Interstellar, Foresight, and the Fear of Falling

I've noticed a common underlying thread to a lot of media in these last few years, and it's recently become even more insistent. It's especially prevalent in the film and video gaming industries, but pervades in at least some area of almost all American media I encounter.

I'm referring to the trope/meme of Mankind's Last Hope; the outlaws have killed the sheriff and started collecting tithes, the skies darken with alien landing craft, Earth's natural resources careen toward total depletion, and rumors abound that Blockbuster is about to re-open. These must surely be the end times, and the only question is whether civilization bleeds slowly out through thousands of tiny needle-wounds, sliding ever so slowly down into mud-soaked, unremembered oblivion or implodes catastrophically in a spectacular vortex of blazing fire and blood-soaked violence. Things are, it could be said, Very Very Bad.

But wait! What's this? A hero appears before us, his gaze piercing and his jawline unmistakably sculpturesque even through his just-rugged-enough stubble. He is one, only one, armed only with his personalized pearl-inlaid revolvers (which can also take the form of swords, magic rings, a set of launch codes, and the common cold) and a steely-eyed will to survive. There is an opportunity, a single shot-in-the-dark chance, and using his skill, resourcefulness, and sheer aftershave-scented animal magnetism, this single point of light will optionally assemble a team of qualified experts to stand against the encroaching darkness.

Their window of opportunity is tiny, and the odds are astronomically against them. Their mission is arguably impossible and certainly suicidal, and there is only one mission; all others have been attempted. And failed. And everyone involved was killed. Especially the characters you liked. It all comes down to this one-in-a-million, trial run-less, desperate trump card play. Succeed, and we might make it. Fail, and we won't be around to worry about it.

Examples of this trope abound, so I'll just list a few that come to mind. The Mass Effect saga focuses on Commander Shepard's suicide mission to defeat the Reapers (sentient machines who destroy all organic life every so often to start over from scratch. Yes, really.). The film Sunshine is about Earth's last-ditch attempt to give a dying Sun a jump-start with a colossal bomb of sorts. Even The Lord of the Rings exhibits this pattern to a certain degree, with the Fellowship's desperately-outnumbered race against time to deliver the One Ring to Orodruin before Sauron can gather enough power to fully freak out and destroy the Free Peoples entirely. More recently, films like Interstellar and a very similar movie whose name escapes me follow a few desperate adventurers on a journey to find humanity a new home (since Earth is so unbelievably, unsalvageably borked).*

These sorts of stories, when well-written, fire my imagination a great deal, and they're undoubtedly gripping to watch. Logic dictates that the heroes lose, but emotional investment (which you have, if the story is well-presented) insists that they absolutely must win, and the conflict between the two halves of your mind only serves to make the conflict on the page or screen all the more sensational. 

I always wonder, however, about a single nagging and extremely annoying question: how in God's name did we end up in such a fix? I know the world outside can seem grim at times, but one minute we forget to tip the waiters and the next minute we're serving them up as the entrée? 

It's the cultural manifestation of an increasingly common thought pattern, I think, and it's one that worries me a great deal. These sorts of stories, as a generality, represent the logical extreme of an assumption that people are not necessarily actively evil, but naturally passive. There's a good deal of evidence in support of this theory, actually, and a great deal of psychology focuses on something called the bystander effect. Especially in crowds, people very frequently become paralyzed by the assumption that Somebody will surely do something soon. Any given individual isn't important enough, or strong enough, or well-groomed enough to actually act, but we're always sure the proper authority or plainclothes hero will be along shortly enough. And so we stand, and Kitty Genovese gets stabbed in front of 38 witnesses.

A related but separate idea is the basis for the Milgram experiment. In general terms, participants were ordered to perform a task that conflicted with their conscience and caused pain to another person (delivering electrical shocks by way of a button, for example). This experiment found that people have a surprisingly high threshold for the unethical, as long as an authority figure told them to do it. Put another way, people are perfectly willing to do bad things as long as there's some ethereal Them for us to put the blame on. "Nah, I was just following orders!"

