my heart is a marble in your empty jelly jar
One time while I was home in Austin this summer I had this sort of identity crisis/meltdown and I was sitting in my little rented room sobbing on the phone to my dad who was in Korea where it was like 4 am and he told me something that I’ve thought about every day since: He told me that growing up is about coming to terms with the fact that nobody in the entire world has any fucking idea what they are doing, and all illusions that anyone else can tell you what to do and who to be in order to be happy and keep you safe are probably bullshit. No one knows what they’re doing, and all the authority figures in your life that want you to think that they do are lying (whether they know it or not). The only thing that counts is being happy and feeling like your existence is validated on a daily basis, and no one else can tell you how to make that happen for you. Other people may have found methods that work for them that may be relevant somehow to you, and that’s great, and if you want to emulate them, that’s fine, but they can’t tell you how to be happy. Other people can supplement your life, but your happiness is ultimately your responsibility and believing anything else is going to lead to a lot of problems. In the words of the unsuitably mystical slogan of a bakery in Singapore that I know, "Only You Who Knows". And my dad told me that that is simultaneously the most liberating and terrifying thing you will ever learn. And so far he’s right. It makes me feel incredibly isolated and incredibly empowered. And is maybe the single most important thing I know.
What I came to terms with last night is that this realization that truth is entirely subjective extends to every assumption of reality that we ever have, not just the ones that obviously come from authority figures. I didn't just have this realization once, and go, "oh, okay, no one knows what they're doing so I don't have to worry about it" and leave it at that: I have this realization every day about every concept that dictates my identity or behavior: The concepts that we use to evaluate the world are based on fairly ephemeral, transient, even arbitrary concepts, concepts like "cleanliness" and "safety". There’s a part of the motion city soundtrack song “indoor living” that has a line that says “safety’s just a state of mind” and it’s so true yet our definition of "safety" determines so much: where we live, how we live, who we trust with our kids, our decisions, our money, our assets, our secrets, our thoughts. We make huge decisions based on arbitrary definitions of abstract concepts. Things that we accept as facts, actual circumstances in our actual lives, are really just vague, amorphous, abstract ideas. I realized this last night while holding my three-year-old cousin Ali’s hair back while she vomited into the all-too-permeable membrane of a green towel on my lap: We make our kids think that we can keep them safe, but we can't. This three year old girl is sick and vomiting and crying and in pain and there is just nothing I can really do about it. She doesn't really know that yet, but she will. This will continue as she gets older, and eventually she will have that day like I had sobbing on the phone with my dad where she will realize that her parents/teachers/church leaders/whoever can't actually keep her safe or happy or anything, that we maintain that illusion as long as we can but as soon as they hit adolescence they start suspecting and then they realize and they grow up and the whole charade is over. But this is just one example. Safety’s just a state of mind, yes, but so is EVERYTHING ELSE. Our assumptions about our lives, our relationships, our behavior, everything- they’re all based on a state of mind, not on an objective reality. We accept things as truth because they help us to evaluate and cope with our lives, not because they’re actually necessarily true.
This is why it's scary to grow up, because we don't want to let go of the idea that other people or sources can tell us what to do and accept that we have to do it ourselves. And this is also why we have to be really, really careful not to fight growing up too hard: Because some people never do, at least not by this definition; some people go their whole lives looking up to people above them to tell them what they do, and never realize that people above them don't know anything they know. These people are scary and sad because never learn the big secret, which is that there is no big secret: No one knows what they're doing any more than you do.
And the thing is, I think that’s actually okay, the fact that we’re all living in our own illusions with our own beliefs that, while of course all drastically, beautifully, wonderfully diverse, are pretty much uniformly mostly based on completely fallible and sometimes blatantly irrational or faulty premises. I don’t believe in objective truth, in one reality that is right for all. I also don’t believe it’s in any way a bad thing that our beliefs about life, the afterlife, each other, ourselves, and the world are very likely wrong or mistaken; we all do the best we can with the truth as best we can determine it. We all call it like we see it and call it loud as we can, and that is great as long as we never forget to acknowledge that we all see it differently and the ideology we base our identity and behavior on is somehow better or more true or more likely to make everyone happy than any one else’s, because it’s not. The second we start thinking that we are objectively right, or that it’s even possible to be objectively right, that’s when we are in trouble.
This is why religion can do such great and terrible things: Because it brings people together and allows them to share their lives by adopting an ideology that gives them that sense of worth, purpose, validation, and happiness in their lives. Some religions do this more successfully than others. Religion does wonderful things for wonderful people, and if it’s mostly made up, then I don’t see why that’s a problem, if it makes them better/fitter/happier.
The problem is that then they start thinking that it will make everyone better/fitter/happier, and however noble their intentions, then they start trying to tell other people how to live their lives to be better/fitter/happier, which no one person has any sort of right to tell any other person. Nobody knows anybody else well enough to be able to dictate that sort of thing to them, or, moreover, to judge whatever their method is. As long as we all allow each other our methods, our chance to make ourselves as happy and successful and “good” in whatever paradigm we live in, then we are fine. We just have to always maintain that sense of relativism that recognizes everyone’s methods as being equally legitimate despite being more or less equally bullshit. Otherwise you get nasty things like jihad and imperialism and the upshot is either we maintain a sense of relativism or lots of people die horrible gruesome deaths or are forced to live horrible lives. As soon as other people start getting hurt or oppressed or discriminated against because they don’t do things the way you would do them, you’re in trouble, because that happens when you’re trying to impose your methods on someone else. This obviously is a problem on a mass scale, but it's also problem on the micro scale, like how some parents don't know when to let the illusion of authority go. These people are scary and sad for the opposite reason of the people who won't let themselves grow up: They're scary and sad because they want to take away the right of people or groups or nations to grow up, too. They don't get it either.
As a side note, of course some peoples' methods are going to be in such direct contradiction with yours that you can't live close to/associate with them. This does not necessarily mean that they are evil or bad or wrong. It just means you can't deal with them. This is fine and should not even necessarily be resisted, although I know I for one have probably missed out on a lot of good people or good friendships in my life just because I couldn't open my mind wide enough to see the legitimacy of someone else's method because I thought it somehow posed a threat to mine. This was before I realized that mine was bullshit, and so, probably, was theirs', and neither of those facts meant that we couldn't get a lot out of knowing each other.
The weirdest thing about this realization that all illusions of authority figures knowing something you don't or being in anyway legit are bullshit is that it came from my dad, who’s obviously pretty much the biggest authority figure in my life. It’s weird to have that authority figure- the person who’s largely instilled your values and ideologies in you and been hugely instrumental in determining your identity and behavior- tell you that he did the best he could, and that doesn’t necessarily mean he was right; to not only give you permission to rebel against how you were brought up but to actually encourage it. It was, as he said, terribly frightening and wonderfully liberating.