I turned 22 a while ago. Which is an irrelevant fact here, as my writing this is in response to something I read1, and I would have written it even if I hadn’t turned 22.
When I was a bit younger, I used to think that I knew how the world works. I used to think that from much earlier age I guess. But every few years, I would realize, how naïve I have been, and would get disappointed at my younger self for being so. I also used to think, apart from that, that I knew how the world ought to work. While I kept realizing every few years that how I thought how the world worked was so utterly mistaken, I never really realized that I was similarly mistaken about how I thought the world ought to work2. With new things unfolding in front of me as I poked at reality, I demolished things from my mental model of how the world worked that weren’t right and built new things to replace them that better fit reality. But for the other mental model of how the world ought to work, I merely built new things in respect to new things unfolding in front of me and never demolished anything. That model was very precious, and so I plucked out nothing but weeds and shrubs, but I kept building and building, with increasing sophistication, in order to accommodate everything and everyone and to handle all edge cases, the task becoming too complicated and too burdensome, but still failing to meet its purpose. Just like in a bureaucracy or corporation, where to solve a problem, you can’t remove anything, say, from a constitution or a codebase, only add more things. But the problem never gets solved, only evolves into a more complicated form to which you surrender to attempt to solve.
Henrik in an essay wrote how he wanted to have a book that he could give to his 7-year-old that taught her how to handle being sentenced to freedom, borrowing Sartre’s phrase. It is at 22 that I realize with my full consciousness, that I have been sentenced to freedom. As Henrik quotes a character from a Dostoevsky’s novel, we humans long to submit to authority, and so did I, and actually still do, but that doesn’t change the fact. I feel as much frightened as does a 7 year old. But now I have grown old enough to stop seeking comfort in what’s probably not true. Even though I know very little of him, I gamble that truth also has some comfort to give me.
The other model, of how the world ought to work, needed as much demolishing if not much more. But at this point, I will have to dismantle it very carefully. It’s not wise to just blow things apart. Because most of these building blocks are useful and important, and actually their much being useful to me was the very thing that made it harder for me to demolish the building. But I can dismantle it carefully, so that I can discard what I am not sure is right, and preserve what I think is important. Perhaps I don’t need to build something to accommodate everything and everyone. I can start from something small, a home for me.