It’s been a tumultuous few weeks in my life
While nothing has occurred that really prevented me from writing another entry in El’sha’s blog, I just didn’t scrape one together in time. Quite unintentionally, I’ve found myself writing for this Substack in monthly cycles—a month of my opinions, and then a month of fiction, so now seems as good a time as any to shake things up. I’ve actually gotten quite a bit more positive feedback on the fiction than I had from previous posts, so this may be disappointing to some of you. I promise next week you’ll get to see how the trip to Manhattan Island goes.
The first big disruption was finding out that my identity had been used on the other side of the country to withdraw all my family’s savings from our shared bank account. The bank actually realized that fraud was occurring, including a fake ID, but only notified me after several transactions had occurred. This meant that I didn’t have to prove my case, but I’m still waiting for the funds to be reimbursed. The bank employees I’ve worked with have been friendly, helpful, and utterly incompetent, making multiple mistakes during the process that have caused lots of unnecessary leg work for me and my wife.
Strangely enough, I’ve experienced very little stress and anxiety during the fiasco. Even when I received that first phone call, during which I was told I had been impersonated and robbed, I felt calm and mostly unconcerned. I knew I would probably get the money back, and even if not, it’s only money, something I don’t personally place much value in. I’m aware that my perspective is only possible thanks to the sizeable privilege I enjoy, but I work hard and put a lot of effort into keeping a balanced budget. I’m doing everything within my power to earn my keep, as it were, in this brutal society we’re all essentially priced into, so I don’t feel guilty for treating it like the big game that it is.
The next hurdle was a deadline I had been putting off, one arguably an expression of privilege as well
A family friend gave me direct access to a publisher, and I happen to have a novel mostly finished. I spent several days scrambling to compose a query letter and selecting and polishing a sample of the text for this informal manuscript submission. It’s still an incredible longshot, but it’s my first and best opportunity to get my writing out into the world, one I’d be foolish to pass on as it costs me nothing but time. I’m not writing because I want to get my writing published and monetized: I’m writing because I enjoy it, and the opportunity to sell it would mean I have more time to spend writing.
Lastly, I’ve been preoccupied with a philosophical problem for several months now, and in the past week it’s lead me to some startling realizations about myself. The genesis of this line of reasoning was my sudden conversion to instrumentalism, when most of my life I think I’ve been more of a scientific realist. In a nutshell, I went from believing that successful scientific theories are, themselves, the ‘code’ in which reality is written, to being convinced that even our most successful theories are simply tools for making predictions about reality, which itself is fundamentally unknowable. I credit the writing of theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder for motivating this change of epistemology, and I encourage all of my scientifically-inclined readers to check out her Youtube channel. Little did I realize at the time, but this shift would have seismic consequences for me.
I’ve been an atheist my entire life
I was raised by agnostics that had little to say in the way of spirituality, and I never saw the appeal of organized religion. I was seduced in my late teens and early twenties by the so-called New Atheists—the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—and they helped cement orthodox religion in my mind as a horrible evil in the world that caused mostly suffering. I carried a lot of anger with me for years, and it wasn’t until I discovered the writing of Chris Hedges in 2017 that I began to soften on the topic. I became more directly aware of the tremendous amount of suffering in this world, including in America, and I came to understand how religion isn’t merely a tool for manipulating the credulous: it’s a coping mechanism few people have the fortitude to survive without.
I considered myself one of the strong ones, the clear-eyed martyr that saw reality as it was. The unexamined life was not worth living, and though the conclusions one reaches may be painful, they are in some way obligate. Spirituality, I came to think, was a beautiful delight that was forbidden to me by my commitment to logic and the scientific method. And then I discovered Alan Watts. Ironically, I had known of him for years; I remember my father telling me, perhaps decades ago, that he had been present at Alan’s memorial service and had ingested a pinch of his ashes, along with the other attendees. It seemed quite a strange thing to me at the time.
Listening to Watts speak about life and death and the oneness of the universe has had a profound effect on my perspective, and helped me to identify a core contradiction in my own worldview. When I was fourteen, I watched a PBS documentary called The Elegant Universe, based on a book of the same name and narrated by the author, Brian Greene. It was about String Theory, and it captivated me. It was the first time I realized that life and reality could be far, far more complex and mysterious than everyday experience suggests. It lead me to study physics and mathematics in college, and broadly determined the emotional and professional arc of my life thus far.
And now, in 2023, I’ve realized that physics was my religion
What’s more, while I’m a lowly Bachelor of Physics, I suspect that I’m not the only one in the field that makes this mistake, and that perhaps it’s impossible for beings as complex as humans to survive without some form of metaphysics that allows them to make meaning. Nothing Alan Watts taught is contradictory of established scientific theory, or of the scientific method itself, and in fact, the very questions that science has yet to answer and the fringes of those that it has point to the conclusions of Zen Buddhism.
Next week, we’ll return to the year 3263. There may be a few surprises in store among the ruins of America’s most iconic city.