Today's professional meme means pretending invulnerability.
An AI-Native post-human powered by edge-of-chaos existential angst. Or maybe just avoidant.
• 3 minute read
Meanwhile René Descartes - the Godfather of Modern Philosophy - thought otherwise, which is important, not just professionally, but personally.
“It is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
Descartes' quote might make it sound like a voluntary, clinical intellectual exercise.
The messy truth of radical doubt…
It's barely a choice and much more likely to be an conflation of circumstances.
In the last few years I've increasingly found myself doubting all things and I will attest to it being as overwhelming as it is profound.
Where what is asked of us and who we are is in such dissonance and for long enough, that foundations that previously felt robust and reinforced are rocked and razed.
Like a vulnerable tower that "pancakes" during a major earthquake.
Your foundations suddenly feel viscous, you lose your sense of place, you question the picture from connections you confidently made between things, you lose connection to your friends, you lose your sense of conviction.
As the pace of change reaches dizzying pace, you might even question your sanity, contemplating whether other's think you are now "weird(er)."
Descartes himself described the feeling as though he had suddenly fallen into deep water without touchable bottom (I think that's called Thalassophobia).
It is a deeply isolating space and yet in truth you have probably lost nothing materially. Nothing but your inner orientation, although that feels as real and visceral as anything physical. Or to quote John Milton -
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
What is the end game of this process? I see it as a kind of transformation; a pupation.
The body doesn't destroy itself, it deconstructs itself, creatively.
Does a fabulous butterfly crawl out of the discarded pupa? Maybe, but that's missing the point.
In reality, what crawls out of the pupa is the same old caterpillar. It's the same old Oliver.
But a caterpillar that's fine with itself. I'm not quite there yet.
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters”
Or a caterpillar is once again a caterpillar.