Humans as Chemotherapy

If you’ve ever experienced it or seen it in action, chemotherapy doesn’t seem very good. It is a brutal process. Oncologists practice the fine art of killing the cancer without entirely killing the patient. But the balancing act isn’t always successful. Suppose the earth were semi-sentient, and had some vague billion-year-long evolutionary memory that suggested a looming apocalyptic danger. Imagine that humans are a kind of inflammatory immune response, a form of self-administered chemotherapy: physics-wielding primates designed to avert the worst life-ending crisis (think: using nuclear weapons to divert a major asteroid impact), at the cost of a mass extinction, climate destabalization, and irreversible global pollution.

All Knowledge Is Provisional

All knowledge is provisional, because it has to be encoded in language. This is a fragile arrangement. Knowledge and knowing does not exist without some degree of circularity, because the mesh of language is built upon itself, like a sweater woven into multiple dimensions from a single line of string. This means that knowledge is foundationally dependent on the language or symbology that encodes it. And symbols are always lossy representations of the base reality that they reflect.

Originality Dies When Being Average Is Easier

So much writing is boring now, and juiceless. There used to be a kind of charm to even the worst writing, because it came from someone just as flawed as you. Now, everything is airbrushed and edited so that we no longer see the real face of things. We see a tiny little snippet of humanity drowning in a sea of inescapable averageness. Contemporary writing often feels stripped of vibrancy.

Empty Vessels Make Fertile Gardens

In a world of more, be less. Then you will have more time for what needs doing. Too much emphasis on the immediate, too little emphasis on the eventual. You are made for infinities and multitudes, yet you fill yourself up and become singular. Focus on true understanding, and momentary illusions will disappear. It is the emptiness within a pot that makes it useful, and it is the emptiness of the mind which makes it a worthwhile vessel.