Convenience

For most of us, time is precious. Most of us can agree that we don’t have enough time in a day. A vast majority of our waking hours are spent at school, at work, doing chores, or running errands. In order to maximize our time, we are presented with a myriad of options to make our life more convenient. But in compelling us into a myopic pursuit to save time and effort—when perhaps neither time nor effort are in need of saving—we neglect asking what it is that ultimately gives us meaning and purpose. Consider how our obsession with convenience, efficiency, and optimization has shifted our perspective in the following:

Social Interactions

There is no denying the fact that the advent of mail systems, the telegraph, the telephone, the internet, and the smartphone has profoundly impacted our means of communication, especially with those across long distances. But we must remain conscious of its potential to dehumanize our interactions, as they deprive them of essential qualities that are just as, if not more important than the content itself of our conversations. While these qualities—our tone of voice, our accent or dialect, the timing and pace of our speech, the pausing between and emphasis on certain words, body language, gestures, posture, facial expressions, proximity and personal space, physical touch, eye contact—have played a pivotal role within our social interactions for virtually the entirety of human history, we, for some reason, do not feel perturbed when these technological innovations have stripped us of them. 

We thus have a variety of tools at our disposal, each, while gradually decreasing the time and effort invested into the interaction, simultaneously increases the level of dehumanizing abstraction: a face-to-face conversation can degrade into a Facetime or Zoom call, wherein our perceptions of body language begin to fall apart; we can then degrade into a phone call, wherein it completely falls apart; we can then degrade into direct messaging, wherein we can no longer even perceive the vital nuances within our spoken language; we can then degrade into an anonymous interaction—be it a Twitter exchange, the YouTube comments section, or a Twitch chat room—wherein we become so detached that we no longer know who we are even speaking to, denuding us of any semblance of humanity that had once remained. While each form of communication has its time and place, we cannot ignore the scale at which social media has proliferated—where the tail end of the spectrum of dehumanizing abstraction has gained prominence—and thus the degree to which it has wrought irreparable psychological damage on hundreds of millions of its users. 

Education and Learning

From rudimentary methods such as flashcards or mnemonics, to the meticulously crafted study guides of Sparknotes and Cliffs Notes, to the more recent innovations like Anki, Quizlet, and other SRS (spaced repetition system) software, we have developed a plethora of tools to optimize studying and hone our memorization techniques. But far too many of us that utilize these tools begin with the premise that rote memorization is the primary pathway to knowledge. There are indeed some domains of knowledge such as law, medicine, music, or language that demand a significant degree of rote memorization, especially in the early phases wherein one develops foundational knowledge. However, beyond a certain point, forcing students en masse to memorize the absurd amounts of impractical information—the names of historical figures or the dates of historical events, hundreds of needlessly complex mathematical principles and formulas, all the names and atomic numbers of all the elements of the periodic table, the capitals of all the countries in Europe—is not a strategy conducive to cultivating inspiration, critical thinking, and problem solving skills within our next generation. 

Not only do our education systems hopelessly fail in teaching us anything in a remotely meaningful or inspiring way, the sole reason these tools even exist in the first place is because the same education systems that coerced us to memorize this information to begin with are also incapable of providing us with any useful tools to aid us in achieving this senseless goal. There is no doubt that using these tools will save us time, but in our mindless quest to game the system—to spend as little time as possible for the maximum grade—do none of us actually care about what we’re learning, how we’re learning it, and why we’re learning it? Do none of us stop ourselves for just a moment to realize just how counterproductive this learning process is, how backwards our logic is within our pedagogy, and how this all inevitably contributes to the continual degradation of our intellectual consciousness as a society?

Romance

The past decade has seen the rise to prominence of dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, romance is far from being free of the trap of convenience. These apps operate under the presumption that romance constitutes entirely on if people match—the estimated degree of compatibility based on personal attributes—but I argue that how those matches occur can be just as important, if not more important, depending on the circumstances. The paradox of online dating is that in a relentless pursuit of convenience, we strive to reduce the time and effort invested, when time and effort are precisely the two conditions that are required for meaningful and lasting relationships.

Gastronomy

If our only concern is the reduction of time and effort, there is absolutely no reason to cook in this day and age for those that can afford not to. The proliferation of fast food, restaurant delivery services, and meal kits trivialize our need for sustenance. Why spend all that effort and all those hours meticulously crafting a unique homemade meal when we can feed ourselves within minutes by ordering in, and use the rest of that time on leisure? But this inevitably falls into the same trap of convenience as romance; we cannot operate under the presumption that our enjoyment of food is solely based on the quality of the food itself or the degree of sustenance it provides, but just as important is the story of the food—who made it, how they made it, why they made it, and who is eating with us. For the entirety of human history, food has been an integral part of our sense of commensality; it is not merely as a means of sustenance, but as an indispensable medium by which we can share our culture, forging meaningful relationships with other human beings. The food that we make—for ourselves and one another alike—is an indelible expression of our identity and our values. We need food to satisfy our hunger just as much as we need it to satisfy our desire for meaning, purpose, and belonging. 

The Car

But perhaps there is no greater symbol of convenience than the automobile. Yes—we’ve optimized it so we can spend a fraction of the time we did previously running errands, shopping for groceries, and commuting to work or school; it added flexibility to our schedules, to do what we want when we want, but ultimately, we must ask ourselves—were we inherently unhappy living our unoptimized lives before merely because we were “wasting time”? Are we truly more happy sitting miserably in traffic attempting to drive to the nearest Walmart versus a leisurely stroll to our local grocer? Did we balk and groan more when we had to ride a bike or take the train to get to where we needed, or is it that the greater stress comes when we’re endlessly scouring streets for a mere parking spot, when our car suddenly breaks down. when we’re helplessly stranded in a sea of traffic, or when we get into an accident? And even if it does make us ever slightly more happy, do we have the gall to honestly justify this shameless and profligate waste of energy and resources? When we perpetuate car-dependent societies and encourage abhorrent city design with countless roads and parking lots that require endless maintenance, incur massive debt, and degrade the beauty of the places we live in? When we put a significant risk to the environment and the lives of other human beings, including our own? It seems as if the car extends convenience only to those that are privileged to own one, inconvenience to those without, and misery to both.

We often forget that we are human. We often overlook the fact that nothing about our psychology as human beings inherently demand efficiency and convenience as we have arbitrarily defined it. If anything, our innate predisposition leans far more heavily on the narratives that give us meaning and purpose, not merely what something is on an arbitrarily defined objective scale, but how those things make us feel and the types of stories we build around these elements of our lives. We must remain mindfully vigilant when seeking to optimize anything; it is not to eliminate, but to preserve the inefficiencies that exist to tell us stories, enriching our culture and our perception of happiness. It is an inherently dehumanizing act to calculate our actions through an industrialist conception of the world, wherein the sole purpose of any activity is to maximize productivity and minimize time and effort spent. But time is not our enemy, and certainly neither is effort. Our greatest enemies are but the toxic narratives that embed within us a deep sense of discontentment, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness—these oppressive and cruel preconceptions of “wasting time,” of “missing out,” of “not enough.” We can choose to extricate these industrialist presuppositions from our beliefs about the purpose of optimization, and in doing so we can optimize our lives through a humanist perspective; instead of centralizing our focus around how to maximize not how much can be done, but rather—to maximize the sense of fulfillment and joy we derive from all that we do in this fleeting life—we should ask ourselves what we should do in the first place. 

A Life Well Lived

How do we live a happy and fulfilling life? Isn’t it odd that people in this day and age continue to ponder answers to this hackneyed question when, as we do with virtually everything else in our lives, we can merely Google it and get more than adequate answers at a moment’s notice? Our understanding of human psychology has advanced so significantly in the last several centuries that the supposed secret of a life well lived is far from a mystery to us at this point; plenty of individuals had already fleshed out profound answers to these sorts of questions even millennia ago, albeit not backed by any form of scientifically proven claims (not that they are necessary to adequately answer this question). 

