Oh, man.

(Wow. I wrote this two years ago and finished it now. Time sure flies fast)

It’s review season. For the bar. For the big leagues. And I feel wholly unprepared. 

I read weeks ago Edgar Allan Poe’s story – Descent Into the Maelstrom, and somehow it encapsulates the sublime and dark feeling of uncertainty. Some would prefer to call it as entropy. The utter chaos thrown into our lives and we are forced to push on and recognize this reality. For one thing, I am not an avid fan of entropy. It is crushing, cruel and pithless. In fact, no adult would line up and queue for tickets of some hypothetical metaphysical film entitled “Entropy: The Saga”. No one likes not knowing. It is the most fundamental of human fears – to be forced to admit that we are in fact powerless in the greater machinery of existence. 

Adulthood is being thrown into the embers of uncertainty, or rather entropy. Adults just like things to be certain and knowable. Be it the cushy feeling of having a job that pays well, a nonchalant approach to relationships secure in the knowledge that people won’t leave you, a stellar academic career that speaks no less than anything excellent. It is tough being an adult, John. People, things, events, bills are in a perpetual flux of gray areas. Someone said that the only thing that is constant is change. Well, damn he/she/it/they/*insert infinite amount of possible usable pronoun* is right. For one, change is a result of the world being at its core uncertain. And if change bears a striking resemblance to uncertainty then it’s like saying the only thing certain is uncertainty. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like wordplay. But it isn’t.

Dear God or Albert Camus or whoever out there is listening, life is an absurd plateau of more absurdity. You might have warned me before but I was stubborn and did not listen. I am learning to become less unforgiving of embittered, soulless adults who suck the life out of anything. The ones that will not hesitate to hit you with their car if it means saving themselves from some deep-seated hell only they can begin to fathom. I am beginning perhaps to become an adult myself. And to be an adult means to feel like every adult is a mirror of myself, to look beyond the dull luster of their blurring eyes and see some (at least not all of them) for what they truly are. 

Adults are at their basest and most vulnerable, afraid. Afraid of what, you may ask? Afraid of this uncertainty that constantly hounds them in their lives. To keep a job. To keep paying the bills. To keep a fasćade. To keep lying to themselves that mediocrity is not the best they could have. To keep a marriage intact. To keep forgetting they once had a dream. To keep believing the government will not fuck them up. To keep their children from eventually resenting them. To keep their employers from fucking them up. To keep desiring for things they know will not come within their lifetimes. To keep building walls of apathy because being a person is a harder job than being a dickhead. To keep running away from what makes this life for what it is - uncertainty. 

Adults are a hypervigilant lot. Always looking over their shoulders because someone might come for them. Afraid of things happening, Afraid some thief of the night will steal away they’ve worked hard for. And I honestly don’t blame them. Dear God or Albert Camus, I am beginning to understand that what makes some people heartless is their fear of not knowing. The fear of not knowing makes even the very best of us blind and selfish. 

But you know what is even more ludicrous? The fact that this uncertainty exists and what we can do is to embrace it as a normal course of existence. Dear Albert Camus, you are right once again. You look like a 10/10 and you speak like a 10/10. This Sisyphean nightmare is the best we can ever have. No amount of whimsical escapism will revert us back to our mothers’ wombs. It’s like that one Fall Out Boy song but with a pinch of grim realism – what was that? – let me sing that in my head – “To get it on St. Peter’s list, but you need to lower your standards, ‘cause never getting any better than this.” Now that doesn’t have to mean pessimism ad infinitum Schopenhauer-style. 

I think the real problem is that we have stigmatized uncertainty and things beyond our immediate knowledge as this cosmic demon force eager to snatch us away from anything good in our lives. We want to be certain. We want to know. Humans are an egocentric lot who believe they deserve a place among the stars and as such must perceive ALL of reality with their limited cognition, their ever shifting sentience. I am an agnostic and before I became godless, my religion used to say men are created from the likeness of God. I’m sorry but that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s more like man wants to be god so bad, to play his role, that we are willing to make faulty comparisons, to rub with his shoulders if I may say so. It’s like getting excited because Jennifer Lawrence uses the same shampoo as you when it’s perfectly clear she is not within your league in this lifetime, in that lifetime, in whatever lifetimes.

Similarly, humans wanting to subject the immutable rule that we cannot know anything for certain, want to become god to bypass that. We are deeply arrogant in that sense. Why do you think science was invented? Aside from arguments of human progress, it is equally possible to say that science was invented to lessen uncertainty – to control that mass of chaos that governs the universe. Why do you think science and rationality were weaponized to create mass ideologies, to enable wars, nuclear weapons? Because people are drunk with the need to be certain, to control this world they cannot completely know by imposing their hijacked sense of morality, reason or science. 

