Torturing Reason
Why do we place heavy meaning on certain moments instead of others? An action, a choice, thought; a word spoken instead of another. At times these decisions become weights of excruciating importance while others appear as involuntary automatisms. Think back to one of these instances in your life, I’m certain you have one. It can be a particularly impressive performance you gave, or a late night conversation with a close friend. Can you point to the specific crux upon which, you believe, a certain outcome hinged?
Personally I’m saddled with my 8th grade rugby game: our team is last in the league with no points scored; our final game is against the reigning champs. I’m on the right wing during one of our possessions, ball in hand, and break out of their defense. There’s a clear, straight line of sight between myself and the goal; I’m running as hard as I can imagining “Is this it? Will I be the one to break our streak?” — pure elation. Then a defender tripped me from behind and I threw the ball forward. We lost the turnover then the game.
Ultimately this event was profoundly impactless. Meaningful, yes. The symbolism of scoring the team’s first point would’ve been great. Maybe there’s a universe where that occurred, and the boost of confidence radically alters my life for the better. But there’s nothing I could’ve done in that moment. I could’ve trained harder during practice or maybe my cleats were poor quality. But in that moment I played the best I could and failed.
In contrast, every conversation I’ve failed to initiate with a magnetic stranger, all chances I turned down for serendipity to play with me, come as impactfully-negative personal moments. I had it all within my reach and turned away in cowardice.
Due to the possible outcome being unclear, there’s no loss of meaning for me to mourn
Yet the impact, not just resulting from the conversation, but of the decision to initiate itself, strikes Existence as a significant failure.
This isn’t restricted to “low stakes” developments like games and conversations. My first job out of college at a high paying startup contributed nothing to my character growth and felt preordained from the start. Years prior I mindlessly chatted with some guy and he ended up hiring me. But certain essays that I labored over for days, still currently ignored, remain embedded in my core. Not a function of work either, as that one time I swiped my friend into the dining hall got me laid one year later. Choices, decisions and their outcomes, take on outsized meaning when their compounded effect is measured over a long enough time-period.
So now we enter timelines and the incalculable chaos of our existence. Everything is constantly moving forward in time, and how you behave yourself determines the timeline we’re continuously finding ourselves in. But don’t get obsessed! Worrying about “optimizing all outcomes to create the best timeline” is meaningless at best and cause for clinical containment at worst. Large swaths of life are lived by no choice of our own, save for imperceptible movements in the energy field that allow you to imprint your will on the collective unconsciousness.
It’s my sincere hope for all those reading to have experienced the intense bliss that comes from being certain your life is going according to plan. The moment when you get in your bed at night, and a sudden unusual feeling of overwhelming expansive consciousness fills your body. Although your eyes are closed, it’s as if your field of view has doubled, and your body fills the room out to its edges. In that moment you can be sure, without a doubt, that everything is as it’s meant to be — everything will be okay. All adversity, challenges, setbacks were presented to you as valuable lessons tailored specifically to make you grow stronger.
What I mean is — we have no control over the behavior of others, shaped by years of idiosyncrasies; little control over ourselves bound by early childhood development and biochemical environment. Yet sometimes — for that brief moment when inspiration to create strikes, or the opportunity to help another presents itself — we become masters of the universe, as our action has significant downstream repercussions. As C. S. Lewis puts it:
For some thing to have meaning, the scenario propitious for an opportunity and the opportunity itself must coincide. Your task is to tune yourself to recognize these moments without acknowledging them thus acting in total accordance with your True Self.
Turning to the central point of the inquiry, how come the rugby moment (which I had negligible control over) tortures me far greater than my inability to talk to the cute girl that kept checking me out at the cafe. Many will offer countless explanations, from dysregulated hormone production to reincarnation karma-debt. Perhaps these “imperceptible moments” don’t exist and true will is fake. What a sad life. Maybe it’s the simple answer, that the rugby scenario fulfills my ideal of what I wanted to be, while the second testifies to what I actually am. The human brain is a wondrous work of magic that dispenses with anything that forces a contradiction towards sad energy states. That is: why think about the actually meaningful moment when I had the power to affect change — that exemplifies my current shortcomings — when I can focus on the lesson I would inevitably learn, yet gives me glimpses of a brighter, fabricated alternative.
Perhaps then, what makes a moment meaningful is its unrealized potential
“Enlightened beings” wouldn’t care about anything as trivial as the birth of a child. Along this line: the conception is the meaningless yet impactful act, while the birth brings about fresh, unrealized potential in the world. Who you are at your rawest vs what you could become.