Both of these effects, and an increasing public awareness of them (along with a host of other things that piss me off extremely, likely to be discussed in the future), contribute to what I've decided is called socially-mediated disassociation of ethical agency. Now, in actual, non-pretentious English, I'd call it the Ethical Shrug Effect, a slightly-less-debased form of nihilism. People (particularly young people, from what I've detected) arrive at some sort of ethical fork in the allegorical road. The young mind in question can't see all the way down both forks, and insists they need more information or input to make an informed, sound, and generally "good" choice. 

The next realization is that we can't have ALL the necessary information about the variables involved in making a decision, because (as I wrote a while back, actually) life is almost infinite in its complexity.  Since we can't have all the information required, we therefore can't make a good choice. Therefore, we don't make a choice at all, because we have an annoying tendency to be looking for better options at all times (another topic). Because we made no decision, we become the bystanders in our own lives, standing and spectating as we drift indifferently through life. We never vocalize our opinion about dinner with friends, so we end up getting generic Mexican food every single time. Aware of our meekness, we then go and talk about the bystander effect with our other friends, or on Reddit, or, say, on a blog.

We never go up to that pretty girl or the handsome guy in class, because we're afraid of that unknown potential for rejection that we've all been told is waiting. He or she's way out of our "league," and so on. We walk timidly by the house echoing with sounds of domestic abuse because it's not our problem, and therefore not our place to do anything. Someone will help, we figure, so we squash the instinctive impulse to do it ourselves. On some grander scale, maybe we as a species do run our planet out of every natural resource because we're too short-sighted to see the danger and too meek to object to those in power if we do. 

I, however, have news for you, people of the world. These are all possibilities, it's true, possible outcomes in the grand tarot of life. Unpleasant possibilities, nothing we would wish for, but it's essentially down to chance, right?

Wrong. Life is so infinitely complicated as to be random to our perception in some ways, and the sheer unpredictable chaos of it all can be overwhelming. In the voluminous morass of seemingly random red smudges, however, there are clearly-defined line segments, collimated bars of order so hot they're blue, continuously advancing rays of choice and will. One of those bright blue stars burning through the chaos, dear reader, is you.

Before this goes any longer, I'm going to truncate for the sake of brevity, and boil it all down to a single word of advice. From all my life experiences (and they are many and varied), all the peaks and troughs, there's one single word of advice I wish to hell someone had given me. So if you're reading this, and no one has told you this yet, or you're just in need of a reminder:

Choose. Make a choice, any choice. Hell, it can be the wrong choice, and some of them will be. It is infinitely better to explain what went wrong while you tried to do right than explain why you did nothing in the face of wrongness.

TL;DR Bad things happen, but you can choose good. The only way to become a virtuoso is the brave humility to mess up the scales.

Adam and Eve

So for anybody who's unaware of the story, it goes like this: God woke up one day and decided He was awesome, so he made a little dude in his image and called this little dude Adam. Being an empathetic sort of divine energy mass, God realized little Adam looked lonely and decided to tear out one of Adam's ribs to make a little lady friend for him, and named her Eve. Realizing His living dolls needed a house to play in, He then created a paradise on Earth for them to live in, called Eden.

This was ravishing, as far as God and the two newcomers were concerned. Unfortunately, God had also made a snake at some point, who may have been an emissary of Satan, or the Big Ugly himself, and in either case was one of those individuals you invite to your work party even if you don't want him there, because otherwise he will be quite put out.

The garden of Eden also had a tree within it, which carried fruit containing knowledge (of some variety; people get twisted about this part a lot). Adam and Eve were told to "not bloody well eat that," so of course they decided to listen to the mysterious snake in their garden and eat it anyway. When He found out his creations had realized they were naked and invented fashion, He was reportedly quite peeved and cast them out of the garden, making them mortal and cursing them to live in the world and Original Sin and yadda yadda.

So, if you take this story literally (which you shouldn't, because that would be stupid, but we'll get to that), people take issue with several points. First of all, man being created in God's image is a problem for a lot of people. Additionally, the idea of women being created out of men (and, implicitly, secondary/inferior) gets many people in a twizzy, and the idea of original sin pisses off pretty much everybody.

