☞ The Messiness of Reality and Stories
Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?
Liu, Cixin • The Three-Body Problem
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this building, it’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail. This turns out to explain why it's so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when they’re literally the best in the world in their field.
johnsalvatier.org • Reality has a surprising amount of detail
Our finite lives are filled with all the painful problems of finitude, from overfilled inboxes to death, and confronting them doesn’t stop them from feeling like problems
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks
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
Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems
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
we would come to recognize that concepts that seem natural to us are full of contradictions. Perhaps accepting this messiness would lead us to a more conscious and intelligent way of living.
Hua Hsu • Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
The smartest minds today—including those studying computers, biology, math, physics—have come to understand that the world no longer adheres to predictable, linear mandates. Instead, life is filled with chaos and complexity, periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. In place of steady lines, observers now see loops, spirals, wobble
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