Years ago in my lost and drunken odyssey after college I had a discussion with my ex-roommate and current friend Matt. I believe I wrote it down in a lost notebook, so please forgive me if I can't quite remember the details. "Wholes and Holes" was a sloppy pun relating two extreme type of people. Holes are people with a profound sense of lacking in their lives at a sub-conscious level. Being weak willed and needy they sought out their opposite, a 'whole person', to help fill the void in their souls. The total sum of one Whole and one Hole was half a person between two individuals. We concluded it was better to become a Whole person if one managed to avoid the empty Holes of the world. This conclusion was based upon the belief that such a thing as a 'Whole person' existed, which I now believe isn't so.
The Human Condition is horrible indeed and all people have holes within themselves that leads to a hunger for specific intangibles: Love, Respect, Adoration, Safety and Security, among others. The key is a need for the intangible, something one cannot hold or view. We can see through Maslow's Pyramid that as basic needs are met an individuals' attention scales up to the intangible. It can be argued that this hunger is the will that drives humans and these needs are the core of what it is to be human. What I once thought of as a Whole person, one essentially satiating every one of their needs, would be an unchanging, homeostatic state akin to death.
In essence, all living people are filled with an emptiness we are compelled to fill to relieve the tension caused by existence, this is the Human Condition as near as I can define it. The essential question an individual need ponder is the method one goes about filling their voids. Once I thought it foolish to depend upon others for our needs, but as communal creatures, to deny man's need to depend upon others is to deny his nature. All of us entered this world at our most vulnerable, the first first thing we require as newborns is Love at its most primal: food and body heat from our mothers' breast. Denying our reliance on others is equivalent to denying our most basic needs, and thus accepting our deaths.
Perhaps this 'lesson' is of a private sort, me just clearing the cobwebs between my ears. For the longest time I've hardened myself to others, striving to need no one but myself, to put no other before myself, but to that end I'm slowly becoming the male equivalent of a crone. Often it's been preached that seeking help is weak, but it's what we are meant to do. Perhaps the only thing left to consider is the method we choose to satisfy our appetites. That however plays into ethics and morality and is another matter entirely.
Just keep in mind: the living must hunger, and to be human is to suffer.
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