đź’‹ Pinecones & Satellites: The Weight of Knowing (vol. 3)
The burden of consciousness — intelligence, certainty, sorrow, and relief.
Essays in this edition:
- Certainty Epidemic
- Would You Rather Be Happier or Smarter?
- The Quiet Grace of Nothing Terrible Happening Today
i.
Certainty Epidemic
If these strange last few decades have given us anything, it's certainty. A lot of people are certain about a lot things that I'm pretty certain they certainly know very little about.
In in the early days of the internet, the vision was to build a more equitable, globally-connected world. Instead, we got the diametric opposite. The internet we got put everyone on a team, gave every team a worldview, and fostered a level of certainty about that worldview that those people and those teams cling to and defend irrespective and irregardless of actual facts and real truth.
I call it the certainty epidemic. It's everywhere you look. It doesn't matter which flag they wave. Wokeistan. MAGAistan. Gaza. Ukraine. Keto. CrossFit. Bitcoin. People don't just believe, they know. And they know because their team knows. And they somehow think that if their team knows, the rest of the world must be clueless.
Certainty, in its rare, measured form, can be healthy. But what we’ve got isn’t certainty. It’s a cheap, Costco-sized contagion of unearned certainty. The conviction that your diet will singlehandedly save civilization. That your candidate is a saint or savior. That your airtight “version of history” that somehow forgot half the facts is the only version that ever happened.
The joke, of course, is that the more certain people sound, the less they usually know. Real experts and scholars, the people who actually know things, never sound certain. They're always the ones hedging, sweating the details, nitpicking in the margins of error. The certain ones, they don't hedge, sweat, or nitpick. They just know, and naturally, they're certain you don't.
Somehow, in our infinite wisdom, we've decided that doubt is weakness and certainty is a performance drug. And like any good junkies, the more we dose ourselves, the further we drift from the messy, complicated, gray-toned reality in front of us.
Knowing things can be admirable. Pretending to know things is lethal. And if truth dies of neglect, good luck explaining that with a straight face.
ii.
Would You Rather Be Happier or Smarter?
On a recent episode of Josh Szeps's Uncomfortable Conversations, he asked Tyler Cowen a deceptively simple question: would you rather be happier, or smarter?
Cowen hesitated, then said he'd rather "know things, even if it made him sad." Szeps pushed back and he was right to. Was Cowan mixing up sadness with depression? Sadness points to something very real that says you cared, you lost, you loved. Depression, however, is something else entirely.
I know. I've been inside the belly of that beast. That ruthlessly, sickeningly horrific crucible. And, I can tell you that depression isn't mere sorrow or sadness. Depression is the erasure of all texture. It is the flattening out of life so intense that you can't even feel sad in a way that makes sense. Depression is unendurable in a way "sadness" never is.
Listening in, I realized that Szeps and Cowan weren’t just circling happiness and intelligence. They were circling language itself. What do we really mean when we say “happy”? Or “smart”? And what about “intelligence”? Is it knowing? Understanding? Wisdom? As their words kept slipping, the whole exchange began to blur.
It struck me that maybe “Would you rather be happier or smarter?” wasn’t the right question after all. The better, sharper, more dangerous versions, I think, would be: “Would you rather know more, or love more?” “Would you rather see more clearly, or feel more deeply?”
iii.
The Quiet Grace of Nothing Terrible Happening Today
A little later in that same interview, Szeps asks Cowan an equally challenging question: "If your teenage self could see your life now, would you take it as-is or roll the dice for another shot?
Cowan didn't talk about his books or his career. He talked about luck. He said he'd take his life again, because he'd been spared the worst: no devastating accidents, no catastrophic injuries, no terminal illnesses. In other words, his happiness was defined less by what he gained than by what never struck.
And I can't stop thinking about that. Maybe the real measure of a life isn't how much joy we collect, but how much disaster passes us by en route to ruining someone else's life. Maybe what we call "happiness" is just the simple grace of nothing terrible happening today.