Bookends

Life is strange.

That’s about the closest anyone has ever come to articulating the complexities of everyday existence. Sure, some folks more talented with words are able to somehow approximate the intuitive complexity of our lives with words that reverberate like echoes not quite heard, yet somehow encapsulate emotions that seem to dance shimmering between antonyms. But I’m not quite one of those people, not yet.

I just got through The Misbehavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot; this great man essentially realized that self-similar patterns form an important basis for understanding naturally-occurring phenomena and stock market behavior alike; the notion of self-similarity and congruence persisting throughout different scales of interpretation is something particularly striking, something as miraculous as the Intermediate Value Theorem popping out of metric space theory as a consequence of separability. It’s one of those things that has no reason to be true or even make sense, but somehow it does, and it’s beautiful.

Jordan Peterson would make the same argument about the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity; reconciling it with science is easy, he claims, since literalist interpretations are garbage almost by definition. Religion is the science of value judgements, while science simply inquires as to what is, without determining an optimal route through the noise. Got me thinking: does religious philosophy really provide a useful heuristic by which to conduct one’s life? Did they really figure out something that, yet again, has no reason to be true, yet somehow is, and is beautiful for it? Peterson would say so, and I hope to God (no pun intended) that he’s right. Life after college seems a little meaningless.

My depression’s coming back, my relationship is falling apart (and might already have gone beyond the point of salvaging), and so a big anchor in my life has now been cut and I’ve been set adrift. It’s hard to find something else to replace that as a guiding principle. It’s just as hard to avoid staying bitter and resentful of the pain that’s been sent my way by someone I love so much. Yes, despite all the nonsense and the emotions, I still care about her. Lord knows it’d be easier if I didn’t, but I do, and such is my burden.

One a positive note, I deadlifted by bodyweight recently. The feeling of power that comes with being able to lift heavy is quite intoxicating; a key that opens a door to let in the ocean.

The ocean serves as a bulwark of the eldritch Truth.

It’s hard to know what to do when guiding reflexes both internal and external seem to fail you all at once. Peterson mentions how the one positive conclusion he’s managed to draw from psychology is that the sense of meaning you obtain when performing a task is an orienting reflex. I hope that’s true, because it’ll give me something to strive towards.

But at the same time I’m rather scared of that idea, because I don’t find many things meaningful anymore. Things seem plastic, surface-level, tangential, irrelevant. Nothing’s touched those deep, profound parts of my heart or mind in a very long time. Time just seems to slip by, with no meaning or consequence. I’m flying to Greece this weekend, and am more excited about getting away from work than I am about visiting a new country. Which is weird, since I don’t hate my job; I actually quite enjoy it. I’m just starved for companionship I suppose. Friends seem far away, family seems to be drifting away, and here I am, sitting in my head again.

Life is strange.