Life is unbearable, but you have to think too much into it for that to be apparent. Aside from the turmoil it throws at us every day, it is strange that anything happens the way it does. Never mind any happenings, it is mind-bogglingly astounding that there is anything at all instead of nothing. These are old tales to anyone with the courage to listen, but in my world, they are buried deep beneath years of succumbing to normalcy.
In my previous posts, I tried to note how bizarre “time” is. I explored how the past and the future are unprovable and that all we have is the present (if we do have it, that is, and we aren't mere pawns in some elaborate cosmic prank). In another, I marvel at the workings of our minds, and from mine, poached the term “cinematic movies” in an attempt to describe the thoughts we’re frequented by. But while who I was was an extension of who I developed into, just as my current self bridges my past to my future, if it were up to who I was, I would never have developed into who I am today. No, I don’t smoke weed (yet).
At a young age, before I was exposed to the vast world outside my confined life, to the rich experiences so close yet outside my grasp, and to things so clearly wrong and but oblivious to me at the time, I was constantly acquainted with thoughts too odd for someone my age. I had a mostly boring childhood, and despite being the most notorious kid my parents ever brought into the world (there are seven of us in my family now, I think), it is perhaps no wonder that such is the case.
Of course, I always kept those befuddlements to myself. I learned the hard way that people do hilarious shit to get out of uncomfortable settings. I would think about sex and how it happens and how it feels... (And yes, sadly, I am still wondering). I wasn’t horny as much as I was curious. I would wonder how couples would stay together while they clearly didn’t have to — I’ve seen plenty get divorced and then reconcile only to get divorced again. Why do I like that girl from my class and not the others? Why do I get fuzzy swooshes in my stomach whenever she smile? Why is the moon online some nights and offline on others? Which comes first between night and day (and why isn’t it always one and not simultaneously both)? Why doesn’t it rain all the time? In other words, normal questions a new human that was only becoming aware of language as a tool for expression is expected to be curious about. The difference is I seem to be alone in my quest for answers. Grown-ups dismiss them. Age mates will either ignore or make up believable horrors to deter me from thirsting to ask anything ever again.
It got more intense when I grew older and could discern the order of events in movies. Why are we here in northern Nigeria, my neighborhood, and not the places shown in those movies (and why aren’t they here)? How many people are there everywhere? Why couldn’t everyone speak the same language everywhere?
Not all answers matter, I agree. A few, I did figure out (more like learned about, really). There exists an indescribable satisfaction in recognizing things that had previously been voids of nothingness in one’s skull. In my early 20s now, though I’ve outgrown many of such questions, I still long to erase variations of this childhood ignorance. In protest (to everyone and myself), I seek deeper questions, each territory both fainter and darker than the next.
I would be listening to Eminem spewing billions of words per second — the motherfucker sounding like an alien — and I would begin to wonder whether spoken language as we know it is conceived by everyone in the same way. I want to imagine that the only way to be sure that we perceive the same experiences is by trying each other’s way of viewing the world the same way I and my roommates try each others stuff only to never give it back. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, we can’t. The closest I have seen someone explaining this is in a decade-old article by the science journalist Natalie Wolchover titled: “Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue.”
If this is the case on Earth with our society of Sapiens, isn’t it curious to think that extraterrestrial, sentient beings have been trying for millennia to interact with us but, for whatever reasons, just couldn’t? A stretch, I know, but a possibility.
It is probably disturbing for them to read this, I imagine (hello, Alien!). They might see us and are prolly very close to us (Mars, maybe); discovered us quite by accident and trampling through our lives. True ghosts. Lonely. Exasperated. Their scientists (or whatever equivalent of that profession they have) working tirelessly to get our attention, but all to no avail.
If we can’t be sure whether my red is your purple or if your sugar is my salt (in the literal sense) — or if everyone’s heads are on their bodies and what you call head isn’t what I call legs (in which case if I were ever to see life/things through you, I would see everyone rolling on their heads!), and since everyone’s reality is so confined to themselves no one has any way of truly knowing what is what and that if we did we might die of shock — could dark matter and dark energy, and listen to me on this, be "the projects" of these sentient beings to make us feel their presence? A debut in an empty space; a cry for help or friendship. Or, of course, a threat to stay the fuck away. While on the subject of fuck, I wonder how these beings fuck, or if they have any intimate relations at all. Don’t get carried away though, for we might still be utterly alone.
During the pandemic, Tim Urban published a fascinating piece about an adventurous morning outside his apartment — a compelling look at possibilities of what might have been if we were to detach ourselves from the dull reality we'd become accustomed to. Ian Chillag took it a step further with the Everything is Alive podcast, an eye-opening approach to exploring how non-living things might interact with us if they were conscious.
It is too much to take in for a human species that is only now maturing and trying to live with their differences in skin colors, languages, and obscure borders. I recall Neil deGrasse Tyson noting how he is more curious about things that we can't even know we don't know.
The Greek poet Philitas of Cos got so obsessed with the liar’s paradox — whether the statement of a liar declaring "I am lying" is true or a lie — that his curiosity led him to starve to death. His epitaph reads:
“Stranger, Philitas is my name, I lie – Slain by fallacious arguments, and cares – Protracted from evening through the night.”
Whether things are true or false might not be relevant or have any repercussions on our collective future, unlike with Philitas. It doesn’t have to. Besides, if what we understood so far about the universe in each of us is any indication of how things work, then we can boast of knowing that most things are much of grey than they are black or white.
That we humans can think about such fundamental matters (subjectively speaking, of course) is something literature has been trying to convey the wonderment of. Carl Sagan summed up this bit perfectly in his insightful book Contact:
“…language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions — so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.”
As at three years ago, we humans are only able to explore less than 20% of our home planet’s oceans. We know but of so little. We can’t even prove we exist, as the most unreliable narrator is the human mind.
Maybe proving things and rationality are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, whatever that means. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the historian Noah Harari proposed a rule of thumb that anything capable of experiencing pain exists, but as much as I adore this perspective, scientists think otherwise.
“The world that we construct out of our sensations and perceptions, and which we always comfortably think of as being quite simply there, is not in fact manifest just by existing; in order to be so, it requires very special events in very special parts of itself, namely the functions of a brain.”
– Erwin Shrodinger, My View of the World (public library).
How do I sleep at night? Well, I mostly don’t. TikTok and Reddit found just the right content to keep me doom scrolling my nights away. But to keenly answer the question, I have a high tolerance for dealing with complexity. I believe it is the same drive that careened me to major in engineering.
Our perception of reality is more sinister than perhaps anything we can think of. Maybe this is life: Figuring it out. Together. And that isn't always so bad. We built the fucking internet, people! Maybe we’re supposed to figure shit out. If we ever do, which I doubt we ever will, then great! If not, then at least there is comfort in knowing that we’re all in this together, right? Not merely you and I, but all earlier generations too. Maeve Wiley was on point when she said that one “can never be lonely with the company of a good book.” Stephen King likened reading to telepathy and I couldn’t agree more.
In the end, it hardly changes anything. Douglas Adams contested that the only way to be unhappy is to have a word for it. Maybe there isn’t a single truth. Maybe “truth” is just a word too. Maybe questions are a distraction from what matters. All questions. Regardless, I would imagine living this way is better than the alternative narratives many have so comfortably sunken to: years of horrifying, intentional doublethink.