Three default variables for deciding whether to spend money on something
We constantly make decisions about whether to spend money on something. How do we decide that something is worth spending money on?
I think that there are a few variables we take into account the most often. One is the thing’s—or service’s—cost relative to our savings (and financial reserves, assets, etc.) and income. We estimate the cost’s magnitude compared to where we place ourselves on society’s income scale or in the social class spectrum.
Another variable is how the cost compares to other similar options: whether it is inexpensive relative to other offerings of a similar thing. This variable depends on how much we believe the thing is a ‘good deal’ in purely monetary terms. By monetary, I mean that the amount of money the seller asks for is the only number that matters in this comparison; if a thing that is similar in most specs to what is currently offered to us turns out to be cheaper, then it is a ‘better deal’. I will call this a monetarily good deal.
A third variable relates to how much we persuade ourselves that we need or want the thing—that is, how much we believe it is going to bring benefit to our lives.
So, to summarise, at the most basic level of determining buying worthiness, we consider three default variables. We assess whether we feel that we can afford it, whether we view it as monetarily the best deal overall, and whether we believe we need it or would find sufficient gratification from buying it.
In fact, sketch variables would be a more precise designation. The idea of a sketch conveys first steps towards executing a fuller image. In the case of determining buying worthiness, these three variables are only the first crude steps towards painting a fuller, richer picture.
Implicit among these variables is how much money we feel we need to set aside in case we will need it in the near-future to buy more things and services (assuming our wealth accumulation rate won’t change significantly anytime soon). This last implicit variable typically manifests in the thought :“If I save all this money by choosing this deal that is cheaper than that one, I can use those savings to buy other things”.
Signs of maturation in our relationship with money
I think that a part of maturing in one’s relationship with money begins with gradually developing a more acute sensitivity to time expenditure. We are opt for a more expensive option because it is right in front of us, and we do not want to continue looking for other options, or negotiating prices. A monetarily better deal might be jus a few web searches away or in the next store, but we want to prioritise getting it done quickly. Some people incorporate their actual or estimated hourly rate into their assessments: if my hourly rate is 100 euros, then I will be saving 60 euros by purchasing the option I have in front of me—though 40 euros more expensive—rather than spending another hour pursuing a monetarily better deal.
Another sign of our maturing in our relationship with money is choosing high-quality options. These are things that are significantly more expensive, while sharing the same basic functionalities as their standard counterparts, such as consumer-grade products.
The price might be double, five, ten, or even twenty times higher, and someone might even be justified in concluding that the quality upgrade is not proportionally fair to the steep price increase. Still, we pay that premium because we prefer settling with something that we trust instead of experimenting with alternatives (as might be clear by now, these variables overlap, in this case time-expense is also present). Additionally, the thing itself might even feature an understated appearance, cancelling any obvious status-signalling functions which for some would have increased its perceived value.
We choose these high-quality options because we do not want to deal with repeating the process of searching for and acquiring that product for years or decades to come. We want something timeless that works well and is not designed with some type of built-in obsolescence —such as fast-fashion— or programmed obsolescence —such as low-grade electronic products.
Thus, maturing in one’s relationship with money consists in learning to read invisible value tags apart from the usual price tags. High-quality and time-saving are only two of innumerable invisible value tags we can see attached to what we pay for. Invisible value tags are essentially subtractive to price tags because they increase perceived value, effectively diminishing perceived expensiveness in a price tag. In other words, the monetary number attached to the thing remains the same, but it appears to be a much better deal once we decide that its value is much higher than what face-value variables, such as the three variables previously described, add up to.
Invisible value tags in action: overspending in temporary furnishings
The more personal the invisible value tags we become skilled in reading are, the more this is proof of an evolving self-understanding. We will have incorporated clear notions of what is meaningful and important to both us and our path in life as additional markers of value. Given that we calculate buying worthiness by weighing what value we perceive in a thing against its price, all additional value tags that we attach to it will significantly effect its perceived worthiness.
We might even spend money on something simply because we need to prove to ourselves that we do not need it, thereby satisfying a pesky curiosity.
We might spend a lot on carefully furnishing a place that we are renting only temporarily, in a city we know we will leave relatively soon. We might do so because we need to experiment with this space, see what works and what does not, and add clarity to that vague vision we have of the ideal living space for us. We understand that becoming more empirically familiarised with that vision of the ideal living space is a lifetime acquisition (or what we could call subjective consolidation) that transcends the furnishings themselves.
It will certainly be a hassle to get rid of those furnishings once we move out. And to many people, this will certainly seem like unwisely wasted money, because these are not investments in objects meant to be kept long-term, or resold with little loss. In fact, it is assured that we will spend even more money in the future on new furnishing for our new living space in another city. On top of that, we are not acquiring basic, affordable products, but we are being selective about it, willing to spend more on things we are irresistibly drawn to. We do this because entering in an ownership relation with them, and articulating them with the other objects we surround ourselves with in our living space, could potentially lead to important revelations about ourselves.
In any case, thanks to our growingly clear notions of what is meaningful and important to us and our path in life, we understand that the long-term payoff of this lesson largely beats these short-term expenditures and inconveniences. Moreover, the increase in self-knowledge that acquire will feed back into the sharpness of our value tags, gradually turning us into consumers who are much more skilled at making good purchasing decisions.
These are only some variables among many more that we consider as we engage with life aided by all that which the collective work of society can offer to us through trade.
Value auras: learning to see invisible things attached to the physical thing we are buying
The culmination for this aspect of our maturing in our relationship with money is that we learn to see extra invisible things—concepts of things, in a way, or a kind of value auras— along with the physical thing (or service) that we pay for. I characterise these as invisible because, being profoundly personal, they are products of our subjectivity and lack any physical form. This does not make them less impactful than the physicality of what we are purchasing. They are abstractions of what kind of other value the thing will bring to our lives, such as the previously described personal importance of empirically experimenting with the definition of one’s ideal living space.
Abstractions can take any ‘visible’ form in our imagination; the only important consideration is that they invoke their content in our minds. Certain kinds of people see a sports car and only glimpse minimal invisible things next to it adding extra value. For their subjectivity and lifepath, a sports car bring little more than its functionality as a fast car that communicates material wealth to others. These same people might see a guitar and in their subjectivities it would be surrounded by bright invisible elements such as all the fulfilment through the performance, sharing and creation of music that they can bring, along with lifetime acquisition—or subjective consolidations—of learning a particularly impactful craft and so on. The physical guitar might be much smaller (and undoubtedly humble-looking) than the sports car, but the magnitude and subjective radiance of the former’s invisible elements (value tags) will greatly outclass the latter’s. Thus, the guitar’s value aura, which is the sum of all its value tags, far exceeds that of the car.
In the best cases, these invisible things can be important lifetime lessons, revelations, or skills, which are the epitome of long-term because they last for life. We might acquire something that seems very expensive in its price and face-value, but its invisible value tags—that is, the invisible things that would come along with it—will make the price appear almost laughable to us.
As these tags pile up, price becomes less of a number fixed upon the default-or sketch-variables of being a monetarily good deal, its proportional size against our current wealth, or how much we need it in strictly functional or symbolic terms (for example, to project status, to belong, or to boost an identity type). Instead, it becomes merely one among many signals of value. Some of these other signals can make a stark difference, making the price seem absurdly low for what we are receiving on a personal level. Yet, we need to understand ourselves and our place in the world deeply enough to learn to discern these value tags.
Learning to manage our own personal ledgers to receive and create more value
It works as a kind of personal ledger: as perceived value increases through the addition of value tags, its price becomes increasingly nuanced (e.g. less expensive). In this personal ledger, money is merely one of many other signals of value that we are constantly trading in our lives. On the left column we will see what is debited from choosing to buy something; we see variables such as time expenditure, money expenditure, threats to our short or long-term peace of mind, and any other ‘expenses’ or value reductions that the thing might induce. Conversely, on the right column we will see the positive value that is credited, such as what I have described in the living space example above.
The beauty of this personal ledger lies in its absolute fidelity to our personal narratives. The invisible things that value tags represent gain shape from the particular paths our lives have taken and the directions it is organically drawn towards, and how wakefully we have journeyed through them. Moreover, it is important to notice that in the personal ledger money expenditure is merely one out of many other variables comprised in the ‘debit’ and ‘credit’ columns.
This balance is what allows us to estimate buying worthiness, and it involves not only our financial situation but the overarching flux of value in and out of our lives that our buying decisions enable.
So, when we view money in this way, we realise that if we are equipped with a developed sense of selfhood we will make a much better use of it. Conversely, if we fail to learn properly identifying invisible value tags, we will squander our resources, consistently making deals that turn out to be fruitless or even counterproductive in the long-term.
This is because we will obtain much less value for things, in the sense that we will not have a way to reliably choose things with true long-term, personally congruent value. For those unaware of their invisible value tags, the act of making purchasing choices becomes a kind of lottery, a numbers game of face-value price comparison, or an untrustworthy series of hunches.
