Duality

"According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small and incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual - but its object is always exterior to the man. The man suggests that he is capable of doing to you or for you. (...)

By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defined what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. (...) To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. (...) From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. 

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman."

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

In writing to a man, for instance, you notice this distinction with unmistakable clarity.

The surveyed: buoyant, filled to the brim with living emotion, alive, absurd, intense, short-sighted, impulsive, unpredictable, sensual, demanding, loving and in love, confused, afraid, enraged, enthralled, ecstatic, thrilled, intemperate, playful, silly and fun, despairing, sincerely attached, suffused with the awe of being and of the other, attentive, curious, engaged, capable of infinite healing and unpredictable growth, but fragile, but funny, but silly, and sad.

The surveyor: sometimes embarrassed on behalf of the surveyed, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes begrudging. Maybe the sort of attitude inherited from one's parents, who themselves were embarrassed by their own humanity, tyrannical dictators of it, frustrated managers. Maybe dictated by the community, which needs you to be predictable and well-behaved.

But what does the surveyor convey for others to understand? There is a midpoint between the two endpoints, between sincerity and politeness, between being fully yourself and being something that fits within the bigger picture. And the midpoint varies from situation to situation. And I don't know what forces pull in each direction.

In the personal, we champion the surveyed. Who today won't tell you to show yourself, to do you, to be honest, and bold?

In the professional, it's the surveyor that often or usually gets the praise. The very word "professional" suggest a person who has mastered herself and can mould herself to the required interface. In work, the community must win over the individual, because that's how anything gets done. We put aside our whimsical multicoloured selves for a while in order to build the city. It's the sacrifice we make in order to have cities. And everything else that membership of the human community affords us.

And sometimes when you work all the time, the surveyed grows riotous from suppression. Can you be yourself and still do good work? Can you even do better work by being yourself?

The answer, as ever, is balance. Bowing yourself to the greater cause of Building is not a problem to be done away with. The sacrifice can be awe-inspiring, grand. There is a Building instinct within us. Such as there is a Social instinct within us, for which being polite at the cost of sincerity is a joyous sacrifice.

Falling in Love

Some time ago I fell in love with Being. And this is a thing I've been failing to communicate to people ever since. This falling in love thing. With capital B Being. This how I went from thinking that the being alive was maybe a bit of a not even an especially funny joke to perceiving long stretches of moments of breath and consciousness and thought as staggeringly, transcendentally beautiful, maybe not continuously perceiving this but reliably, that moments of being are self-evidently filled with awe and laden with meaning, grounded, large, rooted in time, rooted in space, connected, rich, and good, exactly. It came down mostly to eyebrows lifted at angles and cocked heads and wry smiles to signify a thinking person's sophisticated scepticism. And that maybe can they have some of whatever I was on, please. 

But then they always say this of people in love.

But so I take my validation and approval from books, however. And this life affirming love of living is something many millions of people have arrived at over the years, independently. Here's, for instance, Virginia Woolf:

Or here's David Foster Wallace in this is water, the spirit of whom I'm currently being inhabited by, in case you couldn't tell.

Or indeed here's Leo Tolstoy, whom if you find yourself judging and deriding and dismissing because of the God references in the paragraph below, then maybe perhaps best to stop reading this right now, because this whole philosophical essay is maybe just about beyond you at this point in your character-building journey. I'd venture to tender.

Because the language of mysticism sort of works here and maybe is needed here, to hint appropriately at these mysterious facts of being. The language of music, the language of the visual arts. The language of the beyond-articulated-meaning and so on.

Because this life-affirming love of Being is an in-place gestalt in perception rather than a journey to some elsewhere [q.v. M. Proust "The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another" etc]. It's a telling of a better story from the same set of facts, as it were, to paraphrase another of my heroes. But not in the self-delusional sense of believing a lie rather than having the steel cohones to face the meaninglessness of existence, like a real man, I should like to make clear.

Because the fact of the matter is that the meaning of existence is not an illusion. It's always there, if you know how to look at things. Through this seeing with the new eyes.

Because meaning then reveals itself to you like the 3D object in a magic eye picture. Can you see it?

Deviant Art

Stereograms are the perfect visual metaphor for this, I think.

Some people seem to simply get it.

