Real — compared to what?
The experience of living in today’s world is complicated.
It’s hard to make sense of our reality given the scale of information presented to us, at all times. The experiences we have, the multitude of possibilities and opportunities available, the flood of images and information. It's a lot. Hard to derive a satisfying perspective of our own life and its reality from all this.
The world has shrunk with globalization and social media communication. What we learn about the world, ourselves and the times that we exist in, is through the media largely, which has too many heads and voices. To me, this leads to a lack of intimacy and transparency. My private space where I do a lot of thinking, feeling and reflecting is constantly polluted, resulting in a very poor understanding of situations and problems presented to me.
Now, we can’t see Viruses.
Nobody has seen a Coronavirus at least not a normal layman like you and me.
So we have to think about them. And then react. In the case of this virus, we are relying on stories and evidence that necessarily don’t make sense to us.
It’s very mythical.
We all assign potent meaning to our experiences and that colours everything we see and the way we see it. What is reality? it’s apparently just our brain trying to tell us stories after it computes, analyses and predicts given things. That’s the limit of our truth and reality.
I noticed that the garbage reminds me of Corona. With not much logic in my head, the story of hygiene and washing is so closely related to dirt and being unclean that uncollected garbage makes me feel like there will be a lot of Corona there. Theoretically, I know that doesn’t bear much logic but that’s the story my brain tells me after computing stuff through my experiences. Then, a hug doesn’t make me think of Corona, It makes me feel like a dose of immunity booster. Which I know is inaccurate. But that’s the inside of my head.
There is not much consistency in the way I process my fears about Corona. One week it’s some things, another week it’s another thing. The rhythm. There is one. I often think about how to make it match my friend’s and family’s rhythm.
Everything seems to be very subjective to our capacity for interpretation.
There is a big gap between how we make sense of things and what is going on.
We usually study things that happen on repeat and make sense out of them. But how do you study things that happen every hundred years or so?
A: Through stories, politics, statistics, interviews, anecdotes.
We take all this information, process it through our biases and get a ‘reality’ that’s our own Corona reality.
Seeing and knowing has — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —a lot — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -in between.
Mostly, it feels like we are operating with 5 paisa ka knowledge. We rely on all our biases and linguistic capacities to make us see the world.
Bias. A bias is a story that we put together to make sense of something. It’s a good thing that helps us in the short term to make sense of things but slow thinking may give us a better output for the long run.
Knowing this for a while now, I keep looking to answer this question of how to not double down on my biases.
But how? With no possibility of direct perception.
We are in a perpetual state of absence, looking out and looking in our screens for information and interpretations.
When we hear and read something:-
Do we look for evidence to support that in our physical world?
If we find it, what conclusions do we immediately draw?
How to see?
Seeing is not enough to say something exists or not.
How to not take seeing for granted?
Does it exist if you don’t see it?
If you see it, does it exist only in that format?
Could we imagine colours look different to different people?
This is why I quite dislike this way of arguing — “we agree to disagree”. It’s so non-conclusive, lazy and unaccommodating.
When I am sitting by myself and concentrating on things around me and I go from one question to another, to an observation etc. usually I end up laughing. I find it funny because suddenly it’s revealed that everything is so rich and complex around us.
It’s amazing how we all have accepted the fact that corona looks a certain way. Pink and red. I wonder if we were not fed this many immersive versions of the virus how each one of us would imagine it. Viruses don’t have colours.
It’s very interesting actually. I mean there is a new virus-like there always is and has been predicted. But this one, reveals the incompetence of systems in charge. Honestly. That’s all I see. This unravelling of everything. Sometimes it feels like another movement where we are all victims to something and we all articulate it very differently. And there is friction about the details. These details are not mine or yours. They are ideas that are not independent.
I feel like, it’s relative to how I perceive the world and that is a story that my screen feeds me with limited bubbles of algorithms. This is affecting my reactions to this giant problem which I still don’t understand very well. It’s urgent that we are conscious of our perception, if not someone else is constantly creating them for us.
I didn’t mean for this to become alarming. Please don’t be alarmed.
We are all in touch with the tragedy and the beauty of it.
I just recently felt like I was losing myself in fed words. Whatever I read took over my vocabulary.
I no longer trust my judgment of things.
I miss my senses doing a lot of the work and giving me an answer.
We can only invent what we can imagine and today I feel like there is a failure in my imagination.
I wish we could all have a better consensus and a somewhat shared understanding of this. All of us engaging and moving presently.