When we do not understand where value is, we convince ourselves that we need more money because everything seems far more expensive than its actual worth. Worse of all, we might possibly blind ourselves further from the search of the greatest value tags in search of money for its own sake, thinking that it will provide security in a world of scarce value. To be clear, this does not imply that wealth accumulation is unnecessary when we can squeeze the most value out of what we can already access. It simply means that if we keep seeking money for its own sake, out of a sense of insecurity or ignorance of where we are going in our life path, we will never learn (or will do so at a snail’s pace) how to put money at the service of true self-fulfilment, which feeds our sensitivity to invisible value tags, resulting in a more effective use of our finances.
Thus, I believe that the inverse is true: money comes to us when we understand our subjective, personal ledgers. We will spend less of it and do so with a permanently flourishing kind of leverage. Meanwhile, we will be leading a more vitalising, meaningful existence, which naturally attracts and compounds value. And much of that accumulated value can eventually convert to money, as it is ultimately a form of storing and transmitting worth.
It is not a process that takes place naturally nor involuntarily. It demands careful reflection on our daily events, self-honesty, openness to embracing the experiences that we encounter, remaining present through them and processing them instead of suppressing them. It requires active listening to ourselves and thinking about what we are intrinsically curious about, what inescapable desires and interest we have left in the back-burner for so long (I call them Uncharted whispers in this text), what paths to long-term fulfilment are most appropriate for us.
Conclusion: where the cycle of consumerism can be broken
The major upside of such a process is that it liberates us from the vicious cycle of consumerism through the manufacturing of needs and problems and the nurturing of feelings of insufficiency as its primary fuel. I believe the overpowering force of this cycle is rooted in both a lack of self-knowledge (translating into lack of agency in the processes responsible for our existential fulfilment) and an overall insufficiently deep examination of the art of consuming for real personal value.
Consuming is not simply another compartment within the set of actions that we perform in our daily lives (e.g. chores, work, leisure, hobbies, sport, travel, social events). Consuming is a catch-all word for a set of much more complex experiences. The only recurrent commonality binding these experiences is that the mediation of money is involved. Beyond this connection, we are required to identify what these experience actually are, what meaning they have to us, and how they fit in our own personal ledgers of value and the prioritisations of actions.
What we love is unique to every individual: an unrepeatable convergence of all that participated in our experience of existence
When we are explaining things from our own genuine intellectual curiosity, we are slowly giving substance, presence, form, solidity and territory to what we love. We allow it to manifest in its purest form, rather than leaving it merely implied or polluted by the presumptions that conventional words, in their insufficiency, inevitably carry.
We bring along numerous inaccurate presumptions with each formulation we choose so that we can explain, describe, represent, reflect or celebrate what we love. This happens because what each person loves differs in its details by being unique to them. What we love is the product of the convergence of everything that had anything to do with our existence. It is everything that we have witnessed and participated in; it is everything that participated in our time on earth, or indirectly affected us even before our time, all contributing to the formation of our gradual growth as a conscious being in the world. Therefore, that aggregate makes up the essence of everything we love —a particular, recurrent essence, or signature, that marks everything we hold close to our hearts— is unique. Throughout humanity, there exist no two identical repetitions of this convergence in different people.
Let me clarify one thing: “what we love” encompasses that which we are naturally drawn to, which provides us intrinsic enjoyment and that we want to keep exploring further. It manifests as a singular ingredient present in all the qualities that make, for us, particular activities, particular products of our imagination, and other things in the world, reliably life-giving.
All the inaccurate presumptions that pollute our attempts to articulate and represent what we love through communicative means that operate within convention’s realm (such as words and other symbols), may steadily accumulate, resulting in an imbalanced ratio between what we actually want to say and that extra debris that invites misunderstandings.
The lopsided ratio between individual thought and unintended associations
The effect that conventionality introduces into this ratio between idea and debris is this: imagine that something we hold in our minds and wish to communicate contains three essential elements. We are trying to express these elements through the use of words. Yet, words never perfectly align with that which we want to convey — although if we are not in touch with what we love, we might unwittingly allow the pre-made definitions of terms to impose themselves upon our thoughts, deluding us into believing that our thoughts have always been exactly like what the terms’ instituted definitions instruct. Words are enfolded within layers upon layers, like stacks of translucent membranes, of evoked presumptions, or unintended associations almost entirely disconnected from what we want to convey.
For example, the word “entrepreneur” carries a complex web of unintended associations that could muddy its meaning. When someone employs that term, they might simply intend to convey that they plan to pursue certain activities with an eye toward their systematic evolution into a form of structured and sustained revenue. They might envision a prospective enrolment of people with certain qualities to collaborate in the further nurturing of these activities as they grow in effectiveness, complexity and ambition. Eventually, one of their aspirations might be that this systematised structure of activity blossoms into becoming their core source of wealth and how they define their societal role.
Yet, this word opens other conducts through which unintended associations inevitably seep in: visions of a clean-cut man in business-attire with an aggressively confident demeanour teetering on arrogance, a veneration of money-making as the driving force behind personal ventures instead of honest service to others, an infatuation with sport cars and private jets, a continuous employment of entrepreneurship-related buzz-words, a manufactured perpetual optimism, a lack of a “pure passion” beyond business, an appropriation of the term to claim an economic status not truly attained, a membership within a certain social class and a subculture, a fixation on productivity-metrics. These are some associations that come to mind, but the list is endless; the “entrepreneur” prototype of the early 2000’s could very well don a hoodie and sandals.
Thus, when we employ a word such as “entrepreneur” to express one of the three essential components of the concept we wish to convey (and the amount of words that carry the same effect is virtually limitless), we are expressing ourselves through a particular ratio between what we mean to say and the pollution, debris, or unintended associations that the word subtly infuses into our message.
At a more abstract level, the make-up of the contents of our first essential component could be reduced to the following proportion: one part constitutes what we truly mean to say —our intended meaning— while the other three parts consist of misleading debris. The ratio is then 1:3: every single part of intended meaning carries three parts of unintended associations with it.
Now, as we proceed to the other essential components of the concept we intend to describe, the ratio for the second one might be 1:4, while that for the third piece could be 1:3 as well. Consequently, though we have selected three terms or formulations to combine in service of expressing our idea, each carries with it an amount of debris that pollutes its received meaning to a non-trivial degree. The accumulated ratio for the entire idea would be 3:10, which reveals a substantial amount of unintended associations in our message.
The endeavour of faithful iteration: a way to neutralise the inability to communicate authentically
Of course, this phenomenon is not linear, probably not even precise in its mathematics, as it rather functions through analogy (to illustrate the kind of relations of imbalanced proportions between intended meaning and unintended associations that our words can carry). The importance of this analogy lies in its aim to drive home the point that our thoughts are not our words, especially when it comes to what we love. However, if we remain conscious of this gap, we can gradually fashion our communicative means into closer resonance with our thoughts.
For example, the combination of the debris from each element might complement each other to neutralise some of these inaccurate presumptions, providing additional contextual cues so that the receiver can interpret a meaning closer to what we mean. The more elements we successfully combine to express an idea, the more we close in on a true communication of it, hence why sometimes essays or books are needed to explain something accurately. Nonetheless, there always exists an implicit threshold of how many cognitive resources it is acceptable to expect from our listeners to invest in a given circumstance. Many times we are expected to be concise and use as few words as possible, while further explanations are not looked good upon, signalling a kind of fumbling uncertainty, intentional opacity, or disregard for others’ time.
A good way to deliberately combine elements to close in on what we wish to express, rather than allowing it to only manifest by accident, is through repeatedly endeavouring to capture as much as we can of what we mean in some kind of durable form (such as a text, a sentence, a concept, an intellectual artefact). We are always aiming to reach the highest possible fidelity to our original meaning.
In other words, we are engaging in crystallising what we mean into durable forms through successive iterations. We are testing different mould shapes to see which ones align most satisfactorily with that which we struggle to put forth with true resonance with what is meaningful to us.
Given that it is nearly impossible to succeed at first try, we need to begin by establishing an ideally accurate expression as our compass rather than a non-negotiable expected outcome, because we are almost guaranteed to fail short. In this case the term “failing” arrives loaded with unintended debris. As I mentioned before, this is a common occurrence: we might not be achieving this perfect communication, but the real success is in the process of continuous crystallisation. Thus failing is not necessarily something that we seek to avoid, nor something that we should punish ourselves for doing.
Beyond successful communication: nurturing the limitlessly growing network of what we cherish
As we accumulate more of these durable expressions, we find that they interconnect through their sharing of our foundational motivation to make what we love increasingly real. Through this expanding network of meaning, we create our own own body of expressed thought. As a result of this process, the ratio gradually diminishes: we fashion, arrange and orchestrate more of our own artefacts to draw upon (our ideas, concepts, metaphors, forms of envisioning things, stories, our creative work, embodied symbols, our interpretations of others’ ideas) allowing us to express ourselves ever closer to that ideal 1:0. These artefacts will complement each other in a kind of co-responsive cohesiveness, some of them serving as buttresses for explaining others, as subtexts, undercurrents of implicit meaning, as inflectors of a particular desired tone or “mood”, imagery, ethos (in the Aristotelian sense: your credibility before expression, what the expected “genre” of your expression is), and so on.
