252. Learning The Rules

Education is a process of learning the rules. While we also learn many facts about the world we live in, what we are mainly taught is how to value and judge correctly. We are taught rules of reason and logic, of grammar and mathematics, of art and science, and so on.

We are often explicitly told the rules, but we mostly learn them through practice. We are shown a way of solving a problem or expressing an idea and we perform that method until we develop a habit of following the rule. Through this process of education, we are inculcated into our society’s shared normative structure, which is composed of all of the rules that make our society functional.

251. An Impractical Life

Our lives are dominated by practical concerns. We make choices based on the likelihood that they will cause our material situation to improve. We optimize ourselves around variables we can measure, maximizing the quantities we value and minimizing those we do not. We look for practical reasons when we need to justify our decisions to ourselves and others.

We do these things because they are prudent and they help us move closer to our desired goals. We measure our successes and failures in units of practical value that we call wealth or status or fame. We want our lives to include all of the things we want and none of things we hate. We sometimes even see everything in terms of its practical value, to the point that we see value itself as having a practical foundation.

250. Exploring Discomfort

There’s something bothering me that I can’t understand. It’s a thought, or it’s a memory, or maybe it’s an intuition. When I try to think about it, it seems too complex to describe, too faint to see, too indistinct to capture. The feelings that surround it are nebulous and imprecise. I want to see what it is, but I don’t even know where it begins or ends, or what form it might take.

249. Harsh Judgments

Where my values are strongest, my judgments will be harshest. When I see someone behaving in a way that feels not just wrong but repugnant, I cannot accept it. It’s contrary to everything I believe is right and good, and so I feel obligated to respond.

My response might be nothing more than a verbal reprimand to the wrongdoer. Or I might want to seek out some kind of punishment for the wrongdoing, to remind the other that their actions have real consequences. In extreme cases, I might even want to banish the wrongdoer from my community, in order to keep it safe from harm.

248. A More Truthful Response

How do you feel? This question was one she had always struggled with. To offer up a canned response like “fine” never felt right. It didn’t feel right because it wasn’t wholly true. She wasn’t just fine, and saying so seemed to lack honesty.

Honesty was important to her, but whenever she would try to conjure up a more truthful response, she found she couldn’t locate any words that were up to the job. There were always so many feelings present in her and there didn’t seem to be any way to summarize them into a sentence or two.

247. Beyond The Ordinary

You find yourself thinking more and more that life is just too difficult. You’re questioning your existence, your purpose in this world that seems to lack any substantial value. You’re wondering if there’s nothing more to life than this painful struggle that never seems to end.

You’re having these thoughts and feelings because you are suffering greatly. You’re suffering under the weight of something you cannot see. It has occluded your vision so perfectly that you cannot even guess what it might be.

246. Nihilism Is Nothing

We like nihilism for the same reason we like ideology and religion. All of these things give us a way to escape uncertainty. Just as ideology provides us with certain truths about our political situation, and religion provides us with certain truths about our spiritual situation, nihilism provides us with certain truths about our existential situation.

Nihilism tells us nothing has value and by doing so it frees us from our worries about the value of things, the value of others, and the value of our own lives. By making everything worthless, we allow ourselves the strange comfort of knowing that nothing we do can possibly matter. Freedom from meaning is also freedom from responsibility, and in this there can be a kind of morbid excitement.

245. Filling The Gaps

A fragment is always a part and never the whole. There is always something left out. That a fragment arrives with gaps can be unsettling. The text might appear to say both more and less than what it actually says. It’s able to do this because you fill the gaps as you read. You do this automatically, whether you are aware of it happening or not.

You fill the gaps according to your normative understanding of the world. This understanding is a product of your experiences, of everything you’ve been taught and everything you’ve discovered. It is the vast collection of rules and reasons you have learned throughout your life.

244. The Root Of Oppression

When I’m attached to my desires, I produce suffering for myself and others. Suffering arises because my attention and actions are fully directed towards the fulfillment of my desires. In such a state, I’m unable to see what I or others need and I cannot do anything to meet those needs.

The suffering that arises from my unmet needs can cause me to redouble my efforts to get what I want, out of the mistaken idea that I can escape from suffering by fulfilling my desires. Not only do I deprive myself and others of the care and attention they need, I also compete with them out of the belief that I must in order to stop suffering. I might even directly harm other people by lying to them or manipulating them to get what I want.