We already understand the specific contributors towards happiness and fulfillment—healthy relationships, whether in romance, friendship, or family, adequate food, water, and shelter, freedom from oppression, challenging, engaging, and fulfilling work, mental and physical wellness, and a working balance between hardship and leisure. Obviously, not everyone’s definitions of these aspects of happiness or fulfillment will look the same, and while there is indeed a myriad of different philosophies that approach it differently, they will always generally follow similar themes. 

We also equally understand the inimical actions that are likely to detract from a positive, meaningful experience of life—our mindless participation in these constant games of manipulation and deception, of judgment and ridicule, of all that constitutes our emotional negligence and ignorance, ultimately deteriorating our social relationships; our unquestioning commitment to mundane, brainless, and soul-sucking work that we can neither be proud of nor derive satisfaction from; our inordinate use of alcohol, recreational drugs, social media, television, video games, and other forms of entertainment that ruthlessly rot our brain; our edification of hedonism, materialism, and the status hierarchy that consigns so many of us to an inane rat race, depriving us of any real sense of purpose; the inevitable cascading series of negative consequences of these factors that ultimately degrade our culture, our awareness of and compassion for each other’s suffering, and exacerbate existing problems within human welfare. 

And yet we act as if we don’t know. We act as if we don’t understand the reasons as to why we’re so unhappy and unfulfilled, why we all seem to be mired in a rut of purposelessness, why we feel as if the world we live in is cruel and unjust. We act as if the secret to a life well lived remains an unsolved mystery, when in actuality all the hard questions have already been asked—for thousands upon thousands of years, at that—and we correspondingly have a plethora of answers. We have several millennia worth of knowledge at our disposal—an innumerable quantity of seminal works from thinkers far more erudite in the human condition and with far more wisdom than virtually any of us could ever hope to have. Confucius, Buddha, the authors of the Bible, Laozi, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Jung, Russell, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Camus, Chomsky, Foucault—you name it; these are just the most venerated ones among thousands. Despite the scope of their contributions towards humanity, most of us can’t help but perceive them merely as distant relics of the past. For the vast majority of people in this modern age, their work remains fatefully consigned to the dustbins of history, a realm of study which itself has become desolate and esoteric. 

The fountain of truth is brimming with knowledge, overflowing with wisdom, and far more accessible to the common person today than at any point in our entire history. And yet, most of us choose not to drink from it. The most important conclusion we can make by studying the work of the past is realizing that we haven’t changed all that much, if at all, and that our present pondrance of the question of what constitutes a life well lived inexorably aligns with that of our ancestors. We cannot come to the haughty and naive conclusion that all these great thinkers of the past are irrelevant in today’s circumstances and imperiously claim we know better than every single one of them, lest we repeat the mistakes of the past and compel ourselves to relearn all the lessons that our predecessors sacrificed everything for, fighting tooth and nail just to learn what it means to be happy and what it means to be fulfilled. When all has been asked and all has been answered, all there is left to do is humble ourselves, be conscious of our impertinence and arrogance, and commit ourselves to learning not only the specificities of our struggle within contemporary life, but, more importantly, the overarching themes and motifs that inextricably link the past and the present iterations of the human condition. 

Once we’ve opened up our eyes and once we understand what it truly means to live a life well lived, it’s impossible not to come to the daunting realization that even though the exponential advances in science and philosophy have given us ever-more fleshed out answers for centuries at this point, our anachronistic industrial societies obstinately remain perpetually hypnotized by the gaudy splendor and garish glory of consumerism and its promises of wealth, power, and fame. It becomes increasingly difficult to ignore just how abysmally designed our societies are at aiding us in this quest for happiness and fulfillment. This is a society in which we turn a blind eye to the frankly insulting disparity of wealth and privilege across social classes; in which we tolerate a backwards, cruel educational system that does little to promote genuine, inspired learning but instead treats our children as commodities in need of quality control and processing, wherein the defective—everyone who isn’t able to isn’t willing to conform to the preset standard—are casted out and ostracized; in which we settle for corrupt and spineless politicians and captains of industry whose vested interests are to profit off our impulsive desires, to milk us for every ounce of productivity they can get away with, to reinforce the cultural status quo and thus the legitimacy of their profligate actions; in which we become inured to injustice, intolerance, violence, and the deterioration of our physical and mental health caused by none other than our collective irresponsibility and complacency. 

When this is all that we’ve known for our entire lives, it’s no surprise that it's so difficult for us to disillusion ourselves and break free from the chains of conventional thought that seek to mollify us by flattering us with these promises of prosperity if we just follow the rules and don’t ask questions. But we will not be mollified; we can choose a better future for ourselves and the generations to come by simply learning to ask the right question. With this fountain of knowledge abounding and easily accessible to each and every one of us, we no longer need to burden ourselves with these confounding metaphysical and psychological questions when our predecessors have already asked and answered that question ad nauseam. Rather, the difference we can make today lies in our willingness and bravery to bring to trial all that comprises our contemporary life—all these intricate systems in place, all these deep-seated norms and conventional definitions of happiness and fulfillment, all these oppressive stories and narratives that we tell ourselves constantly—and instead of blithely asking ourselves what constitutes a life well lived, we ask ourselves how all this helps us live life well, if at all. 

Detached

Image taken on 1/25/14, the day before this incident.

Snow covered the ground, and once again the green lights shined upon me as I went to sit on the cold bench. I sat there for a good hour or so, just mourning the death of my positive-thinking mind. I didn't know what to do to make my life better again, when I would be motivated to do my work, pursue a dream, and wake up with something to look forward to in the day. I was lonely, and I wasn't willing to blatantly search for someone that would want to talk to me, console me, or truly be someone to look over me all the time. That would just kill the purpose of it all. I could find no one in the people I knew anyway. 

I stared across at the yellow eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg to know that God was still watching me. I still remembered what someone told me at church: "You're not feeling this way because God is distant, but because God is nearer than ever, because He cares." I wept. I wept and I wept — tears inundated and flowed down my face. I cried because of the sad and pathetic life I've been living all my life. I never was really close to Him, read my Bible, or truly devoted everything. Instead I went about on my own, sinning and sinning, and now I suffer the consequences. I was sorry for all of it.

I slowly stop crying and look up at the feverishly pink and red night sky. I begin to become frustrated. I see that no one came to see how much I am suffering, how many tears I've shed, and what I've been going through. The cold begins to grow upon me, and my hands and feet start to feel the frigid clench. My entire body is freezing and shivering at this point, and the only things to warm me are the salty tears that flow from my hopeless eyes. I grow desperate and I dream that someone would come and rescue me, take care of me, and change my life forever. But it is once again only a dream, and still no one comes. 

It is midnight now. I start to pace around upon the snow-covered ground. I then come upon the umbrage of a dead, leafless and lifeless tree and lean on there. I don't want to go home. I don't want to fucking go back home, to know that all this is in vain, as all I did was, where I would go back to my old, pitiful, lamentable life. But I have to. I have no where else to go. 

