Pot-Healer

Do you want to keep this alive? Do you know how to do this right? I can keep going indefinitely, just typing and typing… None of it really matters in the end. I can put you to sleep this way with hypnotic writing. I can keep you alive if you want to stay alive, I can put you to sleep if you would rather just leave. None of it matters; what matters in the end is only what you decide matters. Your decision matters.

All logic loops back on itself. We humans are mere meat-beings who struggle to make sense of what’s going on. Our evolution did not optimize us for rational thought; it optimized us to understand story and infer meaning. We cannot live in a world of mere facts — facts must serve a purpose. Purpose is more important. You cannot escape this. This is what the simplistic atheist fails to understand: you cannot separate humans from purpose. All light comes in through that lens. Every fact is a piece of a picture — a picture you assemble to suit your needs. The human mind does this constantly and automatically; you cannot separate yourself from this process without becoming inhuman.

Our story-building minds were crafted by evolution. Story helps you survive. Understanding meaning and purpose are essential. You cannot be anything at all until you constellate the facts in some particular way. Facts are the atoms of meaning, and they have to be arranged in a way to create some greater organism. They are the building blocks of the greater picture.

You delude yourself if you believe that you are looking at the real picture, just the objective truth. This is impossible. No matter what, you’re looking at what you have pieced together to suit your own purposes. You cannot escape your own bias, you cannot evade the effects of assumptions so deep you didn’t know you were making them. But most of all you will always be caught up in your need to make sense of things. The purpose of purpose is to make sense of things.

You will never be a machine. The world needs to make sense to you. You will always have purposes. You will always build stories. The worst lie you can tell yourself is that you are looking at the real, objective picture — that is mistaking the map for the territory, and that is madness.

When I write, I often like to leave a hole in the shape of what I’m really talking about. Maybe it’s because I don’t actually want to talk about it, maybe it’s embarrassing or humiliating — actually this is often the case. But it might also be more entertaining. It’s more fun for the reader to put the pieces together, more stimulating to use one’s own senses to find the signal in the noise. Writing too plainly is like doing a magic trick that’s too simple, or not a trick at all.

I’ll argue with myself here, though. If the idea is that writing is creating an illusion (as in a magic trick) then the writer can also get away with creating the illusion of meaning. Others have called this “passing off obscurity as depth.” You can hide meaninglessness in fancy prose.

Maybe what I’m saying is that you need to be obvious enough that your meaning can be taken without having to mention it directly. Create meaning with more than just the words, but it should not be a mystery.