Fight Club’s Popularity Shows Man’s Desire to Feel Alive
Modern life is unfulfilling to modern man. We long for meaning in our lives and we are lost in search of finding a more fulfilling life. This is why so many give in to escapism, drugs, alcohol and all the other meaningless distractions that take us away from our mundane lives.
“You do the little job you’re trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.”
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (The Novel)
Man’s work feels disconnected from the results. The beauty of writing, of craftsmanship, of fucking washing your car is that you get to step back and admire your work when it’s finished. Modern life rarely offers man this pleasure.
“If you wake up in another city could you become a different person?”
Fight Club resonates with so many men for several reasons. And I’m going to explore as many of them as I can think to write about over the next few weeks.
The Threat of Death is Motivating
Much of the most poignant moments of Fight Club involve deep introspection into one’s life at the barrel of a gun. There’s the memorable scene where Tyler threatens the gas station clerk who gave up becoming a veterinarian because it was too hard. When faced with death, we are forced to think honestly about what we truly want. We need the constant reminder of death to motivate living.
The movie even opens with Tyler pointing a gun in the narrator’s mouth. For most of your life, you’re not going to be met with this level of tension and desperation. Yet, occasionally you do hit rock bottom and it is when you are at your lowest point that you experience the most growth.
Because ultimately Fight Club is a journey to enlightenment.
“If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?”
The problem so many men face is that they feel lost, they feel adrift in life, without purpose or meaning. They never seek to find their purpose or meaning. Instead they seek constant distraction and escapism to avoid the pain of dealing with existential dread. It’s simply easier to find cheap dopamine thrills than to pursue deep introspection and meaning.
It takes the threat of death for the characters in Fight Club to find what they really want to do in life. As Thoreau says, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” They do so willingly though. They feel trapped in their current life due to debt, obligations or living up to the expectations of someone else. We force boys to go through school living their youth trapped in a filing cabinet of children until we’ve beaten the creative spirit out of them. Then at 18, they’re forced to decide on their life path as if they’ve got everything figured out.
This often leads to a midlife crisis or even a quarter-life crisis where the drudgery of an unfulfilling existence becomes too much to bear. We become disillusioned with the state of modern society and this leads to depression, anxiety and a deep longing that we were meant for something more.
On Feeling Alive
“In the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu zines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”
Modern life is absurd. There’s been a fascination with the idea of the apocalypse or the collapse of civilization. It’s not so much about creating the apocalyptic world that might be better, so much as it’s about destroying this modern life that for so many feels like a prison.
People grow tired of the monotony of the daily grind: Filing taxes every year. The inane drivel of political pundits spouting off nonsense about various political candidates with easy smiles and dark pasts. The trash that is modern day entertainment - this bread and circus is meant only to distract you of the real issues that plague the average person. The desire for the apocalypse is a surface level fascination though as the cartoon image of the apocalypse is appealing, but upon deeper introspection, it would be a bleak hellscape.
Yet the vivid imagery Tyler paints of wearing clothes that last you the rest of your life, eating venison jerky and scaling vines wrapped around the remnants of a discarded material world is highly attractive. This brutal yet fulfilling life would be a release from the bonds of material possessions and incessant, tedious busywork. This endless need for more and bigger is a path that leads to disappointment.
We’ve been raised to believe that the answers to all of our problems can be solved by playing by the rules, obeying what we’re told and constantly chasing the dollar. That one day we’ll be rock stars and this will lead to fulfillment. Jim Carey has followed that path for you and his thoughts don’t look kindly on this journey, “I hope everybody could get rich and famous and will have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know that it’s not the answer.”
In a world that constantly tells you to buy the fast car, to wear $1,000 jackets, underwear with some dudes name on it, and to always lust after more…. Fight Club is a breath of fresh air for telling you to let go. “Stop trying to control everything and just let go!”
We buy bigger houses, faster cars and fancier clothes, but do they make us happy? Do we gain enlightenment with 50 more horsepower or a wardrobe that makes us complete? “I say never be complete.”
“Martha Stewart is polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down man!”
Look around the street and look deep into the eyes of the average person. You’ll see a lot of dead eyes. People who are beaten down and defeated by life. You noticed this in the narrator in the beginning of the movie. But as he becomes Tyler Durden. And as he becomes more confident, he finds something to care about in Marla. It’s one of the lesser talked about aspects of the movie, but finding a real woman is the solution to many of his problems.
The average person feels dead inside. They’ve been beaten down by life, by dead end jobs, by a wife who doesn’t respect them. They let all this negative energy build up inside of them, and you can see this eating away at them. And for what? Why do they put up with all this? Because they want the excessively large lifestyle. The big McMansion. The new car smell. The full wardrobe to impress the people they don’t even like. They’re obsessed with being complete and they keep going after more of what doesn’t work. They put in the long hours but don’t get the time to enjoy life because they want for so much. They can’t let go.
“The things you own, end up owning you.”
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When I think of the most interesting people I know, it’s not the hyper-specialized experts in one field. It’s the people who find a unique juxtaposition of different walks of life. I’m drawn to those who can be both physically fit and intelligent enough to write. Two skills that are not that common alone but uniquely rare when found in the same person.