I walk awfully slow home, still hungry, freezing, and thirsty, but I don't give a shit as the cold-darkness wind continues to blow across my face. When I make it there, I walk straight into my bedroom and close the lights. Who the fuck cares about all this anyway. It's my motherfucking fault in the end. I can't get anyone that really cares because I make myself think that no one gives a shit. Fuck me and fuck my life. Screw what people think! Screw what I think! I'm just a sentimental bastard that no one even cares about, and everything is in vain and is futile! This doesn't make sense. I don't make sense. Nothing makes sense. My life is a paradox. I don't care about those stupid midterms tomorrow, I could fail both of them for all I care now. I don't need to study. I don't need to eat. My life is pathetic. I fucking screw up everything, even the relationship with the girl I love. It always turns into this supposedly "awkward" inconsiderate bullshit that I wrought for my own agony. I didn't pursue God, Christ, read my Bible, associate myself with those at church — no — I'm lost amongst them indeed because I'm a damn complex, self-deprecating, and miserable problem for everyone, my teachers, my friends, my brother, my parents, for all the people that I've known, and for my God — my Savior. I'm not like everyone else at my church who just accepts and goes about and has miracles in their life. Not me, never. The measure of my sin and misery was only building up and measuring to a greater and greater degree of hopelessness and shame. Then what did I live for? Why should I even wake up tomorrow? For a faint sliver of hope, slowly growing grotesque upon a disheartening horizon of sunrise? No, it's only a storm of God's wrath brewing in the distance. Because I care so much about a stupid midterm that I'm expected to do, and I would make myself ten times as depressed and sad if I skipped them. I'm lost in an ocean of despair getting deeper and deeper with not one to show remorse, but only an angry God staring down at me as I grow thirstier and thirstier for truth, for change. It only gets worse when I think how insignificant I am to anyone, just alone, forlorn, and bereft of any dignity or true life. Here I am! Stranded in my own savage, brutal despondency! For no fucking reason. My life is perfectly fine in many people's eyes and it's only me —- only my true pitiful self ruining it all for me. Doesn't make sense, yet still it's all my fault. I start to laugh to myself in the dark and scoff at people. I think about all the people that will bullshit the exam tomorrow anyway including myself and I muse at their and my own misery to come. They can all go fuck themselves anyway, pretentious insensitive dumbasses. Fuck me, too. 

It was at that point I realized how much of a cold, apathetic, angry, and terrible person I've become. I cried even more at this realization. This wasn't the person I've wanted to become. What about love? What about my dream to help others? What about those that care so much about me? I wept because I didn't want to become this person — for people to see that a warm, helping person could fall into such despair and distress. I cried to God, but still the disheartening thought of tomorrow brought me once again into despair, and I went to sleep depressed and once again without hope. Hopeless without Christ. Unable to sense Him near, by my side. So there I was indeed, completely detached from the world, as I wanted to be in the auroras, though in a way I never expected.

I wrote this for the autobiography I was assigned to write for my English class during my Junior year in high school. It recounts the events of the momentous evening of January 26th, 2014, a day that would encapsulate the most emotionally traumatic epoch in my life. It was the first time I was truly denuded of all pretensions, all the vanity and strife, confronting the world naked and unafraid. 

But while it was the first time, it was far from being the only time in my life where I would be compelled towards a sense of desperation. Truthfully, nothing improved after that point. In fact, it only got worse. As the tension of that desperation petered out over time, I once again wore those pretensions as I continued on with my life, only to fall back into disillusionment, realizing that I was consigned to the same inane cycle, the same tireless ebb and flow of my capricious emotions. As the years passed, I would only drift further and further away from God and the church, become increasingly disenchanted by the vapidity and inconsequential slog of school and my day-to-day life, and continue to falter and tear apart other existing friendships and potential relationships as I fecklessly wandered the wastelands that were the remainder of high school and college life. It was only in 2018 when I began working that I was able to begin mending the relationship with my past and recalibrating my outlook on life and what it means to be happy and fulfilled.

I will admit—reading the passage above hurts. Even though it’s been years since I’ve come to terms with that phase of my life, I am still able to viscerally empathize with the fevered angst and emotional unrest, the dread of constantly having to confront a daunting and seemingly insuperable pessimism, and the disconsolate hopelessness of my old self. 

To put it curtly, it reminded me just how fucking terrible life can be. Some thoughts can drive you to the brink of insanity—

The seemingly insurmountable difficulties of life—these are tyrants that oppress the mind, that weigh down our soul, that make us question our very desire to continue on,

the seemingly irredeemable, incorrigible personalities that occupy our societies—these are vicious, barbarous predators that ravage our joy, devour our hope, and mutilate our dreams

incessantly gripped by the insipid distractions, the evanescent pleasures, and nonsensical minutiae of daily life, yet haplessly eluded by truth and purpose, 

our once-trusted instincts, our once-irrefutable conceptions of the world suddenly eviscerated by the relentless, crushing grip of realization,

when you’ve spent your entire life hearing everyone touting values of fairness and equality, but the reality of life is bereft of such, instead pervaded by broken or empty promises, 

we become mired in a dizzying, erratic vacillation between purported absolutes and apparent truths, tossed between capricious waves of good and of evil, of love and of hate, of happiness and of despair, of conviction and of ambivalence, of pride and of shame, of significance and of vapidity, of the revelatory and of the banal, of passion and of apathy, of faith and of doubt, of temerity and of regret, of hope and of disillusionment, of purpose and of purposelessness,

we are left stranded and alone, shivering in the cold, trembling in the darkness, begging on our knees to simply be freed, to be liberated from the psychological chains of this oppressive existence, but all we do is helplessly drag ourselves along, amidst an ever-graying, ever-decaying, anemic, featureless, indifferent yet incomprehensible world,

when our thoughts and words don’t come out the way we want them to, when we don’t feel the way we want to feel, when we just want someone to understand, but there is no one to understand, 

when everything just stops making sense,

and when we have nothing and no one left to blame, but ourselves, 

we realize it’d probably be better—if it all just ended. 

One thing struck me—the more that I read, the more I came to realize that there is something about my past self that has persisted up until this very present moment. It is this feeling of detachment—this act of just letting go. In that moment of acute, unceasing despair that disintegrated every modicum of hope that lingered in my mind, I found freedom. I found freedom because in that moment, I came to terms with death. 

That is to say, I suddenly became at peace with the thought of dying—this uncanny, strangely peaceful notion of all this suffering and agony being wrested from my life, as if it were the inexorable pull of a black hole. It’s not that I’ve ever seriously entertained thoughts of suicide; it would only be my last resort. My thought is, if I would end it all for myself, I would have to truly lose everything. It meant that I would have to lose that aforementioned freedom—the capacity to exhaust every single viable option in my life to be happy or to find meaning. Fortunately, I never truly lost that freedom, and thus I never lost my life, either. It was only years later—after becoming a linchpin at work, after making countless friends and valuable memories along the way, after proving my past self wrong by becoming a person that I was proud to be—that I learned to translate that stoicism in relation to death to a certain kind of fearlessness. It was part of a gradual, yet stark realization that I’ve simply had enough of it; if no one—myself included—was forcing me to partake in the chaos and the nonsense, then I wouldn’t. 

In part, it is recognizing how so many things are not as life-or-death as we make it seem. Even if the surly lizard brain resists and balks at my decision to do something ostensibly risky—I can learn to quell my impulses, to eschew the cultural conditioning that has failed me time and time again. Because very rarely is something that we decide to do, especially in the insulated, privileged societies we live in, a life-or-death matter. It merely takes a moment of detachment—to recall the abject misery and hapless desperation with which I once lived and how it ruthlessly consumed me, how that abysmal bout of suffering dragged me down to the depths where hope ceased to exist, and yet it was the same place freedom abounded. It is to extricate myself from the obsequiousness and passivity that I once wandered around with amid this unjust, absurd world, instead deciding to find my own path upward from the abyss. In the end, it is merely an exhaustion of the apparent options to live a life I’m proud to live, and if it doesn’t pan out as expected, then so be it. If the absurdity ceases to exist, and I cease to exist, so be it. I started with nothing, and I can end with nothing. 

I had originally intended to write my own profound conclusion for this reflection—one that ended up sharing thoughts and feelings incredibly close to my heart—as an exhortation for both myself and you, the reader. But while reading these two excerpts from the beginning and ending of Book 3 in Meditations last night, I was brought to tears, because Marcus Aurelius concludes the matter far better than I ever could:

“Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less of it is left, but this too: if we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If your mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for… all those are gone. 

So we need to hurry.

Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there…

If others don’t acknowledge it—this life lived with simplicity, humility, cheerfulness—he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book 3:1, Book 3:16)

The Spirit of Jazz

For the majority of my life, the music I listened to was consistent. It was consistent in the sense that for a given song, whether through recording or live performance, there was more or less one version of it; the primary components of the music—the lyrics, the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, textures, and structure—were relatively the same across multiple renditions, if not completely identical.. And I found that this trend would span across a variety of genres; whether it was a Coldplay, Rush, or Yerin Baek concert, no matter which performance the footage was sourced from, there would be little to no deviation from the versions that they recorded on their past album. Sure, there might have been some stylistic alterations in the tempo, the dynamics, and the articulation of certain phrases, but it was never to the point where one couldn’t effortlessly sing along to the lyrics or be unable to predict when the chorus or the bridge was coming up. Being an avid fan of these artists, it was incredibly easy to memorize nearly every song, whose melodies, rhythms, and form were already so deeply internalized within me that I, merely in thought, could play it out in my mind on repeat with ease. 

To a large extent, I believe that we’ve been conditioned to listen to music with a certain univocality and with an expectation of a kind of auditory consistency that taps into a uniquely specific emotional memory for each of us. We expect that a certain song makes us feel a certain way, where the integral elements of the music we hear are equally integral parts of our reminiscences.  

It was only when I started listening to jazz in 2015 that I would gradually learn to decouple these expectations from the listening experience. When I began listening to jazz, I listened to it with the same expectation of consistency that was characteristic of all the previous musical genres I had already  accustomed myself to. Upon discovering the plethora of jazz content online, ranging from live performances recorded by phone, to live streams hosted by jazz clubs themselves, to entire libraries of jazz albums available on Spotify, I listened to a particular video or a specific recording dozens, if not hundreds of times over the course of years. I began to deeply internalize each of those individual iterations, just as I did with all the music I had listened to before—memorizing them down to a note and bridging those vivid memories of the music with concurrent life events to create profound emotional associations with those songs. 

But as I listened more and more, as I began to listen to three, four, or five renditions of a given song, sometimes even going to see live performances in person, I inevitably realized something—I never felt the same way listening to one version as I did another. The tempo was much faster or much slower; sometimes they would play the tune in a different key; sometimes the head (the main theme of a tune) had an altered rhythmic or melodic composition. The lineup of musicians was different each time—sometimes a completely different lineup compared to that of the original recording. The solos played by each of those musicians were almost never the same, not even remotely, despite constituting the majority of any jazz tune. They can play a song dozens, if not hundreds, of times and are able to hear beyond the echoes of the past, whereas I so desperately and selfishly clung onto a beloved memory. While my mind, having heard only one version hundreds of times, so eagerly expected to hear a song one way and consequently feel a certain way, the reality was that the auditory experience of each performance inexorably evoked different feelings. I eventually realized that it wasn’t only a new genre of music that I had discovered; I had been exposed to an entirely different art form.

I slowly began to realize that jazz, by design and by tradition, often deviated from musical convention. Being so fundamentally rooted in the spirit of improvisation and the spontaneity that can only be truly achieved within a live performance, it was incredibly unlikely to find jazz musicians that played a song exactly the same way every single time. In the mind of a jazz musician, a particular sentence or phrase is evanescent; it is ephemeral and fleeting emotion in the heat of the moment, one unable to be ever replicated. They abhor the scarcity mindset of pop culture, exemplified by the countless numbers of music copyright cases, wherein one party accuses another of purportedly “stealing” a melody or other elements of an ostensibly original musical composition Unlike many of these mainstream artists that become emotionally attached to the magic and exhilaration of a hit record, of a seemingly “perfect” composition able to connect with the masses, jazz artists have no reason to hoard their successes. They know they have so much else to say, so many other emotions they can convey, so many other stories they can tell through their unique voice; they have no real reason to become so intimately attached to one iteration of themselves out of thousands in their lifetime. 

Jazz musicians implicitly understand that it’s not worthwhile to burden themselves to rehearse every specific note of a piece thousands of times, to achieve an impeccable degree of “perfection,” because perfection is a meaningless concept in a world of imperfect judgment. This performance of July by Ben Wendel is undoubtedly one of my favorite pieces of music, but I can’t quite say the same for the studio version, another performance, or the version I saw live just last week at the Village Vanguard—not because any of those other renditions are inferior in my view or the artist’s view, but merely because I retain specific memories associated with that particular version. And while that version ends up being perfect for me, the irony is that they never sought to create the perfect performance in the first place; rather, they acknowledge that they only need to put their heart and soul into the music, and by doing so they will inevitably create a version that will end up being perfect for someone. Because we all hear the music differently, they don’t waste their time haplessly obsessing over the details to create one flawless, ideal version of a song They neither specifically cater to the majority nor to a specific subset of individuals, but rather, they let freedom and faith in their artistic vision to determine the pathway to success, and not the other way around. 

All this is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with consistency or this internalization of what constitutes a song in memory; it is undeniably a powerful tool to aid us in understanding and thus emotionally connecting with our past selves. However, as Kierkegaard puts it, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” While reminiscing has incredible value in keeping us grounded and conscious of what ultimately led us to where we are today, it is evident, whether through our experience of music, our relationships, or our work, that we have an inimical predisposition to cling onto this idealized conception of what seems right—not what actually is right. We so desperately want things to be familiar, to always follow a familiar pattern or shape, and to be as we expected them to be. The method by which jazz musicians approach their art—their freedom within this brave cycle of iteration, improvisation, and generosity—can serve to remind us:

to iterate—by embracing the ephemeral, by enabling ourselves, even despite external criticism, to be proud of our story that constantly changes because we ourselves constantly change.

to improvise—by allowing ourselves to truly listen, to denude ourselves of our self-absorbed expectations on what something should sound like, on what something should be, but simply what is. 

to be generous—by saying something meaningful, by constantly sharing something made with passion, care, and commitment to the art, not by the selfish confines of a quid pro quo, and not by a romanticization of the ideal and the perfect. 

Conflict

Disagreement and conflict is inevitable. We live in a world that’s often hostile and inimical, bereft of love, filled with contempt and selfish desire, quick to shame and ridicule, and predisposed to hate, to polarize, and to antagonize. But there is nothing inherently wrong with the process of disagreement; in fact, it’s the only mechanism by which we progress human knowledge and culture. Rather, it’s the narratives that we assign to this dissension that precipitate and perpetuate nearly all the issues that pervade our modern day society. 

We fabricate a narrative of us against them, when unity is actually the only long-term solution.

We make it a game of pride, of winners and losers, while in reality we all lose.

We assign motives of sabotage, of purposeful wrongdoing while there are no such motives. 

We make it about revenge, justice, retaliation, and retribution, while we fail to realize that it becomes an perpetual, unending cycle of self-wrought destruction.

We seek to advance the world through business and politics, while all that these systems do is dehumanize our interactions by needlessly abstracting and thus corrupting them.

And the consequences of holding onto these narratives as the social norm are unequivocally clear; while I hope that the egregiousness and horror of the brutal wars throughout our history would be enough to convince us to change, it is our inability to unite—to truly work together to tackle the staggering amount of unaddressed and neglected social and public health issues—that is equally appalling. We have no reservation in continuing to conjure up an ever-increasing, intricate collection of excuses to justify our way of life and the narratives that we assign to it: I’m just trying to get by and be happy. My life already has so many of its own worries. We can’t change human nature; we will always be predisposed to conflict. Everything is hopeless, so we might as well live our lives selfishly and as how we see fit. Even when the world is falling apart around us, it’s all too easy to remain haughty and complacent when we’re not the ones in a grave, a trench, or a hospital bed. Our survivorship bias assures us: the world’s not all that bad. If the system isn’t broken, why fix it? 

In an ideal world, we have disagreement, debate, a realization of common ground, then progress and change—not disagreement, debate, a realization of inexorable differences, then conflict as a means of last resort. Lest we forget, there is solely one purpose for a debate—the advancement of ideas. It is an opportunity for two individuals to learn from each other. 

