Fildy Bejaoui

Neither—The song “Everything” by Lifehouse is about the longing to be loved, and about whatever placeholder we imagine may give that love.

The title says it all. One of the long standing debates in the community, among fans, and listeners of this eternal piece of music—in another post, I argue that this song is the best in existence, with a list of objective reasons to support that argument—is whether Everything, created and performed by Lifehouse, is about God, or about a romantic relationship. When you look at the comments under different versions of the song, you will see people bring up God, Jesus, and whatever their religion preaches, and others bring up their dead wives, husbands, partners, etc.

The answer is neither of these things. This song is about the longing to be loved, that comes leading a life of unfulfillment, where the great wealth of our potential, and thus worth is skipped over and overlooked.

The reason why people bring up either God, or their partners, and often dead partners, when commenting on this song, is because both of these things represent the highest form of love that exists in the universe: oneness, becoming one with something else is the highest form of connecting, because the universe, through its nature of being a vast being composed of and divided into multitudes, becomes a singular entity made up of all the sum of its parts. I discuss that in more details in the vibes article.

Oneness is the highest form of love because it is a return to yourself. It’s a return to the most undiluted form of who you are, and when you find love, for whomever you have that love, you find that return to the source of who you are. The unpolluted source, where no failed achievements, no failed attempts at obtaining a life walked in alignment with what you want, a life walked in alignment with the highest and most positive sentiments you have inside you, can come to pollute that ideal inside you.

The issue is that most of us, well, all of us, struggle to achieve that vision in the real world.

That isn’t because the world is an awful place and everything is doomed. It is simply because, as I argue, we are at the early stages of self-discovery, and we do not know:

• ourselves, our functioning,
• and neither do we know the functioning the universe

It’s a trial and error process when we learn on the fly, and we learn through the blazing harshness of disappointment stamping us with its impact. Because it burns us, we know not to go there. We don’t know beforehand, so we very often take the wrong steps and make mistakes, because we have no idea how to actually walk according to the rules of life. We don’t have the manual, and we are discovering the manual as we go along.

Because of it, obtaining fulfillment is difficult. Not because it’s impossible, but because we don’t actually know how to transpose our will into the real world. We don’t know how to meet the people that we can unite with and that we can love and will love us, we also don’t particularly know what love really means and we have often idealised, flawed, disconnected from reality or trauma-based definitions of it, we get plunged into despair because we’re born into the wrong circumstances, etc.

The list goes on.

This lack of achievement in life leads us to most gaping emptiness inside. We can’t find fulfillment, so we can’t find love. How many of us grow up in families where children are born because it used to be the custom to reproduce, where the parents only reproduced because of this legacy bad programming, and had no idea, how to, in practice, take care of a child and what the reality of taking care of a child is. How many of us, long story short, were born in the wrong circumstances. Not because there’s some kind of deeper reason for it, “god works in mysterious ways” (those ways aren’t mysterious you’re just ignorant) or “there’s a deeper spiritual reason” kind of nonsense, and whatever else people like to use to rationalise the simple truth that; simply because human beings don’t know what they’re doing because they’re still in the discovery process, and terrible, psychologically and vibrationally destructive mistakes are committed.

This is a lack of love. All of us grow unloved. And because we grow up unloved, and live without love, we crave that fulfillment and we long for that love.

More precisely, what happens is, we move away from the complexities and intricacies of reality, the difficulties that somehow make obtention of fulfillment seem so out of reach, and barred behind nonsensical steps we should never have to take (how many people have been made to feel like they need to fight to be loved? Even though love is free, love is, and is a fundamental human right), and when we disconnect from all of that, we move towards a place disconnected from the real world, a place made up of entirely this feeling we know exists, its potential, and we let that unfurl inside us, because it can’t unfurl in the real world.

We focus on that highest form of longing, but because we still exist in reality, we try to find, and devise a way, that this longing for love can be fulfilled.

That is where the split happens.

For some, only a human can bring us that. But for others, only a non-human entity can bring us that.

1. Why God?

For the people who imagine that only a non-human entity can bring us that, some of those people were simply introduced to the concept early on via religious upbringing. But where does this all encompassing omnipotent, perfect, concept, comes from? From the exact same source: the longing to have the love that we want, without all the negativity of obstacles that come from mismanagement of life standing in the way of obtaining that love.

In other words, I’m saying the concept of god is born out of this. And that, it reoccurs in people, because people continue to not have what they need most fundamentally in the world: love. They keep being barred from love because of the mismanagement of life that comes from others, which prevent loves from coming out of people and thus being distributed to everyone else.

These people cannot receive love from others, therefore the love inside them remains locked inside as well because nothing external regurgitates the love inside them, and that feeling gets trapped inside; and its only spot to come out, is this idealisation; this ideal of the highest form of fulfillment, that thing that can give them this love.

People think that this thing is “god,” because nothing human can be fulfilling. Human beings as I explain are clueless, objectively so. But it’s also the biggest source of disappointment, for some. Human beings are the ones who hurt us because we live in a society; we live in a world populated by our own species and our fulfillment must come from members of that species, for the simple reason that they are the only creatures that, by virtue of being like us, can understand us and what we need. But when human beings fail to do that for each other, people get disappointment and simply come to cross others out. Humans become their greatest source of disappointment.

Because there is nothing else around, and out of the dissatisfaction coming from human flaws, people begin to wish for something more evolved. Something higher. In truth, what they’re really wishing for, and especially, what they really need, is for the human race to evolve. But because precipitating the evolution of the human race is evidently a complex process that requires specific, physically real steps, and the need for love is immediate, and existing without fulfillment is impossible, then people disconnects from this, and they move on, mentally, towards that ideal, while skipping all of the steps necessary to accomplish that.