And just for the record I should say that I consider myself an atheist and not intently given to any lust for magical thinking, I don't think; but I have sympathy with the religions on this. Because I suspect the Christian tradition was right, allegorically, that this way of looking at the world is not beyond anyone who genuinely wants it. But rather is democratic. Every religious tradition that I know of seems to have a version of this idea. Mindfulness and meditation, say. Apparently Carl Jung said that people do not see God because they don't look low enough.

Every moment is inexhaustible.

And I should also like to stress that this is not to be confused with hedonism. It's not meant to be hedonism, anyway. Because the hedonistic view of living is only half the story. The other half is our duty to protect Being. And a sacred duty at that, for lack of a better adjective. We are, more than just metaphorically, mere stewards of existence, really: we carry the torch of Life from one moment in time to another. We live just long enough to carry this torch for a while. And so may as well try our best not to become hell-bent on putting it out, the torch, if we can manage it. Try our best not to be resentful of what a stupid mission this is and painful and pointless, this carrying of the torch. Because while it might be, at times, (stupid and painful and pointless), but beside that it's also sacred: because Being must continue Being, you see. Because Being is good. Whatever Being is, i.e. whatever it means for something to be living and un-rock-like: it's worth having. On balance.

This is an axiom, by the way: that Being is good and worth having.

Accepting this axiom is what the religious mind means by the expression `leap of faith`, is what I gather from Mr J. B. Peterson. Live your life as if Being were good and worth having, says he, and every moment of being (an expression of Being) will reveal itself to you as meaningful and joyful and worth every bit of the very real and unpleasant hassle of living it. As overflowing with meaning, these moments, as ripe fruit overflow with juices. Something like that. Or maybe better that you listen to JBP preach about it, in much more articulated form, in this lecture series.

But so anyway, accepting this axiom is a choice, though.

The interesting thing is, being inclined to dismiss these non-hard-numbers-and-science-y ways of looking at things myself, I didn't actually arrive at this conclusion via the religious route, exactly. Though what the difference is between the religious experience and the aesthetic experience is not precisely clear to me yet. But let's anyway say I arrived at it via psychology. Via philosophy. And via the I thought secular wisdom of literature, I guess.

You could say it started with Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which as far as I'm concerned is all about epistemology and a lot more fun to read than the corresponding entry on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which I never had the dedication to finish). How do we know what we know, and cetera. Though in higher probably it actually kicked off with the untold numbers of hours I spent listening to Alain de Botton's butter-rich voice telling me how I was in fact OK and everything was OK and always had been OK and feeling finally unconditionally loved and regarded and accepted. Or likelier still with the unconditional love and acceptance lavished upon me by my existential phenomenological therapist in the US of A.

But so anyway it's still probably fair to say that epistemology consumed me somewhat at this time in my life. And fancying myself, as I said, weary of mysticism, I turned to philosophy. Well, popular philosophy (I'm not that either smart or patient). Q.v. Truth, by Simon Blackburn, and Think, and Ethics, which I returned to. And David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, which I've written about before. Et cetera. But it was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow, I think, which made me a bit more willing to consider that perhaps maybe this psychotherapeutic view of the human psyche wasn't entirely unscientifically deluded. Because here was psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience as I gathered it from Mr. Steven Pinker's several books corroborating the psychotherapeutic claims, or so it seemed like. And anyway reading Carl Rogers, and Brene Brown, and Leo Tolstoy made me feel so beloved and OK and accepted and so on.

Though it was probably War and Peace that finally sealed the deal, for me, I think. Something in that book managed to help me see Being in a whole new lighting. Or not new light exactly, as just a new framing. A wide framing. An all-encompassing framing.

Because, that's the nub and essence of it, I think, of this loving of being. It's that before I loved being consciously, I was narrow framing. I thought that Life was about my life. And it isn't.

I'll pause for a moment to let you take that in.

Being is not about my being. And the good of Being is not about the extent to which my own being is not (let's be honest about how we consider things) not even good, but pleasant. Something like that. Life, in its entirety, is miraculous beyond expression, is the right way of looking at it, I think. And so no sooner I'd thought this than I began to see evidence of this everywhere. In watching London go about its life, in city lights glittering on the river, in the staggering strangeness of people going about doing their people things, in standing besides and marvelling at the ethereal beauty of Ttéia 1C and so on. I mean, it's everywhere, once the scales fall from your eyes, this truth and beauty and meaning.