The essence of what makes us cherish things: an inexhaustible source of individual thought
To make that which we love increasingly enduring, tangible and visible to us —so that we can discover it, talk about it, make it a part of everything we do— we need to find ways to challenge these lopsided ratios. Then, eventually, we will come as close as we can to 1:0. I think that the more we endeavour to give definite shape to what we love, with devotion —not without a healthy dose of obstinacy and irreverence— and through diverse manifestations, the better equipped we become to get there. We can redeploy these new elements that we faithfully bestowed shape upon in order to think more clearly, to express ourselves better, and eventually we’ll draw upon our entire creative corpus to live in uninterrupted attunement and harmony with what we love, as if we were effortless conduits of it —1:0 ratio conduits—, sharing it with others in its best version of itself.
As a concluding note, it is important not to confuse the products of that drive to seek what you love with an essential originality. In that convergence between what we love and how we channel it through some form of expression, these expressions will indeed carry something that is exclusively “us”, but it need not be an “idea” of shocking originality. It may be based upon groups of concepts that countless others have evoked, examined and developed countless times. Yet, our particular expressions of the same concepts (or perhaps not the same, but extensively overlapping with them) will be marked and shaped by a certain rhythm, by an imagery attached to how we make sense of things and explain them to ourselves. They will radiate particular resonances highlighting certain elements while diminishing others —resonances that we tend to amplify where others might dismiss them, because they matter to us precisely in that way.
Our expressions will be shaped by such variables because they emerge in relation to our unique existence and what we’ve come to cherish. They will constitute one of the many life-affirming ways of communicating those concepts that you will become able to create. Even if the “idea” has been expressed before, there’s always something new in one’s way of formulating it: it is something else with a new texture, new possibilities, new resonances for other people that are more like us, with similar preoccupations and sensibilities.
Or perhaps they will connect with very different individuals who might somehow experience a momentary match in our wavelength as they pass by it —a momentary feeling of bursting our heads out of the turbid, thick waters of daily existence, of breaking to the surface under a clear sunny sky; a fleeting connection reminiscent of those proverbial ships passing in the night.
“Always go a little bit further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little out of your depth. And when you feel that your feet are not quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting”David Bowie
There are some ideas that need to be felt to truly become integrated into who we are. This is one of those.
What Bowie is saying might look like just another metaphor to convey an idea that finds another expressive form in the phrase “Get out of your comfort zone”, or “Swallow the frog”, or “Take the plunge”.
However, Bowie’s more complete metaphor paints a story rich with poetic imagery: someone venturing into grey water, feeling the icy liquid creep up their bodies as they wade deeper. Then, before they move past the temperature shock, their feet no longer touch sand, and now they are floating in the undulating water. Once the shock subsides, they discover themselves in another state of being, where walking serves no purpose, and dormant muscles are required, if only through the slightest effort, to keep afloat.
I think that the most worthy moment to encapsulate is when the temperature shock remains noticeable enough for some part of ourselves to implore our bodies to turn back and walk out of the water, yet our feet begin step on the fluid mass of water instead of onto firm ground.
It is a small leap of faith, although you know where you are going. More than a risk, what you are anticipating is a discomfort, an unpleasant state of being. You are testing whether you will float or sink when your feet no longer quite touch the ground. And beyond that, we are testing the feeling of that initial reticence that bubbles up from our own impulses once our stretched out toes fail to touch the bottom, and we begin treading water. Was that reticence right all along, and have we effectively failed to float? Or was it all a confused exaggeration?
The exact threshold where tranquility can turn into excitement
And that threshold is a sign, perhaps not visible to the eye, but perceptible to the body as a whole, with a little participation from each of our senses and other sensations. It is like a specific perfume you learn to identify, a particular logo, a texture. This threshold moment is one of discomfort, of slight dread and a compulsion to crawl back to shelter. We rationalise it through doubts, invoking the most seductive and compelling of its illusions: that there exists a scenario where we will be utterly confident in our capability to confront what lies beyond; we only require a tiny bit more preparation.
Of course, this tiny bit never stops fractioning itself into smaller bits, like Zeno’s paradox: to travel to the destination, we must first travel half the distance, then half of the remaining distance. From there we will always need to traverse another halfway stretch to reach the finish line. Unfortunately every divided distance will divide itself by half: 2 meters left, 1 meter left, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125., ad infinitum. The fractioning process eternally circles around an elusive zero, which is the finish line itself. Similarly, our “readiness” always requires just another half amount of effort, no matter how small, to reach that impossible level of personal acceptability.
But this assessment of our preparation, if we understand it as a simple threshold moment, does have its limit: our only significant preoccupation should be whether we know how to stay in place in the water, treading it without sinking, and how to swim back. We are not entering the high seas, we are just letting ourselves float for a while in waters slightly deeper than what we can touch with our feet while our heads remain above the surface.
Only when we pass the threshold will we experience what our full being -both conscious and subconscious- is capable of in deeper waters. It is there that we will experience everything that we could not predict with our unfailingly poor assessment of our preparation. We can never know for certain how prepared we are, much less wait for that prized convergence between rationally knowing we are ready and feeling it in our bones.
Looking to the future: negative anticipation and the innate face of reticence
Such alignment is rare. We wish we could abandon our bodies, if only during that threshold moment, where all of our past failings related to that particular challenge heap together into a trickster monster of regret and fear of repeating the same mistakes all over again: for what does this say about us? Are we irreparable? Have we crashed against the absolute limits of our capabilities? Yet it is not necessary to abandon our bodies, to observe ourselves from above as we pass that threshold, which in anticipation always appears supremely uncomfortable.
This illusive veil can become increasingly thin only when we accompany our bodies during this crossing. We face the monsters, pay attention to their stinking breath two inches from our faces, to their claws deridingly grazing our arms, as our bodies adapt to the water’s temperature and our feet cease touching ground. Then, we find ourselves “about in the right place to do something exciting”. We are using new, underused muscles, possessed by a delightful state of slight alert tension, synchronising our bodies to the calm sway of the tide, feeling a unique kind of vitalising warmth fermenting within and radiating to your shivering limbs. Perhaps this time you will swim even further; the water is warm and your mind is happy with this new state of being. Or perhaps not, but that is no matter. You will retreat and feel your toes sinking into soft sand.
Looking back: the rich memory of an uncomfortable yet exciting passage
Thus, if we have remained present with our bodies all the way, avoiding any resort to escapism, denial or suppression of our perception, then the memory of this experience will be more grounded in the reality of it than that of the monster that negative anticipation has created. This will enable us to look back to our last venturing across the threshold and tell ourselves “it wasn’t that bad” or “what an adventure”. We will maybe find that we sank and had to swim back to shore, gasping for breath, but we succeeded with the other equally important half of this action: we learned to see the monster for what it is, which is both a fair warning requiring it’s due attention, and an exaggeration that can only do us a disservice.
This small journey is a common occurrence in daily life. Once we have identified those instances where it happens, and predisposed ourselves to face them in a way that we can capture that experiential, emotional sequence through which they take us, we will have integrated the idea that Bowie was trying to get across.
And it might assume a growing concreteness in our minds, interweaving the products of our reasoning about it with the sheer embodied feeling of the experience, along with a powerful narrative to encapsulate these elements. It might present a level of concreteness akin to a talisman, a charm we can always summon in our minds to protect us through the threshold’s momentary darkness.
There is an argument to be made that Bowie’s own advice went on to guide his life in interesting directions.
The immediate tangible rewards populating the process of musical practice
Music practice brings an instant, tangible reward for properly smoothing out the creases that come up during our learning process.
It is an self-sufficient reward that, once gained, can fulfill itself endlessly, because you’ll be able to perform that particular piece whenever you desire.
Furthermore, if you push to become intimately familiar with it, all the nooks and crannies, you will have the capacity to play around with it, develop other variations, derivations, interpretations, inspirations from its solid fundaments (tried and true fundaments, as you learned that piece because it was emotionally satisfying and stimulating to perform).
Music is a gift that readily offers that intrinsic satisfaction. And it also represents an inexorably honest feedback-giving experience. Every time we test our mastery of a particular piece, passage, technique, etc. on our instrument, every single mistake will be all too noticeable. We cannot escape from it nor explain ourselves out of it.
This is just as true when we are playing jazz or other flexible kinds of music-making. While we can repurpose mistakes by framing them through musical manoeuvres that compatibly integrate them back into the bigger picture of the piece (reharmonisations, opening and closing a new motif, circling back to creative cadences, law of contrasts, and so on), every one of these efforts will expose its own mistakes if not performed with finesse. In any case, regardless of how deftly we executed our musical manoeuvre, the piece will continue and we will get to the end, even to a more or less satisfactory result, but the mistake can always be pinpointed and cannot be erased.
A pure analogy for the path of learning itself
Because music offers this perfect feedback-giving experience, when we practice it we are also experiencing a pure version of the act of learning itself.