Because no one should function without their most fundamental need being unfulfilled, and no one can work towards the evolution of the human race and its betterment while running on empty. It is impossible, and if someone expects it, they are delusional.

Because of this, the only possible source of fulfillment for this most profound of need is the highest thing that can possibly exist: god.

So when we listen, to these incredible lyrics, that evoke the perfection of finding the blessing of love, this category of people immediately flocks to thinking it’s about god.

2. Why Humans?

The rest of us—I put myself in this category here, because I hate the god interpretation, I grew up with a religious mother who, not even truly religious, put her entire life on hold, including doing right by both me and herself, over an illusion that visibly existed only in her head, had nothing to do with reality, and that existed solely to prevent herself from making the right choices for herself. Therefore the religion interpretation on this magnificent song irks me to no end.

The rest of us, as I was beginning to say, think of this song as being about another human, because our functioning is different.

Our reasoning is different, not because our experiences are different, because all fans of this song have been disappointed in one way or another and have lacked fulfillment in their lives, but because due to a difference in the middle of this process.

Myself, I can attest that, I consider that my fulfillment can only exist with other humans, which itself is a reflection of the truth of the universe.

I say it is the truth of the universe, because the universe itself, this poorly understood idea of god, is ultimately a large-scale entity made up of all the sum of its parts. Each component of it is what forms the universe, because the universe is an amalgamation of every living creature, and vice versa: every living creatures, when put together, are what form the entity that is god -> the universe, the full expression of every single one of its parts, and that is how god is formed. This is the universe, a vast consciousness that is conscious through the awareness of every single one of its parts.

Ultimately, bonding with another human, is bonding with the universe. Bonding with any creature is bonding with the universe. And when encountering the highest form of love for a human, romantic love, it’s ultimately the same: to bond with another human being means to ultimately bond with god, because each human is a miniature of the universe, each creature is a miniature of the universe. To love another human is to love god, to be loved by another human is to be loved by god.

So while this song, Lifehouse’s Everything, continues to represent the highest possible form of love and fulfillment, free of all the burdens of life mismanagement, for this category of people, that highest fulfillment through love is achieved with an equal. It is achieved with another human, because therein lies the connection to god, aka, the connection to something stronger and higher, that we all want to experience. Through other people.

And while bits of that connection can be experienced with all kinds of connections, whether that’s platonic love, or your platonic soulmate-ship with your cat, the largest and most complete manifestation of that experience is done through romantic love. I’m not sure where do aromantic people fit into this.

Therefore, when evoking the most complete sentiment of love possible in Everything, this category of people think of their partner. They think of their lover. And people especially think of their deceased lover/partner, because their absence provokes the most longing for that beautiful feeling that they got to experience, and that they now miss in their lives. Because they got to experience it while the partner was in their lives,

Making it so, that, in other words, what Lifehouse’s Everything is really about, is the longing for love. What people imagine can bring that love, that’s where the interpretation opens up into these two different paths: god, or romantic love. But ultimately, it is all about love.

3. A final point: Why people fight the god interpretation, and why there is a major two-ways interpretation of “Everything“

“You’re all I need, you’re everything.”

The “you’re everything” section is definitely what speaks to the highest possible placeholder for fulfillment, and where the space for, “this is about something more than human” happens as explained above.

But the line “you’re all I need,” instead speaks of personal emotional fulfillment. The idea is that, if you are all I need, then you are the key to unlocking and accessing within me all the things that I need for emotional fulfillment. And for human beings, again I don’t know where do aromantic people fall into this, that is romantic love. Because the highest form of fulfillment (your needs accessed and fulfilled) includes intimacy. And for human beings, that intimacy is often only ever possible and thus triggered by a romantic entanglement, and furthermore as humans, that also involves everything about us, every aspects of us, which also includes therefore love-making.

The idea that the song “Everything” is about anything other than a relationship, contradicts the feeling evoked by those lyrics.

The other reason for the religious interpretation of this section of the lyrics, as I explained above, is how a category of people, due to their destructive experiences, can’t believe, or imagine, at all, that it might be a human that can fulfill these kinds of needs. The expectation thus is displaced away from their natural spot, and towards something else; something that exists outside the realm of potential human disappointment, because a religious concept we’ll never get to interact with in the physical world and on a practical level can’t hurt us.

This is why it is confusing for people who do not share in that experience of life, and of this response to disappointments. Because some of the section of the lyrics entirely refer to the kind of emotions and sentiments a relationship provokes, but a strong majority of religious people are routinely used to placing the expectations and hope for fulfillment of these feelings onto religious ideals. And not just romantic expectations, but also the need for human support, which in practical form equals having a support system, the need to receive help when we’re down in the gutter, which loneliness and the unavailability of people can make one feel like no one can help us, and we displace the fulfillment of those needs onto something greater, that goes beyond human beings and their inability to meet us where we are, onto something else that represents perfection; the perfection of a mistake-free process of fulfillment.

This is ultimately the reason why people interpret Lifehouse’s “Everything” in these two ways: one being about God, one being about relationship, because of onto whom these two categories of people place their expectations for emotional fulfillment; God? Or another human, as we know it is only through humans, that as humans, can we find our fulfillment, and that ultimately, we go back to start, where finding fulfillment with another human, is ultimately finding god (the universe) that exists in everyone, and in Everything.