Like many of us, for a long time I didn’t keep a journal.
This is partly due to a deeply held belief that there are simply too many talkers and not enough doers in the world. But over time I’ve realized that its also become existentially frustrating for me to stop and write down my thoughts with sufficient fidelity to feel like an accurate representation.
The written word just doesn’t quite do reality justice. Like a shipping bay time-lapse, once I start writing everything seems to just come and go so fast that it’s impossible to know what’s worth tracking. By the time I begin writing the words that convey what I want to say, they feel incorrect. My mind moves onto what feels like the next natural extension of that idea. Then the next. And then the next.
This becomes frustrating to a point of incapacitation, until I take a step back and realize that it is in fact more likely the true nature of all our thinking—a transcendent kaleidoscope of intertwining spectrums; a garden of cascading florescent brain stems; an ever-expanding graph data algorithm invoking some distant procedure—and I can’t help but resign myself to getting as much down as I can for the moment, with the promise that I’ll eventually revisit everything at some later date.
And of course, that moment would never really arrive until I ventured to achieve it
A Secular Gnosticism, Some Language of the Self
I’ll admit I’ve tended to take refuge in this personal cerebral phenomenon, recognizing it as is the true essence of philosophy: To find joy in being. I seem to be able to transmute the trauma that analysis paralysis engenders into a pleasant experience, humbling and humanizing. This joy is a complement to the similarly pleasing nature of gnostic thought, the modern manifestation of which seems to entail constructing a system (or theoretical framework) that one uses to understand the world. While affording many clever amulets, this secular gnosticism is ultimately inferior to philosophy, yet easy to confuse with reality.
This secular vision offers a convenient mode of interpreting reality, but what it misses is the true essence of philosophical inquiry. This is a nuance that only Pirsig seems to have fully understood. To truly enjoy the project of philosophy, one must find joy in the stark limitations of not just human reason — but the human mind. To construct an ontology based around oughts (such as the modern gnostic sensibility), one necessarily excludes the far more complex reality of existence. While we are all required to make mental models for our professions, we should not confuse this with the essential work of philosophical inquiry — especially since it cannot offer the same caliber of joy, no less any deeper access to some more righteous register.
Nonetheless, there is a reason I now I have to write this: Because this was a mistake I so often found myself making, absent a more sobering understanding of my own constraints.
It’s true that there’s also some Eastern sublimity to the experience I’m trying to describe: Finding oneself transfixed — in fascination with how the human mind operates, how dimly accessible its true machinations are to our human faculties, and embracing it. This imparts a Daoist interpretation of reality as a breathtakingly intricate instantiation that we may resist but are impelled to accept, or risk mutilating one’s spirituality to fit the faulty mechanics of human reason. Bearing some curious similarities with logocentrism, the Daoists (not just Laotzi but Chaungzhu) speculated that the human mind’s interpretation of reality exists on a lower register than other animals, meaning it is less spiritually evolved.
To the extent that we all may be understood as being animated by a certain spiritual force, today it seems to be closer to some primal force of growth, commonly confused with progress. But because we are imperfect creatures, we are unable to control this force, and so we are consigned to a reality that exists despite our being able to rise above our national condition — let alone our environment, which we instead find ourselves ravaging in the pursuit of growth urge.
The Limitations of Acceleration
Because I am basically a product of the west, it should be no surprise that this resistance to and resignation the written production of an authentic self has had a limiting effect on my own development. During undergrad, having inadvertently convinced myself that authentically writing out my ideas is simply not a very productive use of my time, I instead spent my free time reading widely based on my interests, and building a tactical digital strategy skillset that, I figured, would increase my chances of getting a tech-related job after school, despite working toward a journalism degree.
When I did write, I didn’t so much authentically reflect as justify this use of my time — constructing a half-baked philosophy based on self-actualization through the hard tech skills I was learning, rather than unpacking my own true feelings in the moment. (You can read that old thinking on my blog.) I thought that the best way to fully self-actualize would be to spend time studying the platforms, understanding the patterns behind how people communicated and how trends materialized, relating my observations back to my reading and coursework. All along, the goal had been to learn how to instrumentalize the platforms in order to most adequately communicate my ideas, to most cohesively bring myself to life on the digital plane.
In so doing, I spent an ungodly amount of time in front of screens and books instead of experiencing the world around me in greater lived detail. I was transmuting a certain gnosticism of the screen to make sense of the world around me. Rather than taking the time to understand myself in the most appropriate manner (through written self reflection), I had assembled a system through which I thought I could understand the world — and then I actualized myself in the context of that system. Of course, this was no way to build a healthy conception of oneself. The gnostics believed that the physical world was created by a lesser god (the “demiurge”), rather than the fashioner of our souls, the benevolent God of the New Testament. In courting the interpretive principles of the gnostics (without taking the time to understand my true self), I was in effect worshipping this lesser god, shielding myself from something greater.
Lighting the Cave via Penumbra
Of course it would have been impossible for me to identify, back then, what was true and what wasn’t. Because I didn’t know myself, I could not have known how this approach would be shaping my condition. But the essence is that rather than examining the deeper aspects of my own analog experience, I’d instead find myself slipping into a mode of digital immediacy and technical determination, rooted in a channeling of both armchair anthropocene philosophy and accerationist thinking through this digital manifestation consternation.
I viewed this psuedo-philosophy, rooted in a genuine existential yearning for human progress, as entirely valid and legitimate—since entering college, the big question I had been trying to answer for myself was how to best achieve progress for the widest range of people—and it was first evident in my early writing about environmental issues. Unable to grapple with the trade-offs that confronting such a sweeping issue would entail, at the time I figured it was worth learning more about the world before trying to inject myself into it. I chose to jump at the first job I was offered, working in advertising in order to learn more about branding, culture, technology, and how to communicate with broad audiences.
Along the way, it’s now clear that I got sidetracked. Without having taken the time to self-reflect and understand how I truly sought to self actualize, I got caught up in the popular notion that one can affect positive change with an idea and ambition alone — rather than the careful and patient deliberation of an idea worth pursuing. It’s perhaps no wonder that this idea failed both practically and theoretically.
Without taking the time to journal, I was consigned to a form of blogging that seemed to demand a transfusion of intellectual obsessions with my take on hustle-culture, which I mistook as praxis. I found myself swept up in an accelerationist zeitgeist of sorts, interpreting the anthropocene as a mode through which humans can evolve beyond that which we are — without realizing that it this notion is not in fact something I truly believed. It was merely a convenient and clever way to justify my own actions to myself.
There is perhaps no limit to the elaboration of our own self-deceit. The challenge is to direct knowledge to afford the proper penumbra, using different methods to refract light and see reality more clearly. While my own frustrations with language should be evident enough in how I draw out these sentences and deploy these analogies, I don’t believe that makes language any less valuable. Indeed, part of being human is accepting these constraints. There is perhaps no challenge greater or more worthy than to write about one’s own experience; the pursuit, while sure to entail a degree of suffering, is equally sure to impart wisdom on those who endeavor to achieve it.