Mutual Misunderstanding
It's disconcerting to realize that no matter how unbelievably weird you think someone else is, someone else out there thinks the same about you. Some people find you completely and utterly unfathomable. That is unsettling, because the only thing you can fully fathom is you.
Stories like "The Matrix" and "The Truman" show inspire a sense of social paranoia that seems to be directed against an organized 'system.' In "The Matrix," it was a simulated reality created by sentient machine overlords; in the Truman Show, it was a facade created by a maniac for a truly 'real' reality TV show. But I don't think the root of this paranoia is one against a superior system. I don't even think it's paranoia. It's isolation. It's the eerie estrangement of existence. We're so alone in our thoughts. Even in the great presence of others we sometimes latch onto strange ideas to explain how such a disconnection between others can even be possible even though deep down we know what we are experiencing is real, and that what others experience is equally real. It's how I explain the paradox of feeling increasingly more alone as a room gets more crowded: we're shown just how distant we are from absolute mutual understanding.
I look at other people with a mutual misunderstanding. I sometimes wonder how their thoughts can form arrangements of words and ideas that are so differently than mine--how they can perform such wild actions that I could never fathom. Such judgment is easy. The difficulty is in acknowledging that other people feel the same toward me. They see me with the same misunderstanding, the same bewilderment. I appear to all of you as alien as you appear to me and as alien as you appear to each other. Regardless of what you think when you read these words--whether you think they are amazing, trite, sad, irrelevant--you will feel an automatic distance from them because they are not your words at all. They are my words, and while they feel as natural as breathing to me, they appear like some foreign spectacle to you, almost like the words were born ex nihilo.
Everyone can appear a little distant or odd at times, and we wonder what can even make them tick. They're just like us, and yet, so different. Even your closest, best friend sometimes has that dead, blank stare in which you wonder if they're a machine or some kind of simulation, even if it is only for a split second. Or perhaps it's all just a deranged product of your own imagination as you sit trapped in some mental hospital somewhere.
But we are trapped: trapped in our own minds, desperately, until the end of our own time. Our mind is our one and only anchor to this reality, and in this we are forever biased. We create our own sense of normal and judge other people as crazy, as they do the same to us. Love is the most desperate of attempts to break this barrier. But the barrier can never be broken as we are slaves to our own minds. Perhaps love is at least enough to create a facade that the wall is broken. Absolute mutual affection. And if two people truly believe that without question: love is bliss, because for once in our lives, we are not alone.
Stories like "The Matrix" and "The Truman" show inspire a sense of social paranoia that seems to be directed against an organized 'system.' In "The Matrix," it was a simulated reality created by sentient machine overlords; in the Truman Show, it was a facade created by a maniac for a truly 'real' reality TV show. But I don't think the root of this paranoia is one against a superior system. I don't even think it's paranoia. It's isolation. It's the eerie estrangement of existence. We're so alone in our thoughts. Even in the great presence of others we sometimes latch onto strange ideas to explain how such a disconnection between others can even be possible even though deep down we know what we are experiencing is real, and that what others experience is equally real. It's how I explain the paradox of feeling increasingly more alone as a room gets more crowded: we're shown just how distant we are from absolute mutual understanding.
I look at other people with a mutual misunderstanding. I sometimes wonder how their thoughts can form arrangements of words and ideas that are so differently than mine--how they can perform such wild actions that I could never fathom. Such judgment is easy. The difficulty is in acknowledging that other people feel the same toward me. They see me with the same misunderstanding, the same bewilderment. I appear to all of you as alien as you appear to me and as alien as you appear to each other. Regardless of what you think when you read these words--whether you think they are amazing, trite, sad, irrelevant--you will feel an automatic distance from them because they are not your words at all. They are my words, and while they feel as natural as breathing to me, they appear like some foreign spectacle to you, almost like the words were born ex nihilo.
Everyone can appear a little distant or odd at times, and we wonder what can even make them tick. They're just like us, and yet, so different. Even your closest, best friend sometimes has that dead, blank stare in which you wonder if they're a machine or some kind of simulation, even if it is only for a split second. Or perhaps it's all just a deranged product of your own imagination as you sit trapped in some mental hospital somewhere.
But we are trapped: trapped in our own minds, desperately, until the end of our own time. Our mind is our one and only anchor to this reality, and in this we are forever biased. We create our own sense of normal and judge other people as crazy, as they do the same to us. Love is the most desperate of attempts to break this barrier. But the barrier can never be broken as we are slaves to our own minds. Perhaps love is at least enough to create a facade that the wall is broken. Absolute mutual affection. And if two people truly believe that without question: love is bliss, because for once in our lives, we are not alone.