Every so often I am struck with these existential stoner thoughts about how miraculous human life is. Thoughts that are incompatible with the belief that there is no God.
It’s a goofy exercise, but humor me. Think about the financial system. In the time it took you to read this, a computer bought and sold millions of shares of stock. Millions of computers bought and sold millions of shares of stock. For that to happen, humans – descendants from primates – needed to band together to create corporations, codify a set of laws to govern them, sell pieces of those corporations to other humans, and then record the value of those pieces over time. Not to mention somehow develop computing technology – which I still don’t understand – to do so.
Obviously I am simplifying. It’s not possible to capture every single bit of luck, ingenuity and more luck, since our arrival on this Earth, that was required for high-frequency trading. Or for me to be sitting here, in an air-conditioned apartment, writing an email newsletter on my iPad about the wonder that is human life. Cheryl Strand titled one of her Dear Sugar columns Tiny Beautiful Things, and that is how I often try to imagine our place in the universe. We’re the result of an infinite number of tiny beautiful miracles that made us what we are today.
Even more unbelievable than our financial system is our ability to communicate with one another. To debate. Let me suggest one more exercise for you: The next time you find yourself reading an opinion about the coronavirus – WEAR MASKS! or OPEN THE ECONOMY! – take a moment to consider how incredibly strange it is that we evolved into a collection of seven billion individuals who choose tweets, text messages and other forms of the written word as our way of fighting over this pandemic, rather than simply killing one another. Maybe our ability to descend into these polarized debates is a mechanism for a disparate group like ours to keep from physically injuring our neighbors.
I’ve become obsessed with the Marcus Aurelius quote “our life is what our thoughts make it,” mostly because I find the idea popping up everywhere, like in this Tony Robbins interview (abridged):
“I always say to people, can you imagine if you were the creator and you come here to one of your creations and you say to this person, Joe, how do you like what I created for you? And he says, geez, God it’s hot as shit here. And man, you’ve got these stupid people I’ve got to deal with all the time. Plus you’ve got these little red ants. They’re tiny little ants and they bite my ass and they hurt like hell. Why would you create these annoying ants?
And then if you’re God, you go to someone else and you say how’s it going? And the guy says, hey, man, God, this is so incredible. This is the most beautiful place I could ever imagine. Oh my God there’s so many different people that challenge me and help me to grow and learn and people I can love. And you even created these red ants. I mean, these red ants are so tiny. I’m 1,000 times their size and they’re so courageous. They even bite me. It’s cool what you’ve created here.
Who do you want to hang with?”
To me, our ability to reflect on our lives, to conceive of more fulfilling ways to live them, is a miracle. Evolutionary theory gets me 99% of the way to understanding our place on Earth, but nothing explains why we stay up whispering until 2am at middle school sleepovers, or why we bare our souls to each other on long car rides. Sure, our jump from ape to man means we can use tools and grow our own food – I get that. But we aren’t just the next logical step up from apes. We’re a billion times more impressive than apes. We have stand-up comedians and nutritionists and genetic engineers, all individuals whose jobs are to enhance our existence beyond simple survival. We have activists who dedicate their lives to taking this miraculous society one step further. We’re no longer building the spaceship so much as fine tuning its smallest components.
I say all of this because I have now spent the last two and half weeks thinking about JK Rowling’s controversial tweets and the internet mess they’ve inspired. To catch you up if you’ve missed it:
Back in June, Rowling tweeted, in response to an article about “people who menstruate,” that only biological women menstruate. There was a significant backlash to that statement, which Rowling then responded to with a lengthy blog post in response to the backlash, which then led to an even angrier response that then snowballed into the Harper’s Letter, a statement defending free speech and decrying cancel culture, that was signed by a wide array of public figures. Rowling also alienated many fans, particularly on two major websites devoted to the wizarding worlds she created.
Last week I saw the event as cancel culture at its worst. Why can’t JK Rowling, a female, feminist and beloved author around the world, comment on what it means to be a woman? Ignoring the fact that her words hurt people – and they did hurt many people – hasn’t she at least earned a spot at that table?
With time, I’ve come to see this whole thing as just another miracle. Some of you will roll your eyes at the straight white guy telling you that humanity is beautiful, and you’re right. I deserve those eye rolls. I have no idea how gut-wrenching it would be for my favorite author to say something that invalidated my existence. And I’m fortunate to probably never have to experience that.
But I can’t shake that Tony Robbins quote above. We’ve retold the glass half full metaphor in so many different ways because it’s powerful and it’s true. I was angry when I read How JK Rowling Became Voldemort in The Atlantic because I saw it as another convoluted internet argument that nobody wins. But that is only one way to look at things. The other is to see the whole thing as evidence that we are special. That we spend so much of our time on discourse, and improvement, as opposed to simple survival.
Now, at a time when many of us feel more alone, fearful and angry than at any point in our lives, that discourse can seem oppressive. “Everyone is fighting. Everyone is polarized. Nothing makes sense anymore.” That may be true, but it’s the price we pay for all those tiny beautiful things.
If you have the time this week, I’d recommend you watch either a) David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water graduation speech or b) Bert Kreischer’s The Machine comedy special. Both are so great for very different reasons!
More to come this week.
– Emmett
What I’m Listening To:
David Yarrow – The Tim Ferriss Show (two and half hours of top-notch storytelling)
Free Speech, Safety and the ‘Letter’ – Ezra Klein Show