the view from nowhere
I used to think that people who found comfort in meaning were just a little weaker than me. Not in a cruel way… or maybe in a little bit of a cruel way. The idea that everything happens for a reason, that your life is unfolding along some pre-written line, that your losses were always going to be your losses and your pain was always in service of something—I saw all of that as a kind of flinching. Just a deal people make with themselves because the alternative is too cold to stand in.
The alternative, as I understood it, was that nothing is planned. Nothing is building toward anything. The universe is not holding me. And I thought that people who couldn’t accept that were just people who needed a story badly enough that they stopped asking whether it was true. I was pretty pleased with myself about this.
What I actually believe, and have believed for a long time, is a pretty common interpretation of quantum mechanics: that whenever something happens at the quantum level that could go multiple ways, it doesn’t pick one. The universe branches. Every version plays out somewhere. There are versions of me who said the thing I didn’t say, chose a different school, stayed for longer, left earlier, made the 11pm call, never called at all. An infinite sprawl of worlds, running in parallel, none of them able to see the others.
The reason I find it so alluring (the actual reason, not the one I’d give off if you asked me at some quantum society house party rager) is that it means nothing is ever fully gone. The versions of me I’ve had to leave behind somewhere are still out there, still living, in worlds I can’t see. It softens things. It makes loss feel less final. It is, in the most precise sense of the word, a comfort. And so, I do exactly what I look down on other people for doing.
What’s most interesting to me is that this Many Worlds interpretation is also a fully deterministic theory. There’s no randomness in it. No choices being made. No dice being rolled. The equation goes one way, always, and every branch that comes off it was always going to come off it. Whatever comfort I find here isn’t an escape from determinism at all… just a roomier version of it. So I’m a hypocrite x2.
What bothers me about determinism isn’t actually the determinism, but something else. The narrowness, I think. The one path, the one outcome, the one version of every moment. There’s no mercy in that, no room for paths untraveled. Something in me feels superior because I can sit in that cold, and make peace with the idea that nothing has meaning. But my strength here conceals my weakness elsewhere, and I suppose I really do want what everyone else does: for life to be larger than the one I see.
I’ve always cared a lot about being seen as someone who thinks clearly. Someone rigorous, someone who doesn’t just believe things because they’re nice to believe. And I think, when you want to be seen as the person who sees through things, the easiest way to feel like that person is to find other people to see through. I can catalog inconsistencies, places where their beliefs conveniently align with what they need to be true, ways they’ve mistaken comfort for insight. I can do this and it feels like rigor. It feels like I’m doing the hard work of thinking clearly. But the trap I often fall into is using other people’s blind spots to avoid looking for my own.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to understand what’s actually true, or with caring about the difference between a belief you’ve examined and one you’ve just inherited or absorbed or landed on because it made things feel more bearable. Of course that distinction matters to me. But it only matters if you apply it to yourself first, or at least equally. Otherwise it’s not really about truth. It’s about feeling like the kind of person who cares about truth, which is a very different thing, and a much more comfortable one.
What I’m trying to practice (badly, inconsistently) is actually asking why I believe what I believe. We all walk around with a collection of beliefs that are partly reasoned and partly inherited and partly just the shape of what we needed the world to be at some particular moment in our lives. That’s human, and that’s fine. But you should probably know which parts are which.
I don’t know if I’m particularly good at being honest with myself. Wearing whatever intellectual vanity I have from time to time snuffs out progress I make by convincing me that I’m intelligent enough that it doesn’t matter—why would I need to analyze my own beliefs this carefully? Obviously, I’m me, and so they must be a result of logic rather than bias. The people I looked down on knew what they needed and went looking for it. I needed the same thing and instead dressed it up in the sciences and called it intellect. None of that makes me smarter. I think it just makes it harder for someone to reach me, even if that someone is myself.