and ambiguity will always be unattractive compared to bold authority, with all its sexy power and control, its seductive assertiveness. Authority can offer so much when we badly want to believe in its solutions. In the beautifully simple, refreshingly comprehensible ideas, in a cause to fully support, or in a place to express the inexpressible. But on the flip-side, much of life is jagged and confusing and doesn’t make sense. A degree of peace might be found in accepting the confusions and contradictions that are part of life.