The fact that debates have become a spectator sport for some is an absolute travesty. In the age of social media and political polarization, it has become a mere caricature of intellectual discourse; from the absurd pantomime of the past presidential debates or the average high school debating competition, what was originally intended to be a means of advancing our collective intelligence as a society is instead now a means of degrading it. They have perverted the very process that allows us to obviate the game of us against them—of realizing the inexorable differences that inevitably lead to conflict.

In an intellectually honest debate, there are no winners or losers. There are no sides to take. There is no applause. There is no emotion. 

There are facts and evidence. There is logic and reasoning. 

Nothing else. 

We can choose to end our disagreement then and there.

What we most need to recognize is that the debate is as much about what we disagree on as it is what we agree on. Any productive debate consists of participants that not only disagree on the topic of the debate, but agree on the purpose of the debate itself; it is only when we can agree about what it means to create a better world—when we can agree about the value of pursuing a greater truth—that we can actually practically make use of all this exchange of knowledge. If we can’t agree on what all this is even for, it merely devolves into raucous, senseless banter or, better yet, glorified intellectual masturbation.

Yes, none of us are without fault. None of us are without blame. None of us are truly qualified to talk about anything. But we have to remember that none of this actually matters when we want to reconcile our differences. What matters is that we have an idea, a thought, an opinion, and we are willing and generous enough to share that with the rest of the world that will not judge the person who said it, but will judge the idea itself. When we preoccupy ourselves with who said it, why they said it, and how they said it, we actually lose sight of what they’re saying. We lose sight of what we’re all actually trying to do.

I want to urge us all—don’t let the lizard brain win. Don’t merely let our human predisposition towards antagonism and division inhibit us from making a better world for all of us; it is singlehandedly the greatest threat toward our progress as humanity.

I am far from being an optimist, so I’d likely be the first to tell you that it doesn’t seem likely that any one of us could realistically upend the current status quo and win the battle against our antagonistic instincts. But I cannot simply ignore the malleability of the human spirit; in the same way that the leaders of our nations and the captain of industry have meticulously shaped the predominant culture in the past two centuries of the industrial age, there is no reason to believe that it is unfeasible to reverse this process. As humans, we will certainly never reach a point where our perspectives of the world completely align, but look how far the industrialists got. We believe it isn’t possible because, for generations, we’ve been told a different story—a story of the value of compliance and conformity, where insolence and refusal to adhere to the status quo will harm our ability to live a prosperous, stable life. We’ve been told that story so that we wouldn’t come to the dangerous realization that all this conflict and strife was merely a means for the wealthy and powerful to hold onto their wealth and power. When from birth we’ve been so intimately cajoled by the glamor of consumerism and the lulling comfort of modern life, it becomes almost impossible for us to imagine losing these luxuries for such a distant and quixotic cause. 

Yes—it will be difficult, but we have to start somewhere, and it begins with deciding what narrative to assign to our inexorable tendency towards disagreement and thus conflict. We can decide to promulgate a culture where the norm of a debate isn’t about vehemently defending our own worldview, but is rather about an opportunity to learn from one another’s unique perspectives. We can create an environment where we don’t have to make crude assumptions about one another’s motives. We can build a narrative that—instead of fixating on our irreconcilable differences—allows us to hone in on what unites us as humanity, to learn about why we’re all here in the first place, what each of us value, what gives us reason to live, and how we can best serve each other. The only true way forward, the only way we begin to change our world and the present narrative, is together.

Soulmate

The term soulmate is frequently misused because most people either ignore or misconstrue the notion of the soul; their form of love is corporeal, not spiritual, meaning that their feelings of attachment toward another is inextricably linked to aspects of their physical being. If you fell in love with someone you were convinced was your soulmate, married them, but suddenly their soul was transported into a completely different body, would you love them in the same way? 

I will be the first to admit to this mistake, construing multiple people I’ve fallen in love with in the past as my soulmate, despite not knowing anything about their soul—the very essence of their being, all the stories that have shaped their consciousness, all the minute foibles and idiosyncrasies all the fears and dreams that reside within them, all the things that make them who they are. Had I not been so excessively infatuated—enamored by the grace of their body language, by how apparently adorable they seemed, by  how my heart felt when I caught a glimpse of their smile—there would likely be no semblance of emotional connection in the first place. 

But this subconscious bias toward physical appearance is merely an extension of the normative modes of judgment we use to navigate nearly any social interaction. In much the same way as we do with romantic partners, we just as easily make baseless assumptions about pretty much anyone that we come across in life. What sorts of conclusions do we draw about a person’s character if they’re morbidly obese or underweight, if they’re much shorter or taller than average, if they dress poorly, if they speak with an accent or have bad pronunciation, if they walk with an odd gait, if they’re physically or mentally handicapped, or if they have a certain skin color? Or maybe they just have strange idiosyncrasies that are completely out of their control? 

We’re far more likely to get a job, get into a relationship, and open ourselves up to far more opportunities if we’re conventionally attractive and if we don’t deviate too far from the standards of what is deemed normal. Not because it definitively proves anything about our actual job performance, our ability to love, our character, and who we are, but it proves something about our desire to fit in, to conform, and to do what we’re told. 

Rationally, it makes completely no sense to judge someone’s worth or someone’s relevance to our lives by their physical traits. But if you asked most people if they judge others in this way, very few would admit to doing so, perhaps out of self-delusion, perhaps out of an ever-growing progressive cultural battle against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Much like the notion of unconditional love, since I don’t believe it will ever be possible to uproot this subconscious bias (to an extent, I believe that it’s potentially even dehumanizing to do so), the best we can do is create a kind of cultural awareness of it; we must be constantly conscious of it in ourselves and in others in every interaction we share, especially those that determine the fate of others’ lives. 

It is perhaps the greatest unspoken injustice built into the very nature of our being. At the same time that we almost unanimously internalize the validity of the basic human right of equality of opportunity—when we ostensibly recognize the worth and significance of a human soul beyond what we can physically perceive—we’ve likely simultaneously formed thousands of ill-informed, irrational subconscious judgments for all the people that we’ve encountered thus far in life. For everyone that we didn’t take the time to get to know, we were probably wrong about all of them. 

This is all a long way to say—let’s not bastardize or banalize the notion of a soulmate; we need to recognize that this form of love isn’t something commonplace, something we perceive on a whim, or an emotion that just comes and goes. While I suppose the concept of human love stretching beyond the physical realm can exist, coming to any solid conclusions is nearly impossible, as it is likely beyond our comprehension of the metaphysical. When we’re so predisposed to weigh our perceptions of the physical world over the elusive, almost imperceptible concept of a soul, declaring that someone is our soulmate is to take an extreme leap of faith for ourselves, let alone for the other person involved.

Criticism

The act of criticizing someone undeniably carries a hefty negative connotation. 

Many of our preconceived notions of criticism entail personal feuds or grudges, scolding, chastising, humiliation, ridicule, and the shame, embarrassment, fear, or resentment that these actions inevitably precipitate. 

But why is this? If we think about it, offering constructive feedback to others is perhaps one of the greatest, most generous contributions we can make in someone else’s life. It is the act of sharing our wisdom, of connecting the lessons learned from our own experiences with those of others, of implicitly declaring our belief in the value of each of our individual perspectives of life. 

When we criticize with a sense of interpersonal resentment, when we seek to belittle or disparage others because of who they are or what they represent, what are we really doing? When the criticism becomes personal, when it becomes about teaching someone a lesson, when we predispose ourselves to hate someone—the very essence of someone’s existence and being—and not what they did, what is it that we’re trying to do? No one consciously and actively chose in their childhood precisely which personality traits and characteristics they would take and ultimately what type of person they would become. So are we leading a crusade against the circumstances of their upbringing? Their family members and friends? Their parents? The parents of their parents? Are we shaking our fist at God or the universe because they conspired to create such a flawed being capable of making such terrible mistakes? When we’re all a work in progress as imperfect, flawed, and defective beings, what grounds do we have to hold negative feelings against anyone without being hypocritical? 

And when we receive criticism, why are we so inclined to feel fear, shame, or often resentment in return, when it is precisely what we need to improve as human beings? Why do we not merely judge the criticism based on the validity of its points and not on the person saying it or how they are saying it? If it’s not useful based on our analysis, then we can simply let go and move on. And if it is useful, we have all the more to gain. 

There is nothing rational about assigning negative emotion to the giving or the receiving of criticism. So the question I wish to posit today is this: what is the ultimate social function of this interconnectedness between emotion and criticism? Do we need to be scolded, humiliated, ridiculed, or chastised—causing us to feel shame, fear, or resentment in the process—to learn the important lessons of life? Is there something about the inherent nature of heated conversations and deep-seated grudges, something about the shame and embarrassment we inflict that enables progress in and of itself, thus rationalizing a seemingly irrational, shortsighted, impulsive act? To what extent are these tendencies innately built into our psyche, and to what extent are they cultural? 

Should you scold and potentially hit your child to teach them a lesson after they tried playing with fire?

Should you hold a grudge against coworkers that don’t do their fair share of the work?

Should you be angry at your spouse if they cheated on you? 

Should you send angry tweets to a divisive public figure that propagates toxic ideologies that you vehemently disagree with? 

Should we publicly decry and humiliate child predators, war criminals, or human traffickers? 

There are no easy answers to these questions—no way to circumvent the need to understand the minute nuances of each and every significant or insignificant situation we will encounter in our day-to-day life. No—I don’t believe that it is feasible to fully depersonalize criticism; as humans, the constraints of our psychological design make it nearly impossible to extricate the feelings from both the criticism we give and receive alike. But what we can do is ask ourselves how to better criticize, how to evoke the emotions we want to evoke, and how to stimulate positive change while working within the confines of the human psyche. The first step is to empathize with the people who are on the receiving end of these forms of derisive criticism—to ask ourselves if the amount of suffering and mental distress we will inflict is worth the apparent value of teaching them a lesson. 

It is when we neglect to ask ourselves these questions—when we impulsively and indiscriminately criticize according to our own whim—that we risk degrading our relationships with one another in an already chaotic, uncertain world. We have the potential to devolve from productive civil discourse into senseless and angry banter, from teaching your child to be an upright, respectable human being into inflicting lifelong childhood trauma that will sap them of countless opportunities in life, from offering a helping hand to someone in need into pushing them to the brink of depression or suicide.

A Time for Everything

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

— Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

If there is a time for everything, how do we know that what we’re doing now is the right time to do it?

Most read this passage with a sense of reassurance, affirming their belief that they’ve chosen the ostensibly right thing to do, and that things will go into their favor because of their unwavering faith in God or an overarching optimism. 

Conversely, others read this passage with a deep fear that the actions that they’ve chosen to take and the desires of their heart are untimely; they carry an unabating apprehension that they are haplessly misaligned with the course of the universe or with the framework of God’s plan.

Time and time again, we prove over and over—whether in the minute facets of everyday life or the more significant events over the course of human history—that we are incapable of accurately predicting outcomes and determining the right course of action towards complex problems. 

We will never know the right time. 

But the best we can do is pretend we know. 

Because perhaps the ultimate fear of humanity is that there is no right or wrong. Perhaps this harrowing notion that we are infinitesimally insignificant specks of dust, suspended amidst an indifferent universe—without a narrative, without a story, without form nor function, without purpose nor agency, without reason nor rhyme—is far too much to bear. 

In our conceptions of a godless world and a godlike world alike, we are powerless. We cannot even begin to fathom the true nature of existence. We are all wrong when we read this passage and contemplate the notion of a right time or a wrong time. But, as humans, it seems as though we would much rather be wrong. We entertain ourselves by chasing these elusive definitions of right and wrong to beguile ourselves into believing that we are in control, that we—against all odds, fraught with uncertainty and imperfection, cursed by the defects and faults of our design—can bring shape to a shapeless world. Even if it means destroying ourselves in the process, we can, at the very least, be proud that we did something.

Regret

If we could’ve done things differently, then why didn’t we? 

In one question, this is the fundamental problem of regret. Regret is the manifestation of our implicit belief in the concept of free will. It can only exist if we delude ourselves into believing that we can somehow alter the course of the universe and the incomprehensible spontaneity of our circumstances; our minds insist that somehow we can, in the fleeting moment of making a mistake, whimsically change our train of thought and our course of action, as if touched by a muse. 

Many people regret not spending enough time with their loved ones before they passed away, devoting excessive time and energy to work and forgetting what actually matters in their lives, committing themselves to a relationship with the wrong type of person, or choosing the wrong career path. But life is complex, and the torrent of circumstances that barrage our lives is unfathomable. Life is far from being black and white, far from being the straightforward cause-and-effect that we’d like it to be. 

“I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning, nor favor to the skillful; for time and chance overtake them all.”

— Ecclesiastes 9:11

It is impossible to know what would’ve happened if you made the “right” decision instead of the “wrong” one in a given instance of regret. Just because we made a “good” decision doesn’t guarantee any “good” outcome. Our definitions of “right,” “wrong,” “good,” or “bad” are nonsensical in this context because we cannot even begin to fathom the potential butterfly effect it may precipitate—the cascading consequences of our decisions within these alternate universes. So if the past is past, and there’s nothing we can do to change it, why do we have such a powerful inclination to ruminate upon it, deluding ourselves in the process? 

Because in the end, it’s not about the event. It’s not about changing the past or thinking that things really might’ve turned out better. The act of regret is fundamentally about the person you choose to be. Our brains use regret as a psychological tool to derive insight from retrospect. We trick ourselves into this futile strife against the seemingly inalterable course of the universe because, for many of us, it has the power to convert the emotional energy of embarrassment, shame, anger, or frustration into a compelling and unwavering desire to make our circumstances just a little more favorable for us in this inhospitable world. It is to learn from trial and tribulation, from trauma and from tragedy, to cherish the loved ones in our lives while they’re still around, to ask ourselves the important questions of life before the luxuries of time and energy expire, to be mindful of the people we choose to walk alongside and the decisions that we make. 

Choose to live a life with regret, or choose to live life without it. In the grand scheme of things, I would argue that it doesn’t matter. The necessity of this emotional rumination ultimately depends on the individual, and it will come intuitively to you. What does matter is that we learn from our mistakes. What matters is that we can look back upon the past with the momentum of forward motion, as a means to propel ourselves forward in this world, day by day becoming more of a person we can be proud to be. But the act of rumination in the absence of forward motion—as a means of self-pity, as a meaningless diversion from the work we need to do, as an excuse to hide or to give up—is nothing but another trap and another pitfall that too many of us fall into.

Excessive Study

The Bible has been translated into over one thousand languages, and in English alone, there are around fifty different versions. While we can have extreme confidence in the translators to faithfully replicate the content, spirit, and energy of a given text, we all understand that doing so is never completely possible. We can all acknowledge this inexorable fundamental shortcoming of translation—just how much nuance is lost and how much risk for misunderstanding there is when we switch from one language to another.

Here’s a prime example of this problem with one of the most well-known verses in the Bible. According to the New International Version (NIV), the most popular translation of the Bible, Matthew 5:5 reads:

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”

In other versions of the Bible, the word “meek” is replaced by “humble,” or “gentle”; these words seem to insinuate weakness, submissiveness, self deprecation, a willingness to comply and to yield, and timidity and passivity. The original Greek word however, embodies an entirely different spirit than any of these words. πραεῖς (transliterated as praus) is more accurately conveyed through the idea of a tamed wild animal that has quelled its instinctive rage, or of trained soldiers that are determined to keep their swords sheathed. This word speaks of beings that have learned to properly moderate their innate temperament to conceive a proper balance of power and reservation. This notion of praus connotes a vastly more nuanced story than “meek,” “humble,” or “gentle'' do; being dangerous, having the capacity to destroy and to create chaos, but choosing not to, is incredibly different than merely standing around passively in the face of destruction and distancing ourselves from the chaos. 

And the daunting notion is that this is likely only one of thousands of questionable translations. On top of this, there is the persistent age-old controversy of Biblical canon—the study of the origins of each of the stories, the aspects of its authorship, and what can be reliably, (however they choose to define reliably) considered as part of what we call the Bible. When the hodgepodge of different sects of Christianity arbitrarily add and subtract content from the Bible to fit into its particular perspective of truth, and when there is a virtually infinite amount of linguistic interpretations of it, it can seem that the ostensibly uniform, concrete truths of the Bible are, in reality, incredibly malleable, subjective, and contextual.

Inevitably, this led us to the conclusion that we need to attempt to solidify that aforementioned malleability of meaning, to objectify the subjectivity, and to deconstruct the contexts by which the Bible evokes truth. This is where theology comes in. Theologians and apologists dedicate their lives to debate and reconcile the apparent truths of the Bible with the other seemingly apparent truths we derive from science or logical reasoning—questions surrounding evolutionary theory, how and when the universe was born, why suffering and evil exists if there’s a benevolent God, the purpose of heaven or hell, or the Bible’s stance on homosexuality or transgenderism. 

The very existence of theology can seem to allude to the notion that the Bible is not the only required mode of study for the Christian. After all, we need to reconcile the two aforementioned problems of translation and compilation. So not only must one read the Bible itself, but, to understand its truth, one must also study theological texts. If we begin with the premise that the purpose of theology is to decompose the truth laid out in the Bible, then we can conclude that the truth of the Bible is in need of decomposition. This then implies that any Christian—as a matter of fact, any truth-seeker—should be compelled to study theology, a trusted field of study to demystify all the axioms and principles of the Bible that would otherwise be undermined by all its mistranslation, questionable compilation, and subjective interpretive bias. And if one might argue that theology is optional—that it is a side project or diversion of sorts—and is ultimately not required to be a Christian, they have undermined the credibility of this entire field of study, since it’s based entirely on a text that seeks to be applicable to every human being.

So if there are innumerable and unreliable translations of the Bible, if there are hundreds if not thousands of versions of Biblical canon, and if there is an infinite number of theological interpretations  by which we can make sense of it, how can we even begin to speak with any degree of confidence that the interpretation we’ve chosen is the right one? How can we even begin to claim there is this one absolute truth? 

Far too many of us extract these axioms and entertain the principles of the Bible as if they are apparent, undeniable, concrete truths. If you ask a devout Christian whether or not God exists, you will get a resounding yes. If you ask them if the version of the Bible they are reading is faithful to God’s design of the original text, you will get a resounding yes. If you ask them if they are sure they are living a Christian life to the best of their ability, you will get a resounding yes. To many devoted believers, anything less than a resounding yes, anything that resembles doubt and uncertainty—to say “I’m not sure,” “maybe,” “it could be”—puts into question our dedication and faith in God. 

The fact of the matter is, however, that none of us know anything. 

King Solomon, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, exhorts us to remember this:

Cast your bread on the surface of the waters, for you will find it after many days. Divide your portion to seven, or even to eight, for you do not know what misfortune may occur on the earth. If the clouds are full, they pour out rain on the earth; and whether a tree falls toward the south or toward the north, wherever the tree falls, there it lies. One who watches the wind will not sow and one who looks at the clouds will not harvest. Just as you do not know the path of the wind, and how bones are formed in the womb of the pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes everything.

— Ecclesiastes 11:1-5

In the same way that we don't know God is real with any degree of certainty nor do we possess any modicum of reliable evidence, we don't know the degree to which a particular version of the Bible is correctly translated or compiled, or if a theological argument is sound. But far too many Christians think they have to know. 

We don’t have to know. We have to have faith. 

Faith—that the words of the Bible we’re reading have been translated in such a way that is as close to the essence of truth as possible.

Faith—that whoever compiled the version of the Bible you’re reading is faithful to God’s word. 

Faith—that your worldview and perspective of the world is one in line with God’s will. 

Faith—that while the essence of truth is elusive and the reality of our existence is fraught with uncertainty, we can still live a life we’re proud to live, to write a story for ourselves that we’re proud to write. 

If we decide that particular theological interpretation or a particular version of the Bible we’ve been given isn’t helping us serve ourselves and the people around us, there’s an easy solution—just use a different one; we don't have to rely on one version nor does it matter the origins of its compilation or its methods of translation. If the story we tell ourselves ceases to make us happy, we should tell ourselves a different story. Whichever version that resonates with us the most—whichever one that compels us to believe that it reflects our version of truth most closely—is the best one for us. In the end, what matters in practice is that we have faith.

Solomon ends the final chapter of Ecclesiastes by saying, 

In addition to being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge; and he pondered, searched out, and arranged many proverbs. The Preacher sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly.

The words of the wise are like goads, and masters of these collections are like driven nails; they are given by one Shepherd. But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive study is wearying to the body.

The conclusion, when everything has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil."

The reason why Solomon warns us that “excessive study is wearying to the body” is because he recognizes the danger and futility of this perpetual epistemological debate. We toil away at this confounding, elusive, needlessly abstracted and endlessly complex concept of what it means to know, when we neither can know nor need to know in the first place. In the grand scheme of things, none of all this matters. What actually draws us to these beliefs in the first place is love, is belief in values like patience, perseverance, honesty, empathy, a commitment to humanity and one another to live out our best lives. Everything in between—all the epistemological minutiae, all the semantics and logical gymnastics, all the nuances lost in translation—is a side thought, not the heart of what we're doing. If we get some parts of it wrong, then so be it. If there’s anything that God has called us to do, and if there’s anything the Bible is about, it isn’t about being pedantic and devoting your life to the hapless pursuit of an absolute truth. Because none of us truly know anything. 

Unconditional Love

Love can only make sense contextually. When there are seemingly infinite ways that it’s represented, we consign love—one of the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human—to a delicate game of presentation and interpretation. We do not accept love fairly, nor as it is. We do not give away love fairly, nor as it is. We perform all manner of mental calculus to determine what type of love we give out, what type of love we receive, if someone is worthy of our love, and if someone is capable of loving us back. 

What is the premise of our relationship with this person? A stranger? An acquaintance? A classmate? A coworker? A teacher? A family member? A friend of a friend? A potential romantic partner? What kind of person do they seem like? How do they dress? How do they carry themselves? Am I proud or ashamed to be around this person? How much time do we spend with this person? How often do we spend time? How do we spend that time? What do we have to gain from this other person? How do they make us feel? What form of love do we express? Do we love with emotional distance and reverence? Or do we love with intimacy and connection? What constitutes the nature of these interactions? A sporadic text exchange every three months? Playful joking and lively conversations? The silent comfort of one another’s presence?

Burdened by the weight of circumstances, tainted by subconscious desire, and perverted by conscious rationalization, it can seem as if our love for one another is selfishly selective, lined with ulterior motives, and temperamental—far from anything we might define as unconditional.

In some way it is discouraging, but perhaps we just have to recognize that our yearning for a pure, unconditional love is all a delusion. Perhaps this kind of love is reserved for the divine and the incomprehensible. Perhaps, as mere humans, we cannot even begin to fully comprehend a concept of love in a vacuum, of a completely pure love unchained by the sins of human consciousness, of a love infinitely. After all, if we could momentarily perceive just a modicum of the profundity of Jesus’ love for humanity—if all at once, we caught a glimpse of all the sacrifice and emotional burden, all the tears shed and every palpitation of the heart, every agonizing moment when he perished on the cross, the boundless thoughtfulness and concern for each and every one of us—I’m fully convinced there would not be a single nonbeliever on Earth thereafter. 

But if humanity was touched by such a divine truth, truly converted by the potency of an irrefutable unconditional love, the entire narrative begins to fall apart. There would be no more stories to tell. There would exist no such impetus for us to discover, to learn, to understand, and to overcome if we already were given the answer. Indeed, love may only make sense contextually, but, perhaps, that is the point of it all. Perhaps the essence of human love is constituted by—not abstracted from—the social dynamics that surround the expression and interpretation of it. The very notion of love between human beings is fundamentally about an internalization of our shared journeys; it is about each and every step along the way, the context by which we can familiarize ourselves with one another by disentangling the mystery of human identity—the webs of our foibles and idiosyncrasies, the abyssal caverns of our past trauma and present fear, the vast, seemingly limitless expanse of our hopes and dreams, and the confounding space of everything in between. We can only love or be loved if we have a story to tell—if we can recall those moments, in spite of the fleeting nature and whim of our circumstances, of lamentation and celebration, of ambivalence and determination, of regret and reminiscence, of unity and discordance, of indignation and justice, of shame and confidence, of anger and forgiveness, of conflict and resolution, of frustration and catharsis, of life and death. 

Unlike Jesus, we do not have infinite time and energy; our commitment to one another is finite and thus our capacity to form the deep emotional attachment to engender true love is finite. Yet some still attempt to emulate this unconditional love. While I wouldn’t necessarily define it as a futile endeavor, because it can bring about positive change in the world, I would assert that it’s a grave misjudgment of our capabilities as human beings. No one can claim to love literally everyone and everything equally, with just the right amount of thought, consideration, concern, and degree of interaction to constitute a perfect relationship between two entities. It’s simply not in congruence with how our brains are wired and certainly unfeasible while fighting the perpetual uphill battle against time, space, and ourselves. We have to recognize that divine love and human love are completely disparate concepts, and that there’s nothing wrong with this distinction. 

This is not to say that there is no value in the belief in a divine form of love; in fact, quite the opposite. It seems to me that those more inclined to apply this concept of unconditional love to strangers already have an implicit understanding of this compulsion to write stories; it’s not that there is already a story before interaction, but they are able to connect and extend the stories of a perfect divine love or of those shared with existing friends or family, conjoining the elements of these stories with the desire to create new stories. And this desire is not insignificant; it has proven itself to be one of the most powerful forces of change in our world. Despite the compelling nature of these stories, we have to remember that extending the story of love does not mean that it replicates it, and that it might look nothing like we idealize it to be in our minds. 

We must avoid the trap of confusing the intimate love we share with our loved ones with the kind of blind compassion, generosity, or admiration one would share with strangers, and covering it with the blanket term of unconditional love, when it isn’t in any way. It could be that we could extricate the conditions and the context from love to produce something we might define as unconditional love, but this version of love is so far-fetched from our standard mode of fostering intimacy and affection with our close friends or family. Perhaps, due to the constraints of the human psyche, to extend this kind of intimate love unconditionally, in a manner that defiantly supersedes context and narrative, is nearly impossible to do with consistency and universality, so much so that we might avoid assigning it at all to any form of human action. 

It may be that all that is left for us to do is present and interpret. It may be that the only way we can inch ever closer to this concept of unconditional love is to practice conditional love—to hone our ability to discern context, circumstance, need, and desire imbued in the acts of love we give and receive. In the end—for everyone that will be a part of our lives, for all the reasons that brought us together in this very time and place, for all that we seek to derive from this fateful existence—these will be the stories that we write, and the journeys that we will take. 

For there is no story without conditions, 

no journey worth taking without a story, 

and no love without a journey.

Public Interest

In 1950s and 1960s America, television had transformed from a fledgling industry into one of the most significant cultural forces in the 20th century, and as it began to prioritize airing lowbrow, mindless, and crass entertainment to maximize viewership, it inevitably garnered significant criticism from those concerned with its long term impact on the culture. In 1961, in response to these concerns, Newton Minow, former chairman of the FCC, broadcasted his speech “Television and the Public Interest.”

Here is a notable excerpt from that speech:

“Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.

Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.”

As Seth Godin would argue, culture is not meant to serve capitalism; capitalism is meant to serve culture. But television was far from the only significant industry that would flip this dynamic to service the shortsighted, selfish, and profligate ambitions of corporate America. As time would tell, other core aspects of American life would degenerate into vast wastelands alongside television.

The restaurant and fast food industry did not serve the public interest. They have worked to surround us with cheap, available, and addictive products that were designed for the very purpose of exploiting our desire for convenience while simultaneously preying on our impulses for fatty, sugary, and processed food. It is certainly no mystery how obesity—and all its related health conditions and diseases—ended up ravaging this country for decades.

The pornographic and adult entertainment industry did not serve the public interest. They have no issue perpetuating the abuse and exploitation of young women. They have no issue propagating media that significantly contributes to anxiety, isolation, and depression among young men. They have no issue warping our perceptions on sex and relationships by surrounding us with cheap, instant gratification that desensitizes us. And with the advent of the internet, this industry has never been more prolific, and thus never more pernicious. 

The tobacco industry, the alcohol industry, and Big Tech did not serve the public interest. They will not hesitate to addict us to our death if it means making the extra dime. They feed on our frenzied obsession to stay glued to our devices to stay up to date on what everyone else is doing, our compulsion to reach for the box of cigarettes on our work break, and our yearning to go to the bar when we want to vent or unwind. We are compelled by these sensations to take our minds away from the chaos of reality and numb our seemingly endless plight. And as mental health as a whole continues to deteriorate in our societies, more and more individuals will fall victim to these devices to merely cope with life.

But the severity of these addictions are as much of a cultural phenomenon as they are a neurobiological one. The restaurant and fast food industry couldn’t have survived without shifting our perceptions of what types of foods and what types of diets are acceptable or normal. The pornographic industry couldn’t have survived without the kind of cultural apathy and negligence to directly confront and teach what constitutes positive relationships and a healthy love and sex life. The alcohol, tobacco, and technology conglomerates can not survive without our continued refusal to educate our populace on healthy coping strategies for the hardships of their life—the incredibly stress and anxiety-inducing social structures that we ourselves perpetuate. When this is all that we’ve known for generations, we inevitably become inured to these ways of life, so much so that it becomes normal, justified, and upheld by generations that don’t know that there’s anything better. 

Because we live in a society that accommodates entities with the sole intent of preying on our impulses and primal desires, our modern life is characterized by a fight against ourselves. We are forced to learn to starve our dopaminergic habits because, left unbridled, they will inexorably rot our brain. Self-restraint—this process of building the mental fortitude to resist temptation and instant gratification in pursuit of a better life—is increasingly seen as a virtue, in fact, a necessity, to triumph over the malignant forces in our modern capitalistic world. As someone who was fortunate enough to break free of their vices, it’s easy to claim that self-restraint is the answer to our plight. It’s easy to lecture others and blame them for being mentally weak and hedonistic. 

But this is selfish. When the majority of our fellow citizens have already succumbed to their vices, when they have no one beside them to teach them those lessons of self-restraint and no alternative but to be enticed by the instant gratification that envelops them, things can begin to fall apart. Temptation and addiction will always afflict our society, and self-restraint and vigilance when it comes to our sensual pleasures is something that we always have to put into practice. But blaming others and putting ourselves on a moral pedestal is as detrimental to our society as these destructive industries. 

We can only serve the public interest when, as a nation, we collectively recognize the aspects of our culture that sustain the industries that blatantly capitalize on human weakness for their selfish gain. If we put our minds and our hearts to it, we can build a life for our future generations where the easiest, most available solutions to our hunger, our desire for love or sex, or our need to cope with stress aren’t absolutely horrible for our physical and mental health.