Sometimes I think we just go through life reminding ourselves of the same shit over and over again. Call your mom. Eat your veggies. Don’t steal. But our brains and souls are so scattered, we need to be reminded of the same shit over and over again.
And how things resonate with us, when and how our brains choose to “click” with whatever clichés, seems to happen quite randomly, like only really understanding “life is short” after a funeral, or knowing you shouldn’t have lied only when your ass is spotlighted on a Jumbotron at a concert.
And so we have developed rituals and books and poems and songs and the Bible to tell us the same shit over and over again. We tell ourselves variations of the same shit using all kinds of stories and fables and analogies. We keep repeating them so these clichés might hit us at moments in our lives when the lessons hit hard enough, when we might actually listen.
At the same time, we know very little about a lot of things!
We know very little about the bottom of our oceans. We know very little about the effects of artificial sweeteners. We know depressingly little about why we fight so hard and so fiercely about how to make America great again. We know almost nothing about how to talk to strangers, how doomscrolling works, or how long the sun will last.
And perhaps the most frustrating thing is, we think we know way more than we actually do, and we think we don’t know things we actually ought to know and already know. We have got everyone else’s life mapped out: how they should live, spend, raise their kids. But when it comes to our own lives, say, our health, we shrug and say “it’s complicated,” even though it isn’t: put on shoes and go outside.
So, as Derek Sivers said, “If information was all we needed, we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs.” Which makes this whole rant just another story, another analogy, another way of saying the same shit I already know …
and will almost certainly forget again by next week.
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