Before I really start, I want to point out that the entire argument over this story is pretty much moot, because it's in the book of Genesis, which is in the Bible, which is a religious scripture, and is therefore a giant mass of allegory written by people inspired by a brush with the divine but informed by the sociological and cosmological context of an ancient society. That, however, is a long sentence with lots of words, and we don't like them round here.

The first point!

The idea of the Imago Dei (humans being modeled after the divine) is irritating to people for a few reasons. Some take the idea to mean that we're modeled after a sublime being and should therefore be rather more sublime ourselves, and are frustrated with our flawed species. Others take this to mean that we are inherently subservient to that sublime being, and nothing gets people angry quicker than saying there might be something more interesting than they are. Indeed, the idea of being "made" at all has come under a lot of fire, because of the "creation vs. evolution debate."

I won't talk about this at great length, because the idea of debating it bores me, to be totally honest. I'll just frame my opinion in two points for you.

1. I don't think we interpreted the "made in His image" part quite right. I think what was meant was: "we were made by the divine, of the divine." Since the entity in question is divine, I doubt we look much at all like it, and indeed I doubt it "looks" like anything as we'd understand it.

2. The debate over whether creationism or evolution is the right theory has never ceased to amaze me. It seems to me that yeah, everything did have a single origin; it was probably the Big Bang, we think. For people who think this should disprove the existence of God, or whatever point they have, I have a point. What specifically you believe in actually has no bearing on this, now that I think of it. Does anybody (sane) honestly believe that, through our mortal intelligence and scientific apparatus, looking at the workings of the infinitely vast and complex universe around us, we could ever possibly figure it out? 

The second issue!

It bothers people that, in this allegory, women seem to have been created strictly for a man's companionship, and were made out of him, implying fundamental subservience. That's pretty understandable; I think all genders are equal and ought to be treated that way, and this binarization in the creation myth bugs me a little too. I think, however, we could alleviate this by thinking about it a little more.

Firstly, for humor's sake, remember that Adam was made out of some scraped-together dust to have "dominion over the Earth," which at that point basically made him God's appointed cat-sitter/gardener. If ever anybody (presumably male) starts to get uppity with this story as part of his argument, just toss him that one.

Secondly (and more seriously) I think it bears keeping in mind that, before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve didn't have much of a sense of the world around them. They weren't even aware that they were naked, to give you an idea of the state these folks were in. Realizing this, then, I have to conclude that Adam and Eve couldn't even have known gender existed, and therefore (because gender is largely a matter of perception), it didn't. We look at this story in terms of our established gender binary, which is the source of our anger and angst over the topic. However, it bears keeping in mind that this binary is a culturally-mediated phenomenon, and there's nothing inherently binary about the nature of things. To cut this short before I ramble, I'm going to compare culture to quantum mechanics (because obviously). We perceive things to be binary: white and black, male and female, yes and no, whatever. The universe, however, is actually made out of things that defy this binary perception; we named them "positively" and "negatively" charged, in keeping with our perceived binary structure, and then we found out there were neutrons and oops.

The third problem!

People of all denominations get upset by the idea of original sin; those who believe it feel variously doomed, hopeless, and unworthy, and those who don't assert that it's a tool to make people feel inferior to keep them in line. I thought about this one for a long time, and came to a few points that change the nature of the issue.

For the first one, stick with me in the Christian tradition for a second. Adam and Eve, as with all other things, are actors in a great divine scheme of Stuff. They were made from dust by God, and to dust and God they inevitably return. In the Christian idea, God is a funny being; He simultaneously knows everything that will happen but does not void the principle of free will. Knowing this, then, He made Adam, Eve, the tree, and the snake, and caused them all to come together. Given that God knew what the result would be and still chose to combine all these ingredients in His Great Big Chemistry Set, I have to come to the following conclusion: He knew, and humans eating the fruit (that is, allegorically becoming self-aware and knowledgeable actors) was what He