Dear J,
I got your letter the other day but I anticipated your questions. I guess we know each other well enough at this point to predict when and exactly how we'll call each other out on our bullshit.
To answer your questions:
No, I'm not sure that my project of documenting and discussing brass-tacks responses to our global predicament actually matters.
No, I'm not sure that I'm the right person to do it.
No, I'm not sure that it's the right time for me to do it.
No, I'm not certain that the project isn't just a cope for the crushing horror of freedom I'm staring down.
Yes, it has occurred to me that I huck myself at projects in order to distract myself from the reality of living inside of an insane system that wasn't built for those like us.
To be honest the apparent day-to-day sanity of the humans I meet on the street astonishes me. Everyone's walking around as if our world is built to reasonable specs that all check out.
It doesn't all check out, none of it. It's perfectly bananas, obviously.
The really crazy part is how we all just cruise along like everything is roughly as it should be. That's an adaptive response, right? It has to be. No species will get too far in the dark forest rocking itself to stupor muttering to itself. Self-awareness/sentience obligated co-development of cognitive mechanisms to handle the brutal absurdity of the facts as far as we can tell them.
We're apparently wired to seek out meaning and purpose in our world. The trick is that there is no meaning. Or rather: meaning is a thing we project onto things, not a thing that we discover out in the world.
But being the source of the meaning we project onto the world is a deeply disorienting thing to understand. As soon as you figure it out you're hosed, because the responsibility of generating meaning and projecting it onto the world you find yourself living in is very, very heavy.
Well, if you can successfully forget about it and go back to assuming that meaning is a discoverable or transmittable thing then you can be fine, I guess. I haven't managed to durably forget despite a few sporting tries and so I've turned my attention to trying to live with the knowledge.
The best explanation I've found is that the art of life is to accept the irreconcilable tension between being a meaning-seeking being in a universe devoid.
Anyway, this is how I experience that tension:
some days the most salient knowledge I possess is that responding as pro-socially and gaia-centrically as possible to Our Predicament is the most important, meaningful, purposeful thing I can do with my life.
some days I feel in my bones that everything I care about is swirling dust.
Some days I experience both of these truths at the same time.
—
A few years ago I was riding my motorcycle through Death Valley. As I dropped towards Stovepipe Wells I saw no fewer than six dust devils spread out across the valley floor. Each was at least a hundred foot tall, probably more. I'd never seen such tall dust devils and never that many at once. It was eerie and beautiful and something about the drama of it compelled me to remain in motion myself, not to stop and gape. I felt that by continuing on my journey as if it were perfectly normal to ride a motorcycle amongst a half dozen dust devils I could render myself a participant in a drama I wasn't capable of completely understanding. I sensed that to stop the bike and take a picture would be to suck all grandeur and significance from the moment, to collapse it into banality.
Isn't that how life works?
That's not a rhetorical question, J, tell me what you think. Is that not how life works? Have I got it wrong?
Best,
T
PS Some reading that’s been on my mind related to this:
The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence by Robert Pantano
Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke