Tyler Cowen, in Stubborn Attachments: grabbing Earthly questions. Earthly, as in, concerning the rocks beneath our minds, the ground pre-existing all feelings. What are we doing here, as a group of people, with beliefs about these rocks, and about each other? And what am I doing here, waking up today, and tomorrow, and next year, and after I’m 40?
The story that is our answer, makes our sense of ourselves, our happiness. Usually experienced as a pre-loaded program, never thought through in the mind’s words, known as through-and-through feelings. The story is built of the same activities and goals, pleasures and pains, that it has for a century. You’ve been told this is the best anyone has ever lived, but you’re as tired as your grandfather would be if he was told his life was going to be the same for another 80 years.
On your fake tile kitchen floor, looking at some sunny hill and tree leaves outside your second story window, stressing about whether you have time to get your oil changed before getting to the office. You don’t need another room, a heated toilet seat, a new car. What you really need is something else to do with your day. Not because you think, “getting up at a time everyone else agrees on and going to the office is what grandpa did,” and feel you need to one-up him. But because, you’re a human mind, grown to chase the seasons and delight at seeing a herd over a new bluff, or a strange waterfall. And freeways, bland music, signage in the world or on our phones that hack your fruit-sensing brain’s attentiveness to color; smooth surfaces, the gentle rush of the air conditioner, crispy skin and hot sauce; membership beneath stylized logos that make you appear bright and trustworthy to strangers; will never feel good in the way that new things feel good, will never be the exciting arrivals your brain craves. Only the relief from terror and shame at doing wrong, of leaving the tribe.
Our sense of taste, touch, and sight are overstimulated, brain-frozen. Mental inventions: work, bosses, time itself, have taken us as far as they can. We can invent so much more.
We can quiet, and notice ourselves; we can see others, and instead of marking, we can ask, and think, and know. With all of the scenes and tools of the world, we can sit, and let the sharp folded figures raise up and take deliberate steps from the warm, rising glow of our minds, and be shared. We can rest in awe of the strange, twisted, filling realness in everyone around us, that’s been there the whole time, behind the screen of America, the beautiful.