First of all, if one actually enjoys music, the reward system that music practice offers is thoroughly satisfying: if we smooth out all the creases and understand them inside out, we will become masters of a small, low resource, self-contained vehicle of concentrated pleasure —i.e., a musical piece—. Second, as I stated before, each problem that we encounter is objectively a problem. We cannot get away without properly addressing it. Thus, how we choose to address these points of failure and what happens while we do so potentially becomes a generalised lesson for the learning process. If we properly digest how to address problems that arise in our learning process in a self-directed manner, we will be able to extrapolate this process to other instances of learning driven purely by self-initiated problem-solving.
Points of failures as anchors: an examination of a particular instance of musical learning.
For example, we can become more aware of the unexpected benefits contained within failure points. They can indeed be used as anchors for accelerating the process of mastering a piece.
Consider this: we can play most parts of a particular piece, except for a few points of failure where we always become more tense, and clumsily play through, making a few key mistakes along the way. So we choose to concentrate on one of those passages that presents a couple points of failure.
What we do is exert exclusive, deliberate concentration on these points of failure. We set our minds to pay attention only to them, sustaining in our heads what exactly is that we need to remember next time we test the passage, so that we do not trip over those failure points. Meanwhile, to alleviate our brain’s capacity, we allow the somewhat mastered parts —or the easier parts— to flow without much thought. We trust that we have integrated these enough, that our muscle memory and our thorough familiarity with them will take care of it.
What happens is that as we concentrate on fixing these failure points, we will also notice how portions of what we left to flow intuitively begin to unravel. We realise that we need to give them at least a bit more thought, as tiny cracks become apparent, signaling that we weren’t as thoroughly familiar with them as we thought.
What is all the more encouraging is that if we hadn’t struggled with these points of failure and thus needed to focus on them, we might not have identified these tiny cracks, because we would have been confident enough to play the piece without having to zoom into its nooks and crannies with such meticulousness. The implication is that these pesky failure points open a window for improving our musicianship, that is, our understanding and mastery of the structural foundations that make the piece work. We are indeed being forced to consciously analyse each detail as it emerges in our automatic playing of what we had thought were mastered passages.
Conclusion: organically choosing our focal points within small learning cycles
The great overarching lesson of this example is that we can deliberately master something organically. By organic, I simply mean that as we progress through our learning, we chiefly address problems as they arise from project to project. By analogy, the musical piece equates to that project: it represents a small learning cycle within the larger timeline of our journey to greater musicianship. This shorter-term goal of mastering this particular piece is what defines what problems we are going to address now — just like the particular problematic passage, they are problems organic to the piece itself, they might not provide us with musical knowledge that might be more relevant for our general musicianship, but they are essential for this particular piece.
In fact, with an organic learning process, we are aiming at various synergically connected destinations: we want to improve our musicianship but we also want to be able to perform something for others and obtain that rewarding satisfaction of doing so. It is a self-feeding mechanism between motivation and arduous improvement.
All the while, when we are confident that these tricky bumps have been flattened, every other part is improved. This is because, now facing the sight of a smooth road stretching to the horizon, all other passages will confidently, fearlessly dance towards their destination. We will find ourselves in that glorious zone of expressive freedom within the piece. Within these formal confines, as we perform the piece, we can decide how it will channel our emotional impulses in the most satisfying way.
When we identified “gods” before the maturation of a language of abstractions
I like to think that one of the many factors behind the origins of pantheons was a lack of vocabulary.
In times when languages were in their primitive state, we hadn’t yet engaged in discussions about creating abstractions. We hadn’t done so enough to have at our disposal an immense pool of concepts that we could comprehensively communicate to each other. We hadn’t yet developed writing systems that would enable the more precise transmission of knowledge across generations, while allowing this pool of available vocabulary to grow through time, building from shoulders upon shoulders the giants of earlier generations.
Did we have words for concepts like “hypothesis,” “leverage,” “theory,” “jurisprudence,” or other such abstractions? We certainly might have applied or practiced some of what these concepts have come to signify. Yet, we didn’t have words that defined them with precision, not when language was at its most utilitarian, mostly populated by concrete vocabulary such as actions -grab, throw, run- and empirical phenomena -rain, seasons, emotions.
And this linguistic insufficiency resulted in a lack of concepts for us to organise our experience of the world: how do we interpret an experience such as what we today would call “trauma” or “anxiety,” and think about it, if we don’t have the concept to turn it into a tangible, organised idea in our minds? It’s likely that we didn’t think about it as a possible mainstay of the human condition, something that we could abstract from individual cases as some definable pattern that anyone may experience. Rather, we simply thought about each particular case in its uniqueness, without realising its consistent resemblance to other cases.
Our perception of invisible “gods” in the mists of pre-linguistic times
But I am talking about a much earlier period. I am talking about immemorial times, of the dawn of language itself, when we needed to refer to things or explain them with an extremely narrow set of available words.
I imagine primitive groups of people in some Mediterranean region who would look at thunder and say “that’s Zeus”. We would point to cereals sprouting from the earth and say “Demeter”. They would marvel at the way some sounds vibrate together in a pleasant, clean way, and call that harmony “Apollo”.
The intellectual exercise to understand this is straightforward: imagine having only dozens of words to refer to and describe things you see in the world. In such circumstances, many of these would be names of gods, which at that moment in time primarily designated particular invisible forces in the world that made things happen -invisible phenomena like the movement of stars, the blossoming of flowers, the generation of fire, rainfall, wind, illness. Evidently, at this point “gods” weren’t yet represented as anthropomorphic beings or personalities in any kind of human way. They were rather an expression of our raw, disorganised yet impossibly dense relation with the universe.
Here is the exercise: how would you group these phenomena in order to be able to refer to all of them only with these few words? Would you unite them according to some kind of specific resemblance, a perceived “Zeusness” that they all share? But how would you have defined such an essence? Since at that time we didn’t think so much in terms of abstractions, our definition of “Zeusness” would have been fluid rather than rigidly defined. And how exactly an early Mediterranean person would have experienced this particular impression or feeling of “Zeusness” when witnessing something might remain forever mysterious to us -we who inhabit a completely different world, one filtered through the premises of modern culture, scientific understand, and the simulacra of mediated communication.
I would imagine that this experience of “Zeusness” evoked for example feelings of authority and power, feelings like the gaze of a father who is infinitely great. It evoked the notion of a certain order of things that always triumphs in the end, such as the idea of justice, and of things ultimately making sense in the big scheme of things. “Zeusness” could indeed be an impression existing somewhere between a common essential element and what we today would call a “vibe”.
As I imagine it, these gods would have been regarded as the singular prime movers of all things within their domain. They would have been the fundamental sources of those invisible forces that made things happen, animating the world.
Gods as common threads across seemingly disparate domains
What I find fascinating about this scenario is how these early people would ascribe the same prime mover to things that in our modern point of view would seem disparate : they would mediate between conflicting parties and decide that one deserved compensation and the other merited punishment. What we now call Justice, they would call “Zeus”. Justice was indeed another quality of “Zeus”. A modern equivalent would be pointing at an assembling machine and saying “That’s engineering”, and then looking at a plane’s turbine and declaring “That’s also engineering”. For both of them, engineering is the underlying principle that makes their existence possible.
Moreover, this prime mover begins to blend these elements into increasingly complex ideas. At some point it made sense to these early people that what happened with the sky and the weather, with rain and thunder, was somehow essentially related to justice and law. These were qualities of the same larger, overarching force. They were all interconnected by some commonality which, in these people’s understanding of things, only this idea of “Zeus” could adequately convey.
Zeus is also “ZeusXenios”, god of hospitality and protector of guests. So, in the universe of all things “Zeus”, hospitality and the protection of guests somehow emerged from -or alongside- the relationship of sky and weather with justice, law, and order (and perhaps other attributes of “Zeus” such as sovereignty or the fulfilment of oaths). Thus, the idea of hospitality was included as something that also sprung from that essential originator “Zeus”.
The influence of each divine domain’s particular blend on our engagement with its constituent elements
It’s difficult to imagine exactly what the implications of this interlacing of things under a common thread meant. After all, this process was guided by an experiencing of the world, an ordering of meaning utterly alien to us modern people. Perhaps these early cultures didn’t consciously establish any clear relation between what happened in the sky and the pragmatic value of agreeing upon common rules for a peaceful coexistence -that is, establishing laws. Yet, these relationships between all things “Zeus” would certainly have conditioned how people thought about them. In any reflection about these elements, whether in simple spontaneous talk or in more organised official debate, there would always remain traces of the underlying connections between these elements: hospitality, justice, sky, oaths, sovereignty, and so on.
What’s more, it seems logical that the association between all things related to the sky and weather with a single entity “Zeus” predated discussions about the establishment of laws by a long time. Nonetheless, there must have been a reason why early people would have made this connection once they attempted to explain how the idea of “Laws” fit in the cosmic order of a world that remained largely mysterious to their greatly limited existences (at least in the sense of means for transport, communication, transmission of knowledge, and both technologies and techniques to ease daily labour). Instead of placing law and justice under Apollo’s domain -which would have triggered associations with light, harmony, music, poetry, rationality, healing, foresight, and so on- they positioned them under Zeus, locating them in a distinctly different place within the hierarchy of the order of things and their interrelations (cosmos). Zeus, after all, is Apollo’s father and the supreme authority among all Olympian gods.
