Just unfurl your life in the front of your mind. What is it like? Very seldom you see a
colorful life comprising adventures and possibilities. Within the most possibilities, your
life is a monotonous walk down a colorless grey path. Not much fluctuations between the
two extremes are undergone. Extending the scale to the entire population, the case remains
with the vast majority of people organizing their lives into an invariable routine. They
wake up. They go to work or school. They do the same type of assignments or take the
same courses. They go home lingering the end of the day, doing conventional things in the
same mood. They trace their footsteps in the endless circle comprising all the necessities
but none of the whimsical ventures for something new and out of mind. In short, their
pursuits for life are thrusted to neglect under the mass, monotonous procedures to follow.
Furthermore, some of them are gradually losing grip over their intrinsic nature. For men,
the gradual withering of masculinity reveals with the greatest severity according to Palah-
niuk (1996). Thus, living proceeds with general inkling of spirituality, while people
seldom think of adding spiritual pursuit and the ensuing brilliance to life.
Further aftermaths emerge due to the colorlessness patterns of life. Just as people’s
spiritual pursuits and intrinsic spirits melt into the big gray area between “to be” or “not to
be” (Palahniuk 2013), the notion of “ambivalence" is as well incorporated into our color-
less procedures with sheer apathy. Following the simple pattern of a living, people seldom
lay their thoughts on the complicated, ambiguous aspect of life, which is the ambivalence
of being. Peacefulness and violence, optimism and pessimism, life and death, self-im-
provement and self-destruction...all these contradictory ideas are failed to be recognized in
their significance in shaping the person, his life, and his journey down his life seeking
glory. These paucities of contradiction function in depriving necessary human experiences
in life but are hardly viewed as something worthy of delving into.
However, there are still signs of people breaking through the “grey” and the
patterns. In the book Fight Club, the protagonists endeavor to seize their lost nature,
achieve brilliance, and eventually actualize these purposes with conflicted mentalities and
demeanors. Through their acts, it is indicated that spirituality and ambivalence of being
jointly comprise the essential experience to fulfill one’s life.
Here enters spirituality. This notion extends beyond the implication of “spirit” and
incorporates an assortment of interpretations in terms of various cultural backgrounds,
usages, and intentions of different authors. However, two connotations possess the most