A permeating vision of an oasis both troubles and soothes my mind.
The books Dune and The Alchemist have been some of the most potent stories I’ve come across. The desert aesthetic has stuck with me along with the the over-arching metaphors. In Frank Herbert’s, Dune, the collective generational vision of a “green paradise” creates a coherent community amidst a hostile desert environment. In Paulo Coehlo’s, The Alchemist, the oasis is where Santiago learns alchemy, takes refuge from a war and meets his lover.
This leads me to wonder, what are the oases of the modern world? To understand the Oasis we must first understand the Desert.
Let’s paint a picture.
A desert is defined as a place of little precipitation. Synonyms include; barren, wasteland, arid, infertile.
Society, in its crawl of modernity, is a desert. What is the water which this landscape is missing? Where might we look to know such a thing? What are the proxies for our society?
I believe the answers we are looking for can be found using the measuring stick of health and well-being. For a few hours I considered the life’s work it would take to fully explain this concept and realized I was in far over my head. That’s when I found.. how should I say it… one of the most powerful works of our time. I found John Verkaeke’s 50 part, 50 hour series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. “Thank goodness”, I thought, “that someone much smarter than me already did it”. The depth he goes into is brutally scientific and honest. It’s boring and hilarious. It’s a culmination of his life’s work as cognitive scientist. And it’s gone viral. Another way to tell what our culture is yearning for is by what gets attention on the internet. The first lecture has over 680k views and 1,200 comments. For a society with an average attention span of about 8 seconds, that is an astounding amount of people who were drawn to listen to a 1 hour scientific lecture.
Here’s the series:
What he clearly demonstrates is the mental health crisis that we are in. In response to this crisis, more people than ever are gravitating towards the search for “meaning”. This is shown in many different ways, one of which Vervaeke says can be seen in most any bookstore where you’ll find extensive sections on mindfulness, spirituality and ancient philosophies. Meaning is the rain which does not fall upon the desert landscape that is modern life. We thirst for it.
Let us first understand a critical detail about the way humans find meaning. Through pattern recognition and story generating, we are able to learn from the past and help predict the future. Our hardware is designed to track patterns and make stories. This both hinders and helps us as a species. We will zoom in on these specific brushstrokes of our painting soon.
To put this in perspective I began asking a few questions to try and pinpoint where I have personally encountered the “deserted landscape”.
I came up with a few questions to start:
Where do I sense there is something missing?
What stories am I told/telling myself that feel incomplete?
Where do I feel cheated in what culture offers me/us?
The first thing that came to mind is recalling the stories I’ve been offered about death. There seem to have been 2 options I could choose from growing up. Neither of which I found to be very helpful.
The first story came via modern christianity. I understood it as, for reasons you will soon see, “be a good boy and go to heaven for eternity or else…”. Sound familiar? Dramatic? I was shown a short video, probably around the age of 13 at a christian youth group which left such a sticky residue in my psyche. I remember sitting in a metal folding chair next to my friends. The lights were turned off and the following video played to a silent group of us kids on a projector screen.
Wooooooooo. That was terrifying and strange. I also remember wanting to giggle and thinking to myself, “Bullshit”.
Not necessarily because he’s wrong. I don’t know! But I also don’t think he knows. I felt put off because I could tell the underlying emotions of the message were fear and guilt. Something I find fascinating is that even as a young boy I yearned for a story about death that wasn’t more true, just more meaningful and useful.
Apparently Carl Jung agreed, “If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude”.
The other option, which is more difficult to find the exact roots of, was the story that death is the end. One day - boom, lights out, done. That story didn’t feel particularly helpful to my pre-teen existentialism either. It too, felt incomplete.
Luckily, in the aftermath of collapsing stories, I was pointed toward an author by the name of Robert Anton Wilson. More-so, towards his books Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger in which he shared an important idea. He writes, “The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself.” Model agnosticism is an idea which has helped me understand that stories are just stories. Something us humans need to help organize the world, predict the future, and make it make sense. This thinking can be a slippery precursor to nihilism*; the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. (*)
And luckily again (is it still luck? ;), this was followed by an introduction to model pragmatism. Which, without getting too lost in these philosophical weeds, I’ve come to understand as an experimental mindset. It says, “Yeah, maybe we don’t and can’t know what’s true. Maybe we are just tiny humans in a random and meaningless universe. So we might as well use the tools we have (our nervous systems) to find what stories work best for our goals”. Pragmatism is defined as “an approach that assesses the truth or meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.”
In other words, what do I find through trying it to be helpful in becoming a healthy human part of a healthy whole? Why not live the story that best succeeds on first principles?
Semi side note: I’m proposing that the first principles we might want to agree on societally and globally (what’s the difference anyway?) can be measured in terms of the health and well-being of individuals and the whole.
The stories of our culture are losing their vitality. The mental health crisis is the writing on the wall. It’s time for new stories. So maybe all stories are made up to make meaning, but not all stories are created equal. It’s clear that some stories (the ones that do provide a sense of meaning) lead to better health.
I know we’re in pretty deep now. Let’s try to bring this back to the ground. A lot of what I’ve discussed here could be more thorough and precise and is offered only as background knowledge. At the forefront is always our personal experience. I would not spend the time here if these ideas were just ideas to me. When I first encountered these concepts bells started going off internally. My own struggles brought me to listen deeper and discover a shared sense of struggle. Depression, soul-sickness, and “undiagnosed home-sickness” as Boyd Varty calls it, are the result of a deserted landscape thirsty for meaning.
This can be a dark place to look for too long, but I do think it’s helpful to understand the gravity of the situation. Part 2 will focus on personal accounts of playing with model pragmatism to see which stories make it rain? There we find our modern oases. And then we can begin to wonder how we move forward from there?
This feels like one of the more real things I’ve shared publicly. It is part of my most audacious vision of the future. I hope these words will be an echo of understanding and a point of connection. Thank you for walking through the desert with me.
Luke
My brother, you have gifts of philosophy and articulation. They are needed, as moisture in the desert. Thank you for sharing.