How To Be More In Love With The Unknown
In order to grow, we have to fall in love with the unknown. Our brains hate this. After all, we developed a huge frontal cortex in order to map the known. What gives?
In our evolutionary past, the unknown was an involuntary part of life. Our brains err on the side of control when it was possible, because it almost never was. Food could vanish, an infection could mysteriously kill, weather suddenly changed. In the modern western world, control — or, at least the feeling of control — is widely available. It’s what is being sold to you nearly every moment you are awake. “Buy this, gain more control.”
In a sense, we have been duped by our own evolutionary wiring. We sell each other things we don’t need in order to quell fear that is no longer serving us. I’m not the first person to point this out.
In fact, overcoming our fear, learning to delay gratification, has been the human project since we invented agriculture. How do you get a hunter-gatherer ape to plant seeds and wait? Tell them really compelling stories. Hence, religion. (And religion’s occupation with farming metaphors.)
Since widespread modernity, the problem has only become larger. How do you get hunter-gatherer apes to put their faith in imaginary institutions, like money, the president, and Coca-cola? The answer is the same: tell really compelling stories. We are being told stories at an unprecedented rate. We absorb information, mostly from our phones, nearly every moment we are awake. The problem is that most people aren’t asking themselves important questions: Who’s telling these stories? Who stands to gain?
The answer is more complex than ever, and that illustrates why we don’t bother to ask. So, what do we do about it? I take the advice from Yuval Noah Harari:
“What’s good for everybody is to get to know yourself better because we are now entering the era where we are hackable animals…and there are corporations and governments that are trying to hack you whether you are a student or a billionaire…If you don’t get to know yourself, you become easy prey to all these organizations and governments that are hacking you as we speak… you have to run faster…previously you had no competition, but now you do.”
-Yuval Noah Harari
We need to know ourselves better than the algorithms at Google. If we don’t, we are at the mercy of everyone’s interest but our own.
In order to make the unknown inside ourselves known, we have to first be in love with the unknown. The outside world is so tempting because it has been categorized and understood by someone else already. The world inside us is dark, swirling, and the unknown is ever-expanding. The journey in us never really ends, and we may never fully map ourselves out. That’s why it is so much easier to re-watch Friends than to sit down to meditate.
The stakes are real, though. If we don’t learn to love the process of facing the unknown more than the destination of feeling in control, we put ourselves at the mercy of algorithms.
Make it into a daily practice. Meditate. Tell your own stories. Slowly, over time, we will begin to love the unknown.
Originally published at https://www.taylorforeman.com on June 24, 2020.
