If you reach out to crush an annoying bug…
…be prepared to wipe its annoying guts from your hands.
If you reach out to crush an annoying bug…
…be prepared to wipe its annoying guts from your hands.
Murphy and Gallagher were swimming along in the Pacific until they happened upon each other.
“Hey Gallagher! You know how we have language, right? It places us on an intellectual plane above other animals not simply because it provides a means of communication between you and I. No, language constitutes a rigorous symbolic system, an all-purpose platform granting us the awe-inspiring capacity to think, to reason, to develop insight, to construe logic. Linguistic tools are the very essence of our higher-level cognition!
“But what if there was something a step beyond our language as we know it? What if there were a method for assigning meaning more powerful and expressive than our own? Something that could make our current linguistic faculty seem like primitive squeaks and grunts.”
Murphy continued. “Without language, we are deprived of song, analysis, expression, debate, rhetoric. What wondrous possibilities would this hypothetical uber-structure unlock, I ask you!”
“There’s no such thing, Murphy, you’re full of shit.”
“Perhaps.”
The two dolphins Murphy and Gallagher then swam off towards the sun.
The tireless work of German physicist Werner Heisenberg reveals the physical impossibility of measuring both a particle’s position and momentum simultaneously. That is, the more accurately you measure one metric, the more information you lose on the other.
Now. Let’s apply this scientific breakthrough to normal human beings! Surely we’ll arrive at some similar sociological insight?
Indeed, the more you fixate on a person’s current state of being - today’s stresses, today’s victories, today’s friends - the more you lose sight of their potential. And I don’t use potential as a fuzzy synonym for growth or self-improvement. Think: internal fickleness and external chaos continually upending people’s values and allegiances. A fixation on “now” encourages a myopia that disregards natural erraticism.
Now the other way. In order to make an accurate assessment of someone’s future, you need some frame of reference. Some starting point. What made this person who they are (and more importantly, who they aren’t)? What have they experienced? What comprises their values? Their ambitions? A projection without a baseline is just a swing in the dark.
Crap. How do you assess someone’s potential?!
And so our analytical methods fall apart. Uncertainty appears to mankind’s only certain certainty.
It was a wonder the old man even reached the hilltop. Ravaged by scoliosis, subordinate to his cane, he wheezed heavily before settling at last on the top.
A palpable sigh escaped his dry, cracked lips. “Well, this is it. It’s all downhill from here on out.”
Suddenly, a youth ran by clutching a skateboard to his chest. Startling the old man, the hoodlum surveyed the angle and threw his skateboard onto the ground before launching headfirst into the steep slope.
“Don’t you know, old man? It’s all about the thrill of the plummet! Speeding downhill’s the beeeeest paaaaaart…! “. And the wind carried away the boy’s final words.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem imposes a limit on the axiomatic underpinnings relating mathematics and computer science. Roughly:
Any consistent system of axioms is incomplete. That means any feasible process (capable of being expressed in a formal language, i.e. consistent) is fundamentally incapable of proving all feasible truths (capable of being expressed in that language).
Such a lofty, universal claim can be applied to the decidedly smaller realm of love and human emotion.
Consider mathematics the pursuit of truth, symbiosis, and structure, all phenomena motivating forces of love. Consider computer science an eternal struggle in process and understanding, of which human thought is an obvious derivative. From these reductions, it follows that:
Any rational person is miserable. Their desire for logic, coupled with an incontrovertible inability to understand human connection, frustrates them. As a result, love requires delusion.
Slithering dread as I reach for my bedside lamp. The plastic click ushers a wave of darkness, and faced with nothing else, I discover that unsavory yet irrevocable rock of truth.
I exist.
You see, this complicates everything. My entire day - the great exercise of the real world - is devoted to suppressing such inconvenient maxim. Formulas vanish with symbols. Questions vanish with words. People vanish with time. Everything vanishes with apathy.
And thus the only entity standing between me and blissful nothingness? Me. By stinking definition.
In the auditorium of the self, there are no lies, no illusions, no embellishments. You can’t outsmart or deceive yourself. The truth is laid bare, seething in all its caustic realizations and unwelcome insights.
It is frightening. And so the race to fall asleep is a race against myself. Dreams provide a lull of sweet, sweet nonsensical muddiness.
Before I know it, the splash of the morning sun whisks me away to another day, another stage, another act.
Desmond squirmed in the itchy theater seat. As the curtain swept from the Proscenium Arch to the floor, waves of applause rolled through the audience.
He scoffed loudly instead.
“What the hell was that?” he bellowed. “My daughter was an extra! A placeholder! Why would she think I would be proud of that?”
“Shhhh,” admonished the woman next to him. “My son was in the Chorus too, but at least I support him!”
Desmond glanced around and saw nothing but beaming faces and enthusiastic applause. There couldn’t be - weren’t - that many stars.
“Oh, I get it,” he said, joining the applauding. “We’re here to celebrate mediocrity.”
Trevor jaywalked out of necessity; he was running late for the first time. An enigmatic thrill coursed through him. The next day, vexed with both life and slow service, he didn’t leave a tip for a frazzled waitress.
“Rules - they don’t apply to me,” Trevor tentatively asserted, vowing not to adhere to moral and social conventions. What are conventions but practices that are mindlessly followed?
Trevor fancied himself a Napoleon - capable of freeing himself of social principles to monger war, or not fasten his seat belt: a person whom rules did not constrain. Never did he consider that he might be a Raskolnikov instead.
Trevor began to contradict every societal tenet he could. Giving up on political and emotional sensitivity, he was avoided by friends and family. Disregarding self-improvement mantras, he discontinued his workout regimen.
Hopelessly unhappy, Trevor was confused; were not all great men, the Napoleons and Alexanders, unobservant of society’s principles?
Certainly Trevor, but they were religiously observant of their own.
“Oh my god! This week: three assignments, two exams, five job interviews,” Jude said with a peculiar mix of pride and despair. “Ach, it’s too much crap I don’t want to do!”
Crap you don’t want to do? Or crap you can’t do? “Well. What if you just…don’t do it? What’s stopping you from pursuing so-called meaningful work?”
“Don’t be retarded. I can’t fail out of school. Immediate versus delayed gratification, buddy. One day you’ll understand.”
“Be forward-looking, got it. Then what do you ultimately want to achieve?”
Jude returned a blank stare, which soon mutated into an indignant glare. He unsheathed an old platitude: “Gotta work hard to get anywhere in life.”
What’s the point of this distinction, the point of “hard work,” if you’ve never even considered what precisely you’re agonizing over?
Poor Jude. Perhaps one day he’d understand the difference between what’s demanded of you and what needs to be done.
Valentine’s Day is a celebration of inequality - a day during which some publicly flaunt their good fortunes with Love before others not as fortunate. Why not celebrate disparities in wealth, hereditary titles, and castes instead?
Festivities have become stratified and exclusive; participation is only granted to that lucky class of people.
The happily married, loving couple can celebrate at Le Bec Fin that wholly improbable meeting decades ago, when the entropy of the Universe brought them together.
The young, passionate lovers can eat dessert off of each others fingers, and spend the night tangled up in the sheets at the hotel on the beach.
The fat couple (see On Fat Couples) can smile at each other over Baby Back Ribs at TGIF, content that they settled for one another.
As for the rest of humanity - let them eat cake(-flavored Ben & Jerry’s ice cream). Alone.