And it occurs to me that I may have hated Being because I used to think this: that if my life sucks therefore Being sucks also. But in fact this is invalid. Just because you are suffering doesn't mean that everything and everyone suffers everywhere. No, indeed, there are at any given moment, scores of people in the world, non-trivial numbers of people, who are truly and actually happy. And I don't mean deluded-happy. I don't mean distracted or drugged up or horse-like beheld by the carrot of future felicity. I mean happy. And there are places on this planet of breathtaking, transcendental beauty and people beholding these places right now, and feeling nothing but hug-from-God-like bliss and joy and pure unadulterated happiness. Really. 

They say it's only at around age 2 that children begin to realise how their own emotions do in fact end at the boundary at their own bodies and how other people around them can, and in fact are, feeling differently from themselves in all sorts of ways, most of the time. But I, for one, didn't quite internalise that lesson.

But of course the thing about appreciating the marvel of Being is that you have to give up your resentment. With all the associated feelings of anger and self-righteousness and occasional malefic glee, which feel nice, to be fair. And just enjoy the possibility of happiness vicariously, if so it happens to elude you, personally. Maybe.

Though just to be clear, this celebration of Being does not in fact entail, for me at least, entering some permanent state of bliss a la Eckhart Tolle. I'm not saying life isn't suffering, because it is. And I'm not saying you should resign yourself to the suffering and injustice of the human universe, because you shouldn't. This is not about turning the cheek and accepting everything unconditionally and going into denials that there's any such thing as evil or tragedy.

(Though it's probably worth noticing that suffering is a lot oftener due to the axiomatic tragedy of being, rooted in the inherent vulnerability of all things living, than it is due to deliberate malevolence and evil. Since this helps with the giving up of the resentment project.)

But anyway back to the clarification, loving Being isn't to deny that evil and tragedy are real. The whole thing comes down to avoiding narrow framing: just because evil and tragedy are real, doesn't mean that bliss and awe-inspiring splendour of existence aren't real also. They're both real. Concomitantly.

Q.v. the concept of ambivalence.

Which is interesting because not so unlike what is required for the falling of actually in love, in the more parochial sense of with another human person. Realising how to embrace this ambivalence towards your own self as well as another's. That is to say, realising & accepting that you are both flawed creatures by necessity, mere intermittently-rational primates with a long and comprehensive list of unseemly inadequacies.

But that maybe if you really tried, you could just about make it. If you really put your mind to it and tried, putting aside your self-pity and resentment and fear for a moment, and fear of responsibility and fear of inadequacy to the side for just one minute, and actually tried sincerely to do the loving for once, active tense loving, without waiting around to be loved, and if you decided to love and participate in The Project of Being, and if you did this, at least some of the time, then maybe just maybe, you could just about make it, and manage to carry the torch of life from one end of your lifespan to the other, successfully.

Resolutions

I said to the man: I want to read more, in 2018.
And the man said: Why?
And I said: Good question.

Why's are important. When I don't feel like doing something - say the washing up, to exercise, or return a phone call - it's either because I want something else more (sleep, usually) or because I forgot why I wanted to do the thing in the first place. Chores are chores not only because they are tedious - what isn't! - but because they are imposed. By necessity, by nagging spouses, by the law. Quite often, by your own incomprehensible past self. You either never knew or forgot the why. But if you take a moment to recover the reasons, almost by magic, motivation returns.

This occurred to me one day when I was doing the washing up. I hate doing the washing up. It's so boring. I'd put it off and off all morning and now I had a legitimate reason to put it off further still: I was running late already. But then I remembered my why: I didn't want to be a crappy housemate. I was living with my sister at the time and I didn't want her coming home after a long workday to cook dinner in a dirty kitchen. In addition to which, I have this pact with Future Me: I do my best not to make its life too difficult and in return it doesn't judge me too harshly with the benefit of hindsight. It's a good deal. So here were two very good motives. Suddenly, I wanted to do the washing up. I was, in fact, quite glad to do it.

Why do a good thing for the wrong reason if you could do it for the right ones? When I first started to run, I did it because I wanted to be more like the foreign kids I met at university. Apparently exercising was cool in this part of the world. All the well-dressed people did it. So I started running. Then I fancied that it would make more attractive to the men. I became wedded to an image of myself that looked suspiciously a lot like what I'd seen in Nike adverts. And so I kept pushing myself to exercise, getting by turns angry and depressed whenever I didn't. But here's the problem with that logic: running makes you neither desirable by men nor trendy. Really, the relation between those two things and running is correlational at best. So then if those are your motives, no wonder you don't want to do it. Your inner sloth might be a sloth, but it isn't stupid: it knows when it's being lied to! Here's when I stopped having trouble motivating myself to exercise. When I learned that past age 30 your IQ begins slowly to drop - unless you exercise regularly. I looked it up and there is solid science behind this claim. These days, that fact has sunk in so thoroughly, that when several days have gone by without a good workout, I literally feel stupider. (It helps that I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, but still.) The point is - good reasons are good motivators.

Nowadays, if I don't return a call, attend a party, or run a chose, I always ask myself why. I assume it's for a good reason. Being tired is a good reason. Pushing yourself beyond the threshold of sustainability is like living off your credit card. It's either desperate or stupid. And eventually you'll pay for it way more than it's worth.

So when the man asked me why I wanted to read more, I was stunned. I couldn't think of an answer. Why wouldn't I, I attempted feebly. No wonder I had failed my 2017 Goodreads challenge. I'd forgotten my motives.

So why do I read? This is a good question, because reading is really quite expensive. It takes hours and hours and hours and if you take notes and write about and reflect upon your reading, it takes hours and hours still more. As we speak, it's Saturday night in London and I chose to stay in so I could finish reading my book. This is not self-evidently the smart choice for a 30 year-old single female. And plenty of people don't read. Smart, educated people, people whose brains are worth many tens of thousands of units of legal tender - do not read. Not regularly, anyway, not books. Most humans have no more than about six thinking hours in a day and most of us pledge that to some legal entity in return for money. Or invest it in relationships. Or in a million other ways to spend free time. So whatever my reason, it had better be good.

And it is good. I think. The reason is this. I read because reading, I find, is the best way, sometimes the only way, a way certainly well-trodden, whereby I change my mind. And changing my mind, no hyperbole, is the only thing that keeps me living.

I know when I haven't been reading for some time, because I feel utterly depressed, quite painfully. It's like being trapped in a room wherein the stultifying air's gone stale. It's agonising, like boredom, but it's worse than boredom, because it stretches infinitely in every direction. Everything I do feels tedious and uninspiring. There's no mystery of existence to be experienced, no magic. It's like walking on a bruise. Like watching daytime reruns. My mind is stuck on looping over the same old ways of looking at the world, my curiosity wanes and wilts and slowly gives way to cynicism and then I start to feel like death and then like dying. It's excruciating. The same old thoughts swirling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in endlessly recurring patterns, never jolting, nothing new, never any new conclusions. It's downright claustrophobic. And it can make for a pretty miserable existence. I know more than one person about whom I quite regularly think: if only you could move in thought-space just a little and change the way you interpret the world - just a little - how much wiser you would be and how much lighter-hearted!

Reading keeps me sane the way exercise keeps me sane. And staying sane is autotelic.

How Not to Worry

I think we can all agree that worrying makes very little rational sense. Helpfulness-wise. Rarely is worrying helpful. And I full-heartedly agree with what my friend called the best career advice he read this year: put your headphones in, stare at your computer, and assume that everyone loves you until you are fired, or retire. (The Book of Mormon put it another way.)

But the truth is that demanding of yourself a stiff upper lip, when it comes to unhelpful emotions like worrying, doesn't really work. It is pretty clear to me that merely being made aware of something sensible and a verifiable fact does very little in the way of changing my behaviour. Only a crude understanding of human thought could posit that a life strategy's helpfulness as I see it carries much weight with the complex and mysterious brain-machine that is responsible for what I eventually say and do.

So if a stiff upper lip doesn't work, what does? The boring answer is analysis: many sad and lonely days slowly debugging the black box intricacies of your mysterious brain-machine.

The reason why analysis is more likely to work is because worrying is not necessarily irrational. The brain-machine has its logic, if one that gives more weight to survival than to your minute-by-minute psychological comfort. To change the outcome (worry), one must begin by assuming that the logic of worrying is valid, and then ask why.

Suppose the machine works thus. You worry about not being good enough (most common secret worry of everyone I've ever worked with). The internal structure of this worry, implicitly or explicitly, probably goes something like this: if I underperform, then I am worthless; if I am worthless, then I have no claim to other people's love and tender care which are absolutely necessary to my continual & thriving existence (because in my model of how the world works, people don't hand over their regard unless under duress from the awe instilled in them by evidence of my measurably superior intellect; and in this model I also identify entirely with my intellect, because evidently what else is there to human beings). So if I have no claim to TLC, then I am left to contemplate a combination loneliness and self-loathing in the dreary company of Netflix and nothing else. Sneer all you want at the plainly untrue, or certainly very questionable, claims in that sequence: if that is your model of how the world works, then the worry is entirely valid.

And faulty models of how the world works are no joke. Because these are not explicit, coherent, logical constructs. They are implicit, embodied, wordless intuitions built upon instinct and tradition, and half-forgotten childhood experiences, and the infinite stream of subversive media messages beamed at your subcortical systems every moment of your waking life. So, for the most part, you are not privy to the mechanics of how these world models come about. You are only privy to the result (the worry) and the dim but inescapable conviction that this worry is in fact plausible.

And not only plausible, but urgent. If fear of failure is connected by rigid conviction to a fear of rejection, then no amount of stiff-upper-lipping is going to suppress worrying. Rejection is no joke. It's not absurd to think that there might be some evolutionary logic for the emotion of rejection to be wired together with the prospect of actual, imminent and probably unpleasant death. Remember that scene in Gravity with the Hubble Space Telescope when Sandra Bullock's character is out on a spacewalk and there is a sudden wave of high-speed debris from a nearby satellite explosion and the space shuttle is destroyed and her attachment gear is wrenched off and she is catapulted into space? I submit that that's not entirely unlike what rejection can feel like: like being sent adrift into the deadly darkness of interstellar space, alone.

So rather than taking the tough-guy attitude that worrying is for women and weaklings, as a popular folk story from back home used to say, it might be more effective to engage with the worry (or - insert unhelpful emotion of your choosing) and debug it properly.

The skill of analysis and self-awareness is pretty much indispensable for an undespairing adult existence. And yet I'm sure it sounds trite and boring on paper, even if in practice I've seen it elude many a clever and educated people. It still eludes me, in the trenches of day-to-day existence, all the time.

Unconditional Positive Regard

In the real world people worry about status. They polish their highlight reels. They secret away their Impostor Syndrome. They try to play it cool. They judge and expect to be judged. They cleave the world into good and bad and winners and losers. In the real world, people understandably stick with being tough and tough-minded.

But there is another world, call it Neverland. That world which your tough-minded striver dismisses as naive, childish, impractical, and a festering ground for hippies and anarchists (you know, people without ambition, quote-unquote). I venture to submit that perhaps this other world might have some insights to offer.

You can read about it lots of places. I was reading On Becoming a Person ("a therapist's view of psychotherapy"), by the famous twentieth century American psychoanalyst Carl Rogers and I was very glad for it. Like Impro by Keith Johnstone before it, or Men, Women and Worthiness by Brene Brown; like Book of Life by Alain de Botton; like Great Thinkers by School of Life; like War and Peace by Tolstoy and The Notebook by Agota Kristof; like Steppenwolf and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse; like Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut; and like one of my favourite books of all time, L'Etranger by Camus. Like all these books and others, and this lady speaking at Google, On Becoming a Person filled me with this joy. A joy simple and steady and tranquil, like a warm summer's day in feeling format. This was Neverland.

What was this joy, this sense of something meaningful and important, this tranquility of mind, so unlike the tough-mindedness of the real world? I kept going back and forth.

In the real world, I worry about everything all the time. Have I done a good enough job? Have I upheld my values? Have I successfully avoided disappointing the people I care about? etc.

But back in Neverland, those worries lapse. Here, Dr Rogers speaks to me with soothing reassurance thus: In my relationships with persons, I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not; I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself, and can be myself [because] the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. His approach to relationships is humbling. It's a reminder of how much more empathy I could bring to my own, of how I could be judging less, accepting more, and trying harder to understand rather than dictate, to help rather than demand.

Dr Rogers reminds me of the virtue of giving (provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth) and acceptance (a warm regard for [the other] as a person of unconditional self-worth - of value no matter what his condition, his behaviour, or his feelings; (...) a respect and liking for him as a separate person, a willingness for him to posses his own feelings in his own way; (...) an acceptance of and regard for his attitudes of the moment, no matter how negative or positive, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes he has held in the past; and acceptance of each fluctuating aspect of this other person; (...) a continuing desire to understand).

Why these virtues? Because, he continues, it is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre - it is only as I see them as you seem; and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience. And as with you, so with myself.

This unconditional positive regards is what Neverland has that the real world doesn't.

I have a Virginia-Woolf-type archetypal memory that helps me return to this feeling of unconditional positive regard. It is December, a few days before Christmas. It is cold. The day is almost over. I am walking through Covent Garden and everywhere there are people: people doing their Christmas shopping, people drinking in the pub, people talking, people walking, people everywhere doing their myriad people things. And I reach the plaza at Seven Dials, whence seven roads stretch outwards like the seven spokes of a cart wheel. And still more people can be seen sauntering underneath the Christmas lights, underneath the decorations, sauntering underneath the crests and mountains of the darkening winter clouds. The seven roads are sprawling like wide riverbeds through the tall canyon of buildings. And soundtrack to all this is Girl from the North Country, in a version by Bob Dylan, and it's a melancholy song. But melancholy and uplifting, and light with the sort of calm composure that one feels when one has accepted one's yearning as definitely unending and as the normal condition of one's life. It is just the right soundtrack. And right there is that joy, that melancholy and uplifting joy akin to reverence, expansive and suffused with awe, at life's tremendous capacity for suffering and still more tremendous capacity for growth. It's a joy as if of standing before the Project of Being, so much bigger than oneself, or one's mission, bigger even than the ambitions of one's species as a whole. For a moment, I feel free from the tragedy of unyielding tradeoffs, finite resources and finite lives of intolerable vulnerability. And from that perspective, Neverland's unconditional positive regard truly does feel like the only sensible attitude to existence.

Why I Read (Even the News) & How to Tell a Good from a Bad Story

Order makes me happy. I can spend a day organising papers. I organise drawers, too, and my calendar and the nuggets of wisdom from books I read. Order is my peace of mind. Order soothes me with the promise that the world makes sense. At least, once you think hard enough.

Order makes you happy, too. Hence this craze for material design and meditation and minimalism. And white space. Because without order there is chaos. And confusion and, worse of all, chance. All scary stuff. If I may grow lyrical for a moment, if you squint, life in all its forms is one long struggle for order, against a melancholy universe of noise and entropy and chance. We are sense-seeking machines. We seek to build a world of order, where things are clear, coherent, predictable - and therefore fair and safe. Order is safe.

Hence why I read. Intelligent thought is an organising principle. Comprehension turns this disheveled reality into a well-structured story inside of which the world makes sense. Smart people are like focusing lenses. They can take the bewilderment of Brexit, with its multitudes of strangers thinking things stranger still, and turn it into the neat thesis of the "left behind". So panic over. Here, we feel certain, confident and calm. Out there, anguish.

This is not to say, with postmodernism, that everything is a deception. Some of these stories are objectively truer than others. This is to say that intelligent thought makes me happy. Even in small doses. Here are just 313 words of dim unease sublimated into a block of rhythmic prose that you can share on Facebook. A good story makes the world intelligible. And bearable.

Hence why I read, even the news.

The news is annoying because it is essentially a slot machine. It even looks like a slot machine, all flashing headlines and that. It's a gamble. You hit refresh and maybe win a bit of better understanding. Or something funny about a cat. Mostly, you win nothing, he-said she-said blather from pundits and analysts who sound more and more like they might fail a Turing test.

To be fair to the news, its job got harder. Here is some history. News used to be about concrete if weird things happening to people nearby. Stuff you could understand. These days, concrete events have been replaced by patterns, analysis, underlying issues, explanation, charts and everything else needed to make sense of a complex world. The time of stories has expanded to include past (context), change over time (trend) and future (forecasting). Individuals have been replaced by representatives, experts, commentators and spokespeople. In the 1890s, you might have read a story about Miss Emilia Taylor from 224 Evelyn Gardens. Now, she will just be an English teacher in London (i.e. nationality, profession, region). Also, back then, the farther it was from where you lived, the less it was news. Now, you have to keep up with everything everywhere. Well, you don't. People who buy and sell stock across continents have to. It was for these people that news agencies like Reuters were set up, rather than the likes of you, with your boring individual existence and lack of a portfolio. All that came later, when someone invented rubrics, meaning a way of sorting readers into consumer groups. Still, self-ascribed members of the elite have always liked to have opinions about everything. I am thinking of Stepan Arkadyevitch from Anna Karenina: "for him, living in a certain society - owing to the need.. for some mental activity - to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat".

But having views is indispensable not just because I move in a "certain society". Views are indispensable because they keep me sane. A good story is an ordered interpretation of reality. It is desk tidy for the brain. I would run out of room to breathe, for all the facts and data, without stories to assemble them into stable, comprehensive wholes. Great stories turn a pile of information into a single thought. One you can remember and hold in working memory and reason about without feeling faint. The thesis of the "left behind". Nationalism vs Globalism. The gig economy. And the better the story, the bigger the bucket. Good stories, like good explanations, have reach.

There is science to back this up. Cognitive science calls this assembling of information into coherent wholes chunking. To handle large quantities of information, we pack them into higher-order abstractions. Turning the key to start the engine, checking incoming traffic, putting the car into drive, steering and changing gear becomes "driving". Millions of people, with their sense of selves and habits and love affairs and daily struggle to make it to 50 without shooting themselves, become "Germans" or "generation X" or "digital natives" or whatever. Chunking is the hallmark of expertise. Chess grandmasters have chunked individual chess pieces into valid configurations, the way we all chunk letters into words (the chess "vocabulary" is much bigger). So we need chunking. We need these stories to make sense of the world.

The trick, of course, is finding the good ones. This is why I like brands. Daniel Kahneman says this: the basic test of skill is persistent achievement. What a brand does is advertise skill. And because its achievement is persistent, a brand helps you find important repositories of skill reliably. Great brands are great. I love The Economist, Book of Life and Steven Pinker. People can be brands, too, and great writers always are. It is hard to brand the news, because news is essentially random, but you can brand the quality of reporting and the skill of the people who do it. That is why I read The Economist. You can't brand a local grocery shop either, but Tesco and Waitrose have managed to brand the experience around one. I have a Twitter list called "great". Here I collect outstanding brands, the way a photographer might collect lenses. There is also "British politics", with a set of lenses, and "psychology and cognitive science", with its own.

Hunting for these brands, these people, these lenses, is like foraging. Except you are after good explanations rather than mushrooms. In theory, you have a choice between exploration (going from fertile patch to fertile patch) and exploitation (selecting a patch and sticking with it until it is no longer fertile). Darwin, for example, seemed to prefer serial exploitation, that is mastering one topic at a time (or, at least, this was the pattern he displayed in the 665 books in the diary he began when he was 28, they think he might have explored more in earlier years). In practice, it is all a bit random. Then again, collecting stuff always is. You just have to keep at it.

Which stories you collect is important. "No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant", says William Clifford in The Ethics of Beliefs; "it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resemble it before and weakens others". You can't get tricked by a piece of fake news by accident. Most people are rational. Rational just means that your views are consistent with each other. But you can be rational and wrong. Years of consistent deception will make you believe anything. A guy in a white coat will make you do most things. Again, quoting Daniel Kahneman: "For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs". So the brands you follow matter.

Luckily, truth has a nagging habit of turning up evidence. After a while and with sufficient intellectual rigour, you learn to tell the good story from the bad. As someone said recently, there is no post-truth way to fly an airplane (I think it was Brian Cox, but I could not find the quote). A foundation of good stories will keep you safe from lies, like a good immune system. The lies will try to fit in with them and fail. 

That said, some lies masquerade as truth quite successfully. This is because, given a choice, our brains will choose coherence over truth. The list of cognitive illusions is staggering. Here are just two from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, fast and slow. If I say that Alain is "intelligent - industrious - impulsive - critical - stubborn - envious" and that Ben is "envious - stubborn - critical - impulsive - industrious - intelligent", you will like Alain better than Ben. Because order of information matters. Because we prefer to feel either one way or another about a person and ambivalence is hard. And if I repeat the phrase "the body temperature of a chicken" enough times and then ask you to rate true or false the statement "the body temperature of a chicken is 144°", you will rate it true more often than random. Because familiarity matters. As Dr Kahneman concludes: "The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen... Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance".

Still, I remain hopeful. We need stories, because we need order, because we need to feel safe. Our stories are like houses, they protect us from a reality that is far weirder, more random and more uncanny than we like to think. The trick is not to get rid of stories, but to continue to hunt for better ones.

Bad Luck

I realised something the other day. I realised that identities are contiguous parts of our bodies. And that we prefer guilt over bad luck.

This week, in acting class, we were discussing an exercise called the Assumptions Game. In this game, you pair with someone and give them a good looking over and observe the sort of thoughts that cross your mind. Perhaps, "this person is a musician" or "this person is kind" or "this person likes to wake up early" (often the person you are paired with is a complete stranger). Then you take turns to share these assumptions - you look straight at your partner and say "you like to wake up early". Your partner's job is to accept the statement, with a "yes I do" or "yes I am", after which you swap roles. As you can imagine, this exercise can quickly push people out of their comfort zone. In regular life, we self-censor for a reason. The first few things that occur to you are always more psychotic, obscene and offensive than you feel comfortable admitting, even to yourself.

Anyway, in this discussion, I kept referring to the Assumptions Game as the Prejudice Game, named so by my paranoia. While playing, I had felt this constant anxiety, like what if I am really a bigot only masquerading as a decent person. Bigotry is a sure path to ostracism, where I'm from. So I called it the Prejudice Game. For some reason, this seemed to annoy the teacher and eventually he cut me off, if gently, by insisting that I please call it a game of assumption not prejudice. 'Prejudice', he explained, 'would be if I were to say to you something like - if you can afford to live in London without working, then your father must be a dentist'.

That is when it happened. Had I been anywhere else, my brain would have happily just parsed the message and moved on ("prejudice is an offensive assumption, here is an example, you should call the thing by its proper name lest you put others off it" etc). But because I was in acting class, where we are conditioned to pay special attention to our breathing and posture and other physical sensations, I immediately realised I felt, for a moment, genuinely upset. First, I think I must have blushed. Certainly, I tensed, my pulse quickened, I felt an unpleasant lightness in my head and I mumbled in reply something I cannot now remember, which is a classic fight-or-flight response. Next, a cold shiver ran me over and my energy sapped. I had to fight the impulse to slide off the chair and curl up on the floor. For a few moments, I was speechless. Finally, I felt this wave wash over me, a wave of overwhelming sadness, in which were mingled a raw and silent rage and a vague sense of anguish and vexation. All this, in what must have been thirty seconds, if not less. I was astonished. You understand that I was fully aware this was all just conversation and that I was being a bit of a fool and that no harm had been intended. Yet a certain part of my brain had reacted to this simple, off-the-cuff remark the same way you might expect a two-year-old to react if you slapped it. I was so intrigued that I spent the next hour analysing this. And here is what I realised.

First, that I had reacted to having my identity threatened the same way I might have reacted to an actual physical threat. That is, what had in fact been upsetting had not been the put-down (which I fully deserved), but the notion, the illustrative example notion you understand, that I was living off my parents. I cannot emphasise enough how crazy this is. Turns out that being a strong independent woman is a core feature of my identity and that to have someone question it, even in jest, is wired to send an atavic part of my psyche into anguish. The fight-or-flight reflex proves it. What is more, under normal circumstances, I would have had no awareness of any of this. None at all. The higher faculties of my brain would have censored the initial reaction, on account of being completely crazy, and would have put in its place something more appropriate. But, returning to my metaphor that being human is like trying to get a full pint through a bustling crowd, at some level, splash splash. Identities are contiguous parts of our bodies!

Second, that it hurts to be misconstrued. It would have bothered me less, or not at all, had the thing been true. The real injury was being misjudged. Is that not fascinating? I mean, why? I searched my memories and concluded that this is always the case, I am always more upset at being rejected or put down because of a misunderstanding than an actual character flaw. Partly, because a misconstrual is to an identity what an injury is to a physical body. But partly, because I can forgive myself for being an idiot, whereas a misunderstanding is bad luck. And how do you forgive bad luck?!

There is something about bad luck that is utterly intolerable. I don't know what it is, but humans seem to be hysterically antagonistic to the idea of bad luck. We would rather feel guilty than unlucky and certainly we would rather feel guilty than unfree. The illusion of free will might be causing us to be angry all the time - at others as well as ourselves - but better that than to feel like a powerless "moist robot". I think this must be, at least in part, why even unsuccessful people seem to prefer to imagine that successful people deserve to be where they are. I find that fascinating.