We abhor randomness and love patterns. We are biologically programmed to find some patterns that explain what they see. But we can never be certain that the pattern we’ve identified is the right one. Even if we could somehow be assured that we haven’t made a mistake, and we are exhibiting a computer-like perfection, there may always still be a deeper truth to unearth. This tension helps drive our love of literature, theater, and the cinema. When we read a novel, or watch a play, the author or director is presenting us with a sequence of events that has a common theme, pattern, or moral. Literature, plays, and the cinema offer us a delightful escape from the usual unintelligible, meaningless chaos that we find in the real world around us. Really good literature goes further, and leaves us with the possibility of many interpretations. We come face to face with the incomputability of the Kolmogorov complexity.
This tension also defines how we engage with our own lives. While we travel through the seemingly random events in our life, we are searching for patterns, and structure. Life is full of “ups and downs.” There are the joys of falling in love, giggling with your child, and feeling a sense of great accomplishment when a hard job is completed. There is also the pain of a crumbling relationship, or the agony of failing at a task after great effort, or the tragedy of the death of a loved one. We try to make sense of all this. We abhor the feeling of total randomness and the idea that we are just following chaotic, habitual laws of physics. We want to know that there is some meaning, purpose, and significance in the world around us.We want a magical story of a life, so we tell ourselves stories.
Sometimes the stories are simply false. Sometimes we lie to ourselves and those around us. And sometimes the patterns we identify are correct. But even if the story is correct, it is not necessarily the best one. We can never know if there is a deeper story that is more exact. As we age and suffer from ennui, we gain certain insights about the universe that we did not see before. We find better patterns. Maybe we get to see things more clearly. Or maybe not. We will never know. But we do know that the search is guaranteed to never end.
Maybe my purpose in life is to express feeling everything that everyone else is pretending not to feel. Or maybe everyone else doesn’t really feel those things and it just sucks to be me and then my purpose in life is to have All The Shame. Because I’m certainly NOT going to pretend to Be Cool.
YES to the first half, and the second is very much what I’ve been struggling with myself all day. But reading it in print just now, I change my mind and think if everyone else doesn’t feel those things, I want to describe them and teach everyone who’ll listen what they’re missing. Being open and honest and sharing one’s gifts shamelessly, in my book, is the coolest of cool.
Aging in America poses existential questions that all men who live to their seventies and eighties must eventually face. Am I still a man? Do I still matter? What is the meaning of my life? Am I loved?
Some of you have never purchased a dead parrot but you didn’t realize it was dead until you got home and then you had to go back to the pet shop to complain but the employee keeps saying it’s pining for the fjords and that’s it plumage is lovely when the plumage doesn’t enter into it and it really shows.