All these invisible forces were interconnected somehow. Before we established that abstractions could exist independently and deserve single words to expressed them -words with a precise definition-, before we had developed distinct concepts and clear separations between abstractions like ‘justice’ and ‘hospitality’, and between natural phenomena, we gave these forces names and developed rituals and attitudes towards them that were always present in our daily dealings. The way invisible forces governed the sky’s rhythms of change constantly reminded us that justice’s own particular patterns also belonged to this ever-present invisible source, this “Zeusness”. And through our rituals, we contemplated our role within these greater currents of the cosmos upon which the “Zeus” force had such profound potency.
We left votive offerings -small objects that we thoughtfully selected to be relinquished. We organised moments of collective contemplation through sacrificial rituals, through the construction of enduring, symbol-laden, meticulously designed temples and sanctuaries, and through the composition of prayers, dances, music, verse dedicated to these forces. And in this process, as our vocabulary expanded and our initial art of telling anecdotes, gossip, and stories became increasingly evocative, detailed, emotive, and full of resonance with our common psychological experience of the world, we began to talk about these forces by borrowing from the vocabulary of these stories. We filled the gaps in our lexicon for explaining these invisible forces with that of our penetrating descriptions and explanations of human affairs. After all, few forms of complex discourse (words organised into larger bodies of meaning rich with precision and nuance in details) are more readily transmitted and stamped into common language than powerful human stories.
The borrowing of the vocabulary of human affairs for the description of divine behaviour
A great testament to this transmutation of the enchanting mysteries of cosmic forces into human affairs are myths and literary works such as Homer’s epics. As we began to explain more phenomena in increasingly intricate ways, we borrowed from the vocabulary of human affairs -something familiar, of our own, much easier to talk about than the laws of physics- to articulate these dynamics. The principle of such transmutation closely resembles that of the metaphor: a metaphor (also symbols1 and analogies) unites seemingly unconnected things through a common mechanism, a principle that animates them in the same way. Similarly, fire was not discovered but stolen by Prometheus (meaning “Fore-thinker” in Ancient Greek) from these cosmic forces, and plagues weren’t transmitted or incubated, but they were arrows shot from the bow of a wrathful Apollo.
Did this exercise in transmutation perhaps evolve into an excessive humanisation of the divine, turning these explanations into what we now call mythologies? It’s possible that this occurred as generations passed across centuries, even millennia, and these initial exercises in unifying phenomena under these common words became too complex. As it could have happened, the extensive use of vocabulary related to human affairs could’ve led to a murky confluence of cosmic explanations with the conception of almost literally human-like divinities. After all, what better way to explain the apparent fickleness of natural phenomena than as being a matter of choices made by the invisible forces that govern them, driven by some particular motivation? And what being in the world demonstrates more fickleness and variability in the expanse of their potential choices -and their motivations- than humans?
The flourishing of rationality, philosophy and modernity as gods appear increasingly human
At the same time, as myths evolved into a space where cosmic forces could speak with humans, even procreate with them, more specialised vocabularies for explaining the world were emerging -for example through philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy- using terminologies distinct from that of human affairs. With this parallel development, the purpose of myth to explain the world became eclipsed both by its increasingly prominent role as allegory to cultivate wisdom, and by the perceived greater precision of these other specialised explanations that did not overlap with the vocabulary of human affairs.
Today, the separation between nature and humanity, between subject and object, is complete, and thanks to our doubling down on this bet, we have such miracles as the current state of science and technology, and all of the other direct and indirect products of rational thought. Nonetheless, we have lost much of that dense interlacing of meanings, that intimate relation with the world that we once possessed when we looked at it in the bigger picture -as if it were inconceivable to isolate the sociology of hospitality from the physics of thunderstorms. When do isolate them, thunder becomes merely an acoustic shockwave created by lightning.
Yet, by considering this acoustic explanation as the primary objective truth concerning thunder, we are depriving it of a larger expanse of meaning that the idea of this “Zeus” force would have better evoked. A simple example of this limitation is how we cannot relate to thunder as we would to Zeus, venerating it as an expression of a larger order of things (a cosmic order) that merits the dignity of what we today would call a “Greek god”. This larger force is what we would have taken the time to collectively contemplate through ritual and gesture, an opportunity to reconnect (etymologically speaking, the word re-ligion means reconnection, or to “bind again”) with our place in this perpetual flux of forces that animate the world and universe, forces that far transcend our daily preoccupations. These modern concerns are a kind of exercise in isolation: we isolate the variables of what ‘life in society’ means in a similar way as we have isolated what ‘thunder’ is, and this practice inevitably distances us from the act of reconnection with the cosmos, of “re-ligion”
Coda: “I find myself compelled to reason, but I prefer to dream.”
Quote by Jorge Luis Borges.
But this is also just a story. It is the exploration of a vivid dream, an exercise in rational fantasy, like one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It is not based on facts, but imagination and a certain intuitive rationality, led through an unexpected turn in the road. It is meant to provoke thought and spark connections in the reader’s mind, so that they can look at our relation with these early religions as something more than mere superstitious, outdated explanations of things.
Symbol comes from the Greek Sumbolon which means to cast two things together. It is an act of unifying two things through the creation of a symbol. ↩︎
How do we confront oblivion as we hold our identities together?
Oblivion is entropy. Things that dissolve into oblivion become a cloud of unstructured, disconnected particles that cannot be reassembled anymore. Dreams exemplify of oblivion. Once we forget them, most are gone forever. There are no loose threads we can grasp with any hope of sewing the whole back together. Fragments of what they used to be become scattered in our minds like vagrant spores, meaningless particles nestling themselves in other regions.
Much of our identity can likewise slip into oblivion if too much of it accumulates within our limited minds. Even if these elements will never entirely dissolve into hopelessly unstructured clouds of particles, they will degrade enough that they become too vague and fluid for us to retrieve them, or to integrate in our behaviour toward the world.
If we consider our being as an isolated individual, our identity would consist of components such as our memories, our thinking habits, our individual thoughts as they emerge, our behavioural habits, internalised skills, knowledge, muscular memory, emotional patterns and subconscious processes.
Then, as we look from the mind-body1 outward, we discover other strings tethered to our identity**. Our family and friends continuously confirm our identity to ourselves.** They treat us a certain way, they talk to us a certain way, and we reciprocate according to what we perceive their identities to be. They perceive us from their perspective, and we glimpse parts of our identity reflected in their behaviour toward us. If we were to lose these people, parts of our identity would lose their foundation and collapse, as nothing would remain to confirm them aside from our memory, concept of ourselves, and habits. And these resources are limited, endlessly malleable by the inconsistent nature of our organic minds2. A concept like reputation reflects this phenomenon: an image of our identity -however distorted- becomes enduring in the minds of several people. It transforms into an intersubjectivity, consolidated through being shared across the minds of many people.
The concepts, heuristics, mental models, systems that we integrate into our way of making decisions and interpreting the world around us also serve as anchors for our identities. They pack ideas together into tight, structured bundles, eliminating the need to contemplate each separately when using them as a lens through which we interpret things. Without these structured abstractions, easily replicable through the use of words (we can consult them whenever we want, once we document them), the parts of our identities that they buttress will also risk dissolving into oblivion.
If we lose the ability to swiftly interpret things in our customary way, then something in our identity undergoes transformation. We will interact differently with the world, because our interpretation will be different: we will highlight some things that we perceive while obscuring others; we will be attributing particular causes and effects to them, we will be making value judgments (as good or bad) based on the reasoning -and reasons- that our concepts provide.
Another extension of our identities lies in objects. These are primarily objects that we own, meaning that are very often surrounded by them and we can reliably make use of them when we need to. In a functional sense, these objects facilitate certain courses of actions, certain kinds of behaviours over others. They assist us in doing so through the very function for which they were designed (or the function that reveals itself to someone thinking out of the box).
In terms of meaning, objects remind us of our identity by reflecting back to us the parts to which they are attached. Just like for example songs, we associate the objects around us with certain memories, with certain intentions, moods and tones: Why did we acquire it? How? What has occurred in the presence of that object? Even if we do not deliberately decide upon it, everything in our homes will reinforce a particular way of being. However, when done intentionally, each object becomes the product of a process of contemplation of our identities -an attempt to give it a discernible and intelligible form in the external world. In this case, this form emerges from the aggregate of objects we choose to own or be surrounded by. And here, the whole transcends the sum of its parts.
So we will regularly witness this collection of objects, as will others who visit our homes. The same principle applies to mobile objects such as clothing and other accessories.
The limitations of the individual mind
The conscious layer and the unconscious layer
We cannot handle our full identity with only our mind and body. Humans simply cannot. Our own identity, the fertile soil for our thoughts, emotions, inspiration, perception, interpretation, and experience of the world, will become too vast for our own mind-body processing capacity. So we will strive to provide it with a more durable existence.
