What We Don't Know is Where We Find Answers
Embrace mystery
Those of us who live in the WEIRD world* have had a pretty good existence. Barring foolish lifestyle choices, we live longer, are less likely to die of violence, and are more likely to have access to clean water, transportation, air conditioning, safe heat, and working plumbing and power. And a significant number of people from the less wealthy nations come here to participate in our economies.
And yet, there is an equally significant portion of the population in the WEIRD world that struggles with depression, anxiety, and a lack of meaning. This could be because our day-to-day actions often no longer have any obvious connections with our survival or our emotional satisfaction. This sense of meaninglessness is exacerbated by our increasing isolation.
Humans are meant to interact with each other. We are social beings. We evolved to be face to face, hand to hand, heart to heart.
There is nothing wrong with chatting online. It can be a blessing to be able to interact with people from very different cultures and locations. But it isn’t a substitute for in-person interaction. When this is our primary connection, we feel unfulfilled, as if we had been gorging on nutrient-free food.
And when we don’t interact with each other in real space, we lose a critical physical connection to life itself. If the person who has lost such a connection has no other lifeline - being outdoors, a pet - darkness awaits, hungry, and fangs dripping.
But what else is there besides human companionship? We have been trained for decades that there is nothing that humans cannot do, and that there is nothing we can’t understand. We have been taught we can heal all ills if only we can understand the chemistry of the body and mind, and that depression, despair, and self-hatred are fixable if only we can take the right drug, or otherwise hack our brains.
That is wrong.
Thinking we can solve problems as if we were mere mechanicals is no more than ideology. We are far more than gears and circuits and chemistry. We don’t know nearly as much about ourselves as we think we do. John Ioannidis Ph.D., one of the most cited researchers, wrote a paper in 2005 titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. Our bodies are far less legible than we’ve been taught.
In any case, that mechanistic view offers us nothing in times of anguish, no purpose to our pain, no reason for suffering. But the mystery does, and we would all be better off being more comfortable with it.
Mystery says that we don’t know everything about how the world works.
Mystery says that we don’t know all the outcomes of our own actions.
Mystery says that we don’t even know who we are.
Mystery says we should be humble. Go and see. Listen, and assume that the person in front of us knows something we do not. Assume that the landscape in which we live has multiple kinds of value. Assume that the people who live around you have goals and life experiences that you don’t understand.
But it’s more than that.
Mystery is also where hope lives. If we don’t know what could happen next, then we have the freedom to assume that things will go well. We can assume that someone does care even if another human isn’t immediately present. With practice, we can even assume that the person in front of us cares even with evidence to the contrary.
But we can’t do that if all we have are the words on the screen, the talking head, the rattling of our internal voices. We need more than that.
We need the mystery.
Where do you find mystery?
*WEIRD = Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic