The Slow Fade

I remember reading an article in National Geographic a while ago about a nomadic tribe that lived somewhere in the dry bush of Africa. What struck me most, was how the writer finished the article, which was by describing what the tribal customs were concerning the death of one of the members. When one of theirs died, there was no ceremony, there were no dances or rituals, no story telling, no wayward spirituality. The body was simply covered with dirt or leaves and the tribe simply moved on. To my western brain, this felt so... wrong. The fact that someone could die and never have existed seemed so foreign to me. But also somehow beautiful in it's simplicity.

These days, when someone dies, they never die all at one. Sure, there is the moment when they take their last breath, or their heart stops and they are declared medically dead (different definitions of medical death somewhat blur this line), but at that moment, they don't truly die. They die in bits and pieces. In fact, for some people, their funeral ceremony or wake begets more life than they have lived in a while. No, now dying only really begins with death. After death, their body is prepared, and people are amassed together to commemorate what once was. They are stuck in a box in the ground and covered in dirt. But they don't die then. They live on in the memories of those that knew them. every person has a different memory of someone that they knew who died, and those together constitute, together, what the person is now. Then one by one, things are forgotten. Phone numbers deleted, photographs thrown away, the dust from their skin swept up and thrown out. Them all that new him die, and those that knew stories of him die, then those that knew his name, until he has passed out of memory and time. However, is that possible in this day and age? Won't the coroner or city hall always have record of the death? won't there be an online yearbook with his name in it somewhere? Won't there be some hard drive with tax records or credit card statements that just sit there whirling away for decades? When will the dead truly die?

It seems impossible for someone that lives now to ever... die. There will be some version of them out their, some tether preventing them from ever leaving this earth. For this tribe, perhaps a deceased will be named no more than three generations on, and then no longer be. This is something that will seemingly never be granted those who live in a developed nation. Perhaps when the bank we used goes out of business, or there's a flood in the local courthouse or library we will be granted some reprieve, but really, most of us will just have to wait until the sun blows up and scorches everything we know into a crisp, or some alien race comes and trashes our planet. 

Treatise on Fear

It has recently occurred to me that people fear an excessive amount these days. There are rational fears, like driving near large cars and gangsters with daddy issues, then there are the every day fears. So many people complain about being afraid of missing a TV show, or being afraid of talking to a girl. All these are really the same fear- the fear of screwing up. What we fear isn't that not watching the TV show will make us miss out on vital information like what to do if some has a heart attack, and a loved one could possibly die in the near future because of you not sitting down in front of a glowing screen at a certain time of day, nor are we afraid that the girl we fear talking to is really a secret assassin that we might accidentally piss off on the wrong day and be killed. No, what we fear is missing out on the enjoyment that this show could bring us, or the possibility of a relationship. We fear missing out on the best life, or at least having a better one. You'd only be afraid of missing a show if you knew somehow that it was likely to be good, just like you'd only be scared of a woman if you had suspected that she might actually be awesome. In short, our fears are not present fears, but future ones, fears that might result in loss or failure in the future.

Human beings have a singular adaptive strategy that far propels us beyond the world of beasts, which is the ability to learn. We're not the fastest animals (though we can run ridiculous distances), we're not the strongest animals, we don't really have fangs and out claws are crap, but have the unique ability to learn. What defines an animals's evolutionary adaptiveness are not only its physical features and abilities, but behavior. A dog's fear response of tensing up and making its snarling bark is part of what makes it a dog. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to change our behaviors over time, to an extent that is unseen in any other living thing. We can learn to drive cars and cook, use jackhammers and plant trees. These are things that are passed down the community, because humans form communities not only to birth, but raise children. This understanding, however, comes with a rather large caveat: it expanded the range of our fears. If you can now rationalize that 1. you don't have fur, so 2. you should wear a jacket because 3. the forecast said it would be cold later, then we can rationalize that a thin jacket would probably be inferior to a thicker one, and perhaps there would be a wind due to the incoming front so a jacket that's purely insulative would maybe not be the best choice. Neither would a jacket without a hood, but perhaps wearing hat and scarf would be just as useful. Well, this hat covers the ears and the jacket has a high collar, so maybe a scarf isn't needed. All the same, one should bring it because should the wind pick up or the temperature drastically drop, it would help a lot. However, if that were to be the case, one would want a thicker hat, but the one that you've got doesn't match the scarf entirely, or the outfit for that matter. It should be better to change entirely.