Think about it. We might be blessed with a subconscious that performs all that intuitive work behind the scenes, arranging our thoughts, cementing lessons from daily experiences and practices, interpreting our engagement with the world in holistic ways that our conscious thought cannot even dream of achieving. Yet the subconscious does not obey conscious will. We cannot direct our will toward something and instruct our subconscious to make sense of it. It does not follow the rules of the surface world, the one where life in society unfolds, where we make conscious choices and attempt to materialise desires, purposes, and more. This is neither fortunate nor unfortunate; it simply it.
On one hand, subconscious processes make life less overwhelming, allowing us to experience it without having to manage all the input that we are actually absorbing from everything. And meanwhile, it is not simply discarding all this input, but processing it in extremely dynamic, sophisticated ways without requiring us to do much more than keep ourselves together in the conscious world.
On the other hand, as I just described, our subconscious will not unconditionally cooperate with us. If it processes certain things in ways that are not helpful, constructive, or are downright emotionally painful, we cannot simply message it and tell it to stop. We must learn to understand it, case by case, and take steps to remedy it -people try to do this through therapy, for instance-. It is a long and arduous process, ill-suited for a fast-paced environment where change needs to happen quickly.
Meanwhile, the conscious layer of our mind is where we fix our attention upon particular things and attempt to understand them by ‘thinking hard’ about them. This is the layer where make decisions and execute them, where we make choices, where we follow action paths -”I focus on this, I interpret it this way, so I will proceed like this and not like that”-. It is wonderful to be a conscious being, yet our minds do not possess such a big working surface to tinker with thoughts.
This mental workspace becomes even less practical when we do not even have concepts, theories, mental constructions of things that can help us move faster in our thinking: without having learned and then decided upon a particular concept of what decent behaviour is, our minds become trapped examining the behaviour of people on a case by case basis. We have no principles to guide our judgment with any reliability.
Rather than simply comparing a witnessed behaviour against our concept of decency and quickly assessing it, we become bogged down, forced to mud through the interpretive process. We evaluate each aspect that we can distinguish of the situation and according to the particular context where we witness it. We then put all of these impressions together to reach to a conclusion about this behaviour, allowing our decision to be guided by whether it seems more or less beneficial at that particular moment. Certainly, meticulously assessing situations and contextualising them is not inherently flawed, but when done without concepts and principles to frame our interpretations, it becomes a losing battle: our mind’s working surface cannot retain all those elements in place without any tools to compress them, manipulate them, or blueprints to guide our work. We will end up making decisions without a rationale that will make sense to us neither in the short nor the long term. We will realise that we failed to thoroughly consider the situation in the heat of the moment, perhaps forgetting certain aspects of how we aspire to behave when faced with situations we disapprove of.
In other situations, when pressured to act quickly, we will likely default to instinct, letting the subconscious to decide by communicating with us through a ‘hunch’ or a ‘vibe’ we cannot adequately explain. Sometimes this succeeds when our subconscious just happens to be properly calibrated to these specific situations, but relying on it for all situations remains unrealistic.
This oscillation between guidance from mental constructs and wading through unorganised input is constantly happening in our minds. And this represents merely a facet of the process. Our conscious minds exist in perpetual flux, like a boat violently lurching through the stormy ocean of the subconscious: shifting emotional states conditioning our energy levels, intrusive thoughts crashing in, the winds of our attention altering our course, etc. Meanwhile, thoughts spill overboard as our memories become overloaded: we lose our train of thought, we forget how we got there, we encounter an impasse in our reasoning, our thinking takes a needlessly negative turn, we decide that we need to focus elsewhere and drop all our thinking process up to this point, and so on. Sometimes it can even feel like we are highly capable but unsure jugglers upon this boat tossed by the waves.
Thus, through abstract constructs, objects and close relations, we may alleviate these fluctuations by anchoring all these unwieldy manifestations of our inner world and achieve some tranquility. We may rely upon them to extract our boats out of the occasional whirlpool, where our identity may end up sailing in circles, guided by a mix of incomprehensible subconscious forces and uncritically integrated cultural instructions for how to proceed in our thinking, interpretation, decision-making and behaviour. These anchors are solid and objective, in the sense that once the storm subsides, we will remain by them and they will have not changed. They might not be perfectly accurate, as they are rigid by definition, but they provide a chance at constancy. We must know our previous position to resume our journey from there.
Anchors for our identities
Springboards to further emergence: the mutually shaping relation between the anchors we choose and who we are.
We accomplish this for instance by imprinting meaning on objects around us. These objects summon certain associations, while the associations themselves become imbued with the object’s characteristics. The particular style, shape, and symbolic connotations of the object will in some way shape the association itself. We can associate an old cherished lamp with the initial exhilarating moments of independent living in our own place. And this lamp can be a second-hand lamp with an art deco design, which might infuse that first association with an awareness of our changing taste overtime, along with subtle fantasies of a 1930s café society lifestyle. We have effectively used the object’s qualities to make a particular feeling from a particular time instantly evocable -accessible- while also making use of its physical attributes to lend it certain overtones.
This symbiotic relationship also occurs with metaphors: we explain a particular idea through a metaphor, constraining the idea itself by the governing laws of that metaphor (if we use a metaphor related to cultivation, our idea will be exclusively explained through cultivation-related processes). Hence, the idea gives meaning to the metaphor, but the metaphor establishes the limited types of causes and effects, developments, variations, and relations with other things that the idea can follow.
And naturally, our most frequent anchors are words themselves. We combine them to give durable shape to our thoughts. We do this constantly: we have a thought about something that happened, a feeling emerges, we feel something, a sense of urgency, and it disturbs our peace, we cannot sleep. So we attempt to articulate this feeling to ourselves in words, latching elements of this feeling to sufficiently compatible words to give it shape and make it communicable, both to ourselves and others.
When we have added these clamps so that the thought can hold up with at least a loose structure -meaning it will resist the entropic tendency to dissolve into oblivion, or murky formlessness, mere potentialities immanent in our subconscious-, we can better review the feeling, and we can remember it. Then we might incorporate it into the larger whole of our identity, with our principles and opinions; or we might package it with other articulated thoughts into something else that other people can recognise, effectively adding another anchor in the form of the minds of others.
Thus, this process is not solely a matter of choosing our anchors. Its most significant repercussions do not rely on our ability to choose methods of consolidating our identity in durable ways, preventing entropy from disintegrating it -and confining it to the limitations of our body-, dissolving its best parts before they can even manifest meaningfully in the world. Rather, it represents a crucial process for the continuing discovery and, if you will, ‘cultivation’ of our true identities.
Once we begin thinking about identity in this mutually recursive relationship between consolidation (both inwardly and outwardly) and the fluctuating, stimulating yet untameable nature of our mind-bodies (we are not machines after all), we can transition to a potentially more fruitful metaphor. I would propose to shift from the highly capable juggler on a boat, eternally trapped in a fickle sea, to one of an inner kingdom3.
We all contain multitudes
The potential of our identities
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1892
I am repurposing this particular section of Whitman’s poem with my alternative interpretation.
When it comes to identity-making (and, in equal measure, discovery), the multitudes that we contain are nothing else than the vast crowd of elements that lie immanent in ourselves, and that we channel to the outer-world through our identities4. This aggregate of undefined elements constitutes our ‘potential’, whereby we perpetually sense that we are much more than what our daily being in the world manifests (both to ourselves and to everything and everyone else). The multitudes are this inner reservoir that nourishes our development in the world, that provides a vague direction, preferences, an ‘essence’. They are those aspects of ourselves that we cannot change, and that if we follow them they provide a sense of fulfilment unlike anything else. They are the multitudes of manifold elements, ranging from abstract to concrete. They can be images, desires, inclinations, memories, archetypes, theories, conceptions of our relations with others, concepts. They can be anything as long as they come from oneself and one’s individual unfolding in the world.
We might call the aggregate of these multitudes aspirations, vocations, passions and what not, but these terms merely address a thin layer of what they are. No words adequately convey their essence. It is impossible to capture them in words because words, by definition, operate through convention. The implication is that language is designed to speak about shared conceptions, not the utterly messy, profoundly complex, unique concoctions that conform individual characteristics.
These conventional terms are attempts to give form to the multitudes, to translate them into the world through pre-established frameworks. So, in practice, we may try to give some form to these elements through a term like ‘passion’. Then we take a look at the inventory of ‘passions’ from which people typically select in order to articulate their ‘passion’ (both to themselves and to others). These items may include names of professions, artistic disciplines, particular subjects, hobbies, sports or other recreational activities, types of entertainment and other forms of cultural consumption, intellectual domains and other categories. We gravitate toward existing methods of translating some of our multitudes through conventions because the alternative process is much more arduous: we need to explore and gradually occupy territory for our kingdom. Yet the items from these pre-established inventories rarely provide the pure and endlessly invigorating, meaning-generating radiance of giving form and endurance to true manifestations of our individual essence. And no instruction manuals exist for doing so the easy way. Instead, we need to go through the consolidation of our domains.
So managing these multitudes within us remains a labyrinthine process. We might try to manifest fragments of their totality by concentrating on some portion that overlaps with the passion ‘travelling’ and the aspiration ‘opening a bookstore’, but these represent only small settlements, habitable territories within our inner kingdoms. They form limited areas where segments of our inner multitudes can rest and find some quotidian predictability.
This process of staking claims on areas where our inner multitudes can settle is no more than the crystallisation of our identity in the world. We seek methods to express (channel outwardly) who we are by allowing our inner multitudes -all those ideas that resonate, all those impressions that are purely ours, all those conclusions about how we could have behaved better, all those images, conceptualisations of things that we develop in ways that are coherent with our unfolding into the world- to explore uncharted territories and discover fertile regions to map and/or occupy.
Then, like every thriving kingdom, we construct roads and infrastructure, so that we enable an easy return to these fertile areas next time5. And we develop settlements, erect scaffoldings, structures, signposts, runways and sustenance systems, all designed to shore us up so we can excavate deeper, uncover the real gems in these areas, and refine raw resources into more precious creations. Meanwhile, by anchoring, crystallising, and consolidating, we are hampering the progress of entropy, whereby our progress could be reverted due to our limitations as a single organic individual.
Territories and fertile areas of the self
Discovering and mining the self
Just as I described what I mean by inner multitudes, I will also explain what I mean by territories and fertile areas. The territories into which we launch our troops are the invisible and visible worlds, namely, the domains of symbols and ideas and the world of other people and things. They represent all of the latent meaning in the world, waiting to be discovered and nurtured. They are the bounds of one’s own curiosity and resiliency as we venture to see more of the world in every sense, to learn about it. In other words, the territory metaphor reflects our active engagement with the world, our troops being commanded by our distinctive way of experiencing and thinking it. A territory becomes occupied by our troops when we engage in the world in a way that is properly ours. The banners, language, style of politics, culture of these multitudes as they spread on the territory metaphorically constitute our own singular individuality.
Fertile areas are those parts that are especially resonant, that make sense to us on multiple levels. Typically, they involve intrinsic interests and pleasures, things that energise us and satisfy us, that we enjoy without expecting external rewards. They may also include things in the world that are especially resonant with who we know we really are beyond our persona (etymologically: our social mask). These areas represent what instinctively yet momentarily persuade us that the social order that we navigate is akin to a theatre play. A fine play indeed, but one that unfolds against a flat backdrop built upon a flat stage, all framed by the luxuriant background of all that life has to offer beyond the audience seating.
We desire to hold on to these fertile places. We want to cultivate them, dig further, transform them into paradise, both for ourselves and any potential visitors. We want our troops comfortable and readily connected to the rest of the kingdom for sustenance and motivation to continue their mission. We want more of our multitudes to flow into them effortlessly, allowing the settlement to expand and become richer. The settlement needs to fulfil itself, to become a paragon: a renowned and special place.
And naturally, the roads, infrastructure and other structuring and anchoring elements are none other than our methods of countering entropy-induced oblivion. We create durable things: objects, texts, stories, concepts, art, enterprises, communities. We acquire and arrange things in durable, ordered configurations: curation of culture, narratives (the arrangement of elements into a coherent, meaningful sequence), clothing, furnishings, decoration, and other objects. We leave our distinctive marks with our names printed on them: professional, personal or community achievements through our performance of a role we have chosen. And we strengthen relationships through a continuous advancement in our ability to be known better and to know the other better.
Provided these activities have been discovered, claimed (occupied), and developed by our own multitudes, they all reinforce and strengthen our kingdoms. They expand our inner worlds and identities. And they allow our finite minds occasional respite, so that they can later return to develop them further, which means to improve the quality of life of our multitudes by providing them with more effective and reliable resources to freely circulate the kingdom with far fewer impediments (repetitive thinking, intrusive thoughts, distractions, lack of direction, poorly managed emotional turmoil, insufficient self-knowledge, unexamined habits of how we interpret the world around us). In this way, they can dedicate themselves to what really matters: making paradise out of the settlement, uncovering the gems within its depths.
Our kingdom
Tapping on our kingdom’s resources, burnishing its splendour
Occasionally, we strike gold in the promised land. We experience an epiphany, discover a vein, and we plant a flag on it. We open a mine and build a sanctuary alongside it. We develop increasingly superior tools to extract these resources further and uncover others. We install handles, handrails, support beams, ladders and ventilation systems. In this way, we can return and continue our work later, picking up from where we left off.
This produces an ever advancing process of self-understanding, excavating ever deeper as we set an infrastructure in place that allows periodic rest, and enables deeper exploration next time. A consequence of this is that our settlements and our preliminary attempts to set scaffolding and infrastructure will be rudimentary at best; our multitudes will lack smooth connections to the metropolis and other settlements, they will struggle to properly exploit the resources in the land. But that is no matter: eventually they will, as long as they do not abandon the mission altogether, allowing all of the infrastructure established so far to rot and degrade into ruin.
Once the kingdom becomes reasonably expansive and developed, a coherence in one’s identity emerges. The network of roads, settlements and resources grows increasingly condensed, integrated, and efficient. We recognise what each settlement stands for, and circulation among them becomes swift and fluid, no longer sputtering along endless points of friction. At this stage, we will have developed and strengthened a sense of an identity that is purely organic with our individual unfolding in the world. We will be large, we will contain multitudes, like Walt Whitman expresses in his poem, yet we will contradict yourself less and less.
This expansive mission essentially aims to explore, claim fertile territory, consolidate, and develop it. If the mission strays from this essential purpose, then we are abandoning this kingdom and attending other life matters, such as questions of social expectations, cultural games, communal needs and obligations, status pursuit, competition, service to others6, chores, more pressing real world concerns.
Certainly all of these processes intertwine at some points within the kingdom, but attending to them means we are not deliberately and exclusively working with the resources within it while combating the gradual decay of our identities through entropy. Instead, we are entering spaces where external forces test the endurance of our infrastructure and settled multitudes.
And outcomes may vary: these external forces may gradually make us forget who we are, with the extreme case being an identity so weakened that we will be crawling through unsure terrain, desperately clutching at anything in the world of conventions that might accommodate even a tiny bit of our multitudes (and under suboptimal conditions). We will cling to such arrangements merely to maintain some functionality to survive and at occasionally obtain a modicum of fulfilment through the life events that the world of conventions insists in funnelling us through.
Alternatively, it is not impossible that these challenges might positively reinforce our identities. We are obtaining feedback from the hard tests of reality, which can be a priceless source of lessons (after all, our identities constitute some of our main sources of personal solidity in our engagement with the external world).
First benefit: sturdy workstationsfor resuming work
“Workstations in the deepest galleries of our inner resources” – setting up a solid camp to maintain the painstakingly progress achieved so far
When understood as advancing this mission to provide our multitudes a better place to live, every effort at consolidation will simultaneously serve us in the external world. As these elements become consolidated, we create possibilities to share them with others: we can tell others who we are and point them directly towards pathways for them to further explore our kingdom. We can even use all these settlements to enhance our memory of who we are. During moments when we return to the juggling atop the tormented boat, we can think back to our settlements, look at them as concrete evidence of our being.
Even more, in many cases others can access these settlements without any action from our part: our reputations precede us, our writings remain available for them, our projects, creations, acts carry our names, etc. In sum, what is consolidated serves multiple purposes. They are a concrete reminder of who we are to ourselves. They generate growing coherence between the disparate components of our identity7. They stand spread both in the visible and invisible world (respectively, of objects and ideas) as shareable, witnessable, explorable testimonies to our identities, as well as launching points for further exploration and development of our identities.
Lastly, they work as a multimodal vocabulary of who we are; they offer a larger repertoire of discernible and intelligible elements (in any form: from words to objects) that can be used to speak about our identity. Given our intimate familiarity with our kingdom, we can communicate its components more easily. As a result, the quantity of consolidated elements, of anchors, scaffolding and so on, that we establish increases their effectiveness in buttressing us for further exploration. We can talk about it with others, receive feedback, be recognised through the gazes of others. A consistent engagement with the external world, combined with an organic intertwining with it, is fundamental for the development of a prosperous kingdom (otherwise we risk retreating into solipsism).
Second benefit: facilitating human connection and mutual development
”Human connection – mimesis” – the elements of our crystallised identity are rest areas for others uncovering their own.
Another benefit of nurturing our multitudes within our kingdom is that this process can assist other people in exploring their own. Others on this same mission can access particular settlements of our kingdom to latch them onto some element that resonates with their own identities. In turn, they use these elements as initial strongholds of solidity and certainty (at least about some part of their identities, a prime example being the imitation of an idol’s demeanour) to mobilise their own multitudes into their own territories.
They can use them as consolidated foundations for their own journeys of identity extension. This is why it is no zero-sum game whatsoever. Everyone benefits. Hence why a military metaphor might not be the best choice; we are neither occupying, nor exploiting in ways harmful to others.
