☞ The Messiness of Reality and Stories
Applying universal logic gives our experiences a certain weight and our lives a certain order. I assume this is why we’re so drawn to recasting our life stories into tidy narratives and lessons to be shared with others. But in doing this we risk underestimating chaos, nuance, idiosyncrasy, and the occasional dose of self-delusion.
Haley Nahman • #155: How to be delusional
The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rational
... See moreBrian Klaas • Fluke
Physicists and mathematicians want to discover regularities. People say, what use is disorder. But people have to know about disorder if they are going to deal with it.
James Gleick • Chaos: Making a New Science
“Entropy applies to every part of our lives. It is inescapable, and even if we try to ignore it, the result is a collapse of some sort. Understanding entropy leads to a radical change in the way we see the world. Ignorance of it is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures. We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To m... See more
Farnam Street • Natural Disorder
Narrative is a tool by which we extract (or impose, depending on your perspective) meaning from the chaotic flux of being in the world
theconvivialsociety.substack.com • Narrative Collapse
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more
This is an observation about human rationality as much as it is about the epistemic conditions generated by life in what Jay Bolter has aptly termed the digital plentitude and which I usually call the Database. We are not as narrowly rational in our thinking as many would like to believe. Which is why conventional “solutions” to the problems associ... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Digital Inception
despite out best efforts to create coherent narratives, for the most part we live fragmented lives in a world of chaos