The need to know sure gave us science, philosophy etc. It created a world that we are aware of today. Curiosity is a double edged sword, it gave us progress but at the same time the state of not knowing, of not being in control makes us discomfited. We act as if uncertainty is our enemy when all along it is our reaction to uncertainty that limits us. To cite one very real example: our love for certainty made predictive behavior mechanisms (think algorithms analyzing our purchase histories, social media behavior) extremely popular. Human behavior is an interesting thing to control because while we are reduced to multiple concepts of psychology, sociology, economics, there is also a chunk of us that is much much harder to predict. But with predictive behavior (which advertisers and businesses are too willing to exploit) we can become less unknowable and therefore more controllable.I can go on and on about our need to know, to be certain and how it has impoverished our idea of life. Things like death, emotions, the whole gamut of human relations that exist in the sphere of gray areas, sustained by the principle of not knowing have all suffered. 

Remember Brave New World? That exquisite piece of literature? The whole thought of Huxley by writing it is to introduce a utopia based on the premise that human behavior can be predicted and ultimately controlled. Things like books, family, relationships, art have all been removed. In fact, one of the characters who advocated for their return was rightly called a “savage” in that world. They were removed because they are ways by which uncertainty is explored and even celebrated. Art, our intuition, our emotions are all uncertain. They exist in a capacity quite unstable within the realm of reason and logic. But are they necessarily bad? Not at all. They are afterall what makes us human. To elimate uncertainty, spontaneity in human beings is to render all of us androids, robots capable of being perfectly measured. Similarly,  if life in general is too predictable, too easy, I wonder how would us human beings react and live when we operate at some level with uncertainty? Brave New World sounds exaggerated and melodramatic for some but the reason why it is touted as a prophetic masterpiece is because much of its premise is already happening now. Capitalism which uses predictive marketing, technocrats who consistently analyze human behavior optimal for business and the workplace. Dating has been changed with the onset of online dating which works based on matches. Hell, even our political world can be manipulated with predictions. Cambridge Analytica, rings a bell, eh? The hallmark as well of echo chambers, of fake news peddling works in this similar fashion where people’s biases are being played against them. The world of artilleries, nuclear weapons and military strength are gone. The god of this modern secular age is the man who has the information. Because the man who knows can predict and the man who can predict can control. 

We want to defiantly say we are more than just mere numbers but unfortunately our systems reduce us continually as statistical markers of whatever it is they are studying about us. If Dostoyevsky was alive today he would have despised where we are right now. He wrote books as heavy and dense as rocks, talking about the free will of men, only for his ideas to be smacked in the face by Instagram’s algorithm. For him, man cannot simply be reduced into little cubby holes of rationality and control. Life and humans are also fundamentally irrational and doing away with that causes more harm than good. I think Dostoyevsky would have physically hurled against the aftermath of the worldview which the West eased into: that rationality is paramount among other things, that there is one key to this life and that is reason and of knowing, of demystifying the irrational. 

The Kiwi musician Lorde mocks the faux spirituality of some people in her new song “Mood Ring” and though I agree with her to some extent (white people just think every culture is an aesthetic istg), I also can’t deny that there has been a move for some people from their very Western and hip lifestyles to Eastern philosophies and beliefs. I suspect the Western outlook has become so wearying (emphasis on reason, ego and the self) that the concepts of interconnectedness, nirvana, samsara, non-detachment of say Buddhism become particularly convincing. I do know that Eastern philosophies are much more tolerant of things that cannot be controlled and therefore less hostile with uncertainty than the Western model of thinking. 

I guess I’ve said too much but the point is just me beginning to realize that maybe life is not meant to be known but meant to be understood. Having something known, to me, feels like lessening this uncertainty that is a constant in our lives, of controlling it. Knowledge has been weaponized to exert possession and control of this world. But when we understand something, we take a position of calm acceptance that perhaps some things are the way they are without the urge to control or render them knowable. True understanding is knowing that we cannot completely own and control this vast stretch of consciousness we call life. Life is uncertain. Nothing is truer than that sentiment. Perhaps if we become less hostile to this uncertainty and not try to run away from it as often as we can, we learn something about our selves everyday. 

We live in an age of worry, of constant anxiety. And I think that’s because our society imposes on us this expectation that everything should conform to perfect standards, to what has been tried and tested. We need to be predictable to fit in. Anyone who does not seem to fit in is different and being different is not acceptable. Why do you think humans have a feeling of contempt for anything that is different from them (think racism, homophobia)?Evolutionary biology aside, could it have something to do with how different people just seem uncertain and remote from us that we are repulsed by that difference? But being predictable does not always mean we are being authentic. And for someone who has fought long for her authenticity to be protected, I would rather remain a mess of a human being, perfectly ordinary and yet true than be a predictable and accepted member of society that feels a little less human, a little more android.