I am drowning in updating packages

Hi, welcome to the forum.

Have a look at the FAQ for general posting hints.

It is likely to help us if you post some of the error messages but as a beginning restart R and Rstudio.
Then try :.

install.packages("rlang")

This should install the updated package. If that works try:

install.packages("lifecycle")

If that's okay , retry installing rvast.