Try knowing less
Is it necessary to understand everything?
Blasted on the best LSD I’ve ever had, sitting on a log bench and looking at the river behind my pals’ cabin, my mind started trying to make constructions from what I was seeing. Began digesting my witnessing of the river into insight and inspiration. Movement, impermanence, time, soft power, surrender, the Dao. Every thought that spun up felt so feeble. Then I’d look back to the river and it’d all be there. Self-evident in all those qualities and more. More than my little fried brain could ever box in was right there roaring in front of me and just being. I stopped thinking. The river spoke for himself and I listened and believed him. For a moment I tried to talk about it all, and I couldn’t form even the essential ingredients of words. I was trying to get the river himself to flow out of my mouth.
In concentrative meditation styles, we focus our attention on something specific. Most people focus on the breath. Three days in on a backcountry trek in 2023 I decided to focus my attention on the Big Sur River. I had just bathed for the first time in two days in one of her twinkling pools alongside eleven other trekkers and meditators, all naked as apes, primally elated by simple cold clean water. In the ensuing fifteen minute meditation, the self-evidence of the river’s spirit and beinghood revealed itself to me. Just because I listened. And watched. Removed myself from center stage. My mind would drift, and I’d tell myself; “be quiet, River is speaking”. I listened without interpreting and in that River language was wisdom that human thought can’t contain. I glimpsed it. Since then I find it almost pointless to talk about what a river means to me. A stone, a bird, or almost anything else. They are already saying it. I want to listen.
The enduring shifts from those pilgrimages are many. The one I feel most daily is that I don’t need to form detailed thought structures about most things. I am a better friend to the humans, dogs, trees, birds, and stones in my life when I quiet down and open myself to what they are saying and being. I feel more at ease. I am less frustrated less often by believing anything should be different from how it is, or that I have some unique authority about what’s what because of the species I was born into.
Have you ever been talking to a less-online friend, and said some sequence of words that was incomprehensible to them because you were working from a hyper developed online dictionary with ten layers of reference? And felt their gaze with a combination of embarrassment about feeling out of touch and a tinge of “maybe my friend has schizophrenia”?
On Seattle’s First Thursday Art Walk between one gallery and another I was walking with some friends and through some sequence of topics I ended up saying:
“Maybe the pizzagate guys were right and there is a pedo cabal and Demna’s in on it. Didn’t they have like pictures of baphomet in a lookbook one time?”
I realized of the three people I was with, nobody really knew what I was talking about.
I felt like a fucking alien, so I’ve been reflecting on that. I don’t care about Balenciaga. I don’t care about the culture war. Why did I tap “read more” on those threads? Why do I know anything about any of this shit? Knowing more is not making me smarter anymore. We are all basically aiming a mind melting death ray at our faces for three to six hours per day.
To a certain extent, why do I need to know more about what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing? We understand by now that the overwhelm is part of the strategy. I understand that they are going to try to destroy and restrict everything that gives people liberty and enforces boundaries on the wealthy and powerful. I have actually always known that powerful people were doing that and have built my life and beliefs accordingly. Constant drip fed updates of New Bad Thing shouldn’t really have a lot of bearing on me.
This is not an “online bad” screed. I like the internet. Especially since hanging out on Substack. Redressing the way I process information online has been helpful too. I don’t need to have an opinion about anything. Sometimes I open the comment field to Do a Discourse and I just pause and close it. The more I do that, the more I can refocus on finding things that engage parts of myself that I actually value. And there’s a lot. This isn’t a pitch for tuning out entirely on some privileged sidelines shit either. Through my life with political and direct action, it has mattered very little who was in the White House when it comes to the brass tacks of organizing with the people around you to improve your lot. I want us all to be fed because I want us all to be fed. You don’t need theory for that.
Maybe because I grew up punk and only got into reading Marx and shit way later, I am like 95% praxis, 5% theory. Theory kind of drives me nuts, especially online where it’s too easy to pull out the worst components of any thought and make those the center of an argument. Every concept is flawed, okay? I am a communist and communism mostly sucks. I don’t want to talk about it. Will you raid the Cabela’s in the hectic days of the early collapse with me or not?
I was chatting with
in his comments about “The Meaning Crisis” the other day, and ended up basically saying what I came here to say, so I’ll just post that convo below. If you don’t know what “The Meaning Crisis” is - Good. Don’t look it up. It doesn’t matter.
Very little of this stuff actually matters if you know who you are and what you’re trying to do. Remember millions of people are out there achieving shit and having fun and finding meaning in their lives without knowing anything about Zizek, Red Scare, Liver King, Newsom’s Podcast, brain rot, gamergate, accelerationism, Chloe21e8, and techno optimism. If you know what every one of those things are, I beg you - log off. Touch grass.
Even “touch Grass” itself is an online thing. You have to be online enough to know that saying “touch grass” is a way of saying “I think you have been looking at the internet too much and you should try doing something else”.
I turned 38 today and I am finding it liberating and generative to just let go of understanding everything. To decenter myself as the first-person narrator of an existence bubble. Be quiet. River is speaking.