As much of a farce as this scenario is, this kind of thinking is more common than not. In fact, I would venture to say that nearly everyone has experienced some form of this runaway thought sometime in their life, if not on a daily basis. This future thinking is so different from the kind of thing that the limbic system is supposed to deal with that it doesn't know what to do with it, so it manifests in one way: fear. Stepping out the door now in the jacket, hat, and scarf, of your reluctant consensus, doubts start to creep back, making you fear that you've made the wrong choice. And physiologically, this fear manifests itself in much the same way as if you've just entered into a dark forrest- increased heartbeat, uncertain stride, protective body language, etc. These future fears have such a hold on people that we're always fighting through the future to be in the present.

What then should be done? Letting this fear control us, especially of something so immaterial, is nothing short of ludicrous. It's a terrible thing to give up living in the "now" for living in the "if". In all honesty, I don't know.

You May Now Disregard the Bride

I've recently noticed a disturbing trend amongst the general public that has taken over may aspects of society and popular culture in the past few years. This is trend seems simply to be a change in our relationship to information. Information has changed a lot in the past few years, mostly that now there is 1. much more of it, and 2. it is everywhere. Just 100 years ago, an average person probably saw not more than 50 books in their life, let alone read them. These days, a single shelf of a single floor of a single library in a single town of a single state is likely to contain more literature than most people will read in their lifetimes. A person could spend the rest of their life understanding the market data from the last hour of stock exchanges and probably never finish. Availability of information is in no way a problem for anyone in a developed nation. 

Why then are people more ignorant than ever? If information is everywhere, why is so much of it being ignored or discounted? I believe that our relationship to information has changed because we no longer have to earn it. This is what I mean: growing up, I had an encyclopedia set in my house. Well, two actually- One was a children's edition. Whenever I wanted to find a specific piece of knowledge, I had to get on a stool, pull down a heavy book of a high shelf, and flip through it, floundering with my third grade spelling skills until I got to the one entry that I wanted. If there was a word or an idea in there that I didn't understand, I had to look that up in a dictionary or the encyclopedia too. This laborious process of acquisition of knowledge is a mere triviality compared to how information was sought after historically, but I think it serves as an apt example for the relationship to knowledge that people used to have. We used to have to labor actually exert effort to find what it is I wanted to know. 

Now, the internet has more articles and entries than anyone could begin to compute, so we rely on google to tell me which ones are the most reliable or important. This is a fundamental change. Because people no longer have to work at it, they am much more likely to discount the information that I do find, simply because they unconsciously think that the lack of effort which which they found this information is the same as the lack of effort someone put into getting it there. Now in come cases, this happens to be true. Anyone can start a blog or write something about a a topic they know nothing about, and indeed, a significant portion of the internet is false, or at best misguided truth. However, this becomes dangerous when we take this attitude toward genuine resources of knowledge, such as the work of scientists or historians, i.e. people that actually know something about something. For them, the labour of the 20 page article you just read isn't in the writing of twenty pages, which would be the equivalent of the labour you put into attain the knowledge, it was the hours and hours of research and thinking and being very wrong so they could find out how to be a little right. It was the frantic grant applications and the long nights of slaving away at a fragment of codex or a pipette and microscope. That is what we are discounting when we don't take seriously their work. 

We used to be married to our information, and had to work and learn to love what we learned, even if what we found wasn't what we wanted. And some people still are in such a way married, and they are in no way the people I am addressing here. I'm addressing the Mitch McConnells and the Ragen Chastains of this world. Information is not just words, any more than music is just noise. If you're not a scientist, that's okay. Listen to one. If you're not a doctor, that's fine. Listen to one. There is an, for all intents and purposes, infinite supply of information in this world. If you choose to be dumb, that is by all means your right. But don't try to pass your stupidity off for anything else except what it is.