The result is that part of our kingdom becomes a “safe space” for others with a few similar affinities to rely on some initial, solid footing to venture into expanding their own. This process resembles how a fragile identity will fasten itself into already existing conventions to give its own multitudes an at least minimally viable existence. The difference is that our own consolidated settlements serve as more complex ”conventions” than ones belonging to general culture. This is because our “conventions” evolve from individual experience (I call them conventions because they have become identifiable, shareable, communicable enough to serve a similar function, albeit with a much smaller amount of adherents. Nonetheless, I think the proper, albeit a bit too technical-sounding, term would be consolidations, or identity extension). Conversely, general cultural conventions emerge to accommodate as many people as possible, regardless of their differences, as they must do so to be effective in maintaining societal harmony.
Yet, beyond broader general culture, a series of smaller, ideal communities can develop through this process: through the growth of a web of personal kingdoms overlapping via particular settlements (i.e., consolidated affinities).
Third benefit: actualising our naked self
“Beeswax might melt and our wings fall apart, but we have seen the land from above, warmed by the sun” – doing away with the technology once we did the work
Of course technology, particularly digital technology, plays a big role in this. Technology facilitates many of these consolidations, because it is made to execute specific processes reliably in order to address problems responsive to these processes. It is reliable and durable, smoothening out many cumbersome procedures along the way, which lightens the burden of our limited mind-bodies. Technology primarily serves as a facilitator, another tool in the kingdom’s own stockpile. When it comes to the digital, it has this particularity that it is lighting fast and infinitely replicable, which also renders it indestructible in a way (as long as there is energy and infrastructure to power it).
Conversely, it can be instantly erased, stolen, become inaccessible, or fall under others’ ownership with the same speed and control at a distance. It also has the characteristic of being immaterial and inaccessible without interfaces. All things considered -both advantages and limitations- these technologies serve as powerful facilitators for deepening and extending our identities, and we are fortunate to have many of them freely at our disposal in this day and age.
A complexity emerges when combining identity with its durable external extensions: what we would be without these extensions. Would we exist merely as a set of severely constrained potentialities, unable to be manifested or uncovered due to a lack resources to sustain them against the twists and turns of our organic minds experiencing the world?
I think that this is indeed the case. We will not get as far without an impulse to extend our identities and methods to do so durably. We can learn lessons, acquire skills, develop our character and bodies, but this encompasses only a part of what we can be. Without means to consolidate our progress of self-discovery and projection into the world, we cannot hold all this growth within our minds, unless we are extremely lucky, and we miraculously find efficient ways to do so consistently.
The good news is that we evolve alongside the development of these extensions. Once we have established and developed our kingdom, we are no longer the same: we have updated ourselves in our standalone mind-body (when deprived of all external identity supports) in response to the gradual evolution of this process, and the feedback and insights into our souls that its outcomes provide.
Consider the example of a person living in a fairly conservative environment who chooses to shave their head and dye it bright pink to explore their relationship with the world through this more provocative facet of their selves. Once they grow their hair back to its natural colour and keep it that way, they will have learned something from this experiment, perhaps discovering they can handle this boldness that they always felt they had in themselves.
Such a discovery of one’s courage lays bare new territories to explore, new possibilities that were previously dismissed because the requisite courage to even conceive them was presumed to be absent. This happens but at a much larger scale when engaging in the kingdom-making process. We might lose certain areas of our identity extensions; they might become outdated as we shed our old skins throughout the process. But this evolution is only natural. We have become emancipated from them, like a decaying kingdom retaining the wisdom and sophistication of its culture8, reflected in every aspect of its population’s daily existence. We can navigate the world as a more fulfilling version of ourselves, while we ready ourselves to begin the process anew, in its next cycle.
Do we have an inescapable essence?
“Real-isation both inwardly and outwardly” – are we born with something that is essential and unchanging?
What is that essence that defines the kind of multitudes we contain? That inner drive -that compass- that knows when to tell us that something we are doing, at its most elemental level, feels right while something else does not? What is that source of a particular, incomparable sense of fulfilment and enthusiasm9 that renders life all the more worth living and sharing with others?
I feel there exists a formless source of primordial energy within us. For reasons perhaps evolutionary, culturally developed, determined during infancy, or maybe a combination of all these influences, it is born with a form unique to each human being. It is an energy that is just that: energy. It doesn’t really harbour any particular content that we can describe, yet it shapes the forces driving us to lust for life and flourish, to continue making the most out of the world. All we can know is that it pushes us in some directions rather than others, regardless of our conscious responses to these impulses.
All artefacts of culture (both material and immaterial) serve as channels through which this energy finds expression, just as I described regarding how we select our passions from a list of socially sanctioned items. This is a way in which culture gives us the means to mediate part of this energy through something that is supposedly socially sustainable, and that we do not have to painstakingly develop ourselves. It can also be viewed as a collection of enduring departure points for people to claim their own kingdom.
However, these channels are imperfect; what culture in its default state puts at our disposal during our daily dealings is not enough for us to achieve an authentic flourishing. Nonetheless, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, cultural elements are conduits through which people’s primordial energies can interface with the world. They are like catalogues of pre-made holes, each with their own characteristics, through which parts of this nebulous energy can cross into the outer world. In the worse case, we might confound these items for our primordial energy, thinking that we are all the way down to our essence whatever stark definitions culturally conventional terms are designed encapsulate, and allow this to dictate every aspect of our being.
Our inner multitudes represent diverse expressions of this energy generated through our experiences with the world. If playing an instrument for a crowd is compatible (resonant, reactive) with some part of this energy, then the energy will generate multitudes of ideas, desires, impressions, concepts and such that relate to music. Because all these elements are the best suited for satisfying this energy’s demands.
Then, as we begin to discover and understand what these multitudes are, we face a choice. We may choose inactivity, confining these multitudes to stifling lives, huddled up in cramped spaces in a diminished, decrepit kingdom lacking any means for smooth circulation so that they can breathe and expand. Alternatively, we can choose to guide them in their mission to explore and settle somewhere fertile, enabling our primordial energy to manifest in better, more powerful, more discernible, more intelligible, and ultimately more fulfilling ways.
Our intertwining with the world
“Like ivy” – spreading out into the world while respecting it.
Musician Luis Alberto Spinetta expressed this mission in an elegant way:
“Human beings have a big problem, which is our egomania. It is a very foolish idea, and it is not only about the “self” of psychoanalysis. It is a question of the energy that one possesses, and how we establish a connection with it in a way that allows us to live not only happily, but also having great respect for all that surrounds us.”
This energy is always present, whether we establish highly conductive connections with it or not. If we fail to do so, the energy might work against us, hindering our chances of living more happily while having great respect for what surrounds us.
Maybe this is a fundamental part of being human. As we evolved through the aeons, we have grown to become -to contain– too much for our bodily limitations. Our inner worlds want to become real, or better said: realised. They want to be born, acknowledged and paid attention to. They want to brim over, tumble out into the world. So we structure the world (both the invisible and the visible, with our cultures, objects and arrangements) to allow ourselves to be who we are, to become what our bodies, minds and hearts are crying out for us to be, however much we attempt to repress their attempts. It is that primordial energy that insists upon manifesting in the world through the resonant elements we make available for it, so that we may witness it in its variegated manifested forms. Neither our minds, nor our bodies are made to bottle it all up!
I chose the term ‘mind-body’ to signal that my belief that the mind is not an entity that transcends the body. Even if it feels like all perceptive and thinking processes take place in our minds, we are doing so in an embodied manner. ↩︎
Sometimes what remains consistent is parts of us that do not reflect what lies deepest in us. They are products of learned ways of interpreting and reacting to the world, handed down by cultural modes/recipes, and a sheer incapability (or lack of effort, or inability to point out exactly what the problem is) to do better. It is an incapability to find the right channels for our authentic selves. Wanting to be is not the same as learning to be ↩︎
There are always alternative metaphors to war related metaphors. Perhaps because this metaphor came in a moment of inspiration and fits in perfectly, and I do not want to continue looking for another one, I will keep it. I will clarify though that it is an ideal, peaceful kingdom which expands its territories through diplomatic missions in a non-imperialistic way. ↩︎
Identity comes from the Latin identitas, which translates to ‘sameness’. I interpret it as that sameness that make us who we are across time. What repeats itself continuously about us. It carries a sense of consistency across time, which makes it discernible to us and to others. ↩︎
We are finding and founding our very own Macondo, the magical fictional town from 100 Hundred Years of Solitude, which grows from a small settlement with no contact with the world, founded by a group of exiles in a never before explored terrain, into a prosperous, well-known town. ↩︎
Although an individuated person can certainly provide better service to others ↩︎
They are disparate in so far that modern society is built over the premise that we need to separate them into precisely defined, distinct compartments ↩︎
Hellenistic Greece under Roman occupation comes to mind. ↩︎
Enthusiasm comes from Ancient Greek, it is based on the word theos, which translated to “god”. It conveyed the idea of being possessed by the gods, owing to the mysterious source of these moments of the temperament. It is a source that sometimes seems unending, of an energy that we did not know we were capable of having. I like to think that some used to think that perhaps it was an energy from the gods. ↩︎
