On the misfortunes of free men

I’m currently reading If This Is A Man by: Primo Levi. It's a haunting and remarkably well-written autobiographical account of Levi surviving Auschwitz in his mid-twenties. It’s (obviously) a pretty dark, and extremely moving book; one that I can't recommend enough.

Upon initially entering the camp, Levi writes:

“When we finish, everyone remains in his own corner and we do not dare lift our eyes to look at one another. There is nowhere to look in a mirror, but our appearance stands in front of us, reflected in a hundred livid faces, in a hundred miserable and sordid puppets. We are transformed into the phantoms glimpsed yesterday evening.

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”

In another passage, after having an unusually “good day”, he says:

“At sunset, the siren of the Feierabend sounds, the end of work; and as we are all satiated, at least for a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good, the Kapo feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen. For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.”

When everything has been taken away—your house, your clothes, your family, your name, your identity—that is as low as it gets, or as Levi describes it, “to lie on the bottom.” Add to that the almost daily ritual of physical and emotional abuse, and you’re in state of mind and body unlike anything conceivable.

I don’t think anyone who will ever read this will ever experience such cruel and dire circumstances. That being said, I think we can agree that the daily misfortunes you and I face throughout our lives are incredibly shallow compared to horrors Levi must have been exposed to.

Hence the benefit of comparison. Similar to the Stoic practice of ‘negative visualization,’ I think a useful exercise might be to consider: “what are the misfortunes of free men?” And then to compare that to what life must have been like for Primo Levi at the age of twenty-five.

What’s making you unhappy as you go about your day? What urks you? What misfortunes have you had that, frankly, because you’re not struggling to survive a death camp, could you actually reframe as appreciable setbacks to have?

It’s a useful practice that I think everyone who do well to regularly reflect on.

Here’s my current list:

- an empty fridge
- being overweight
- a broken air conditioner
- a car that won’t start
- loneliness
- hunger (having skipped breakfast or lunch or both)
- clothes that don’t fit
- not having enough money in the bank
- friends/family who upset you
- traffic-jams
- buffering
- minor irritations
- plagiarism
- taxes
- unexpected expenses
- jury duty
- unfashionable clothes
- rejection (of any kind)
- bad reviews
- overpriced restaurants
- not enough followers, friends, re-blogs or likes
- not getting picked or invited
- waiting in line
- rude clients, customers or coworkers
- a dead-end job
- being bored
- chores
- housework
- sunk costs
- a cold shower
- bad decisions
- indecisiveness
- uncertainty
- immature people
- bad drivers
- aging

You're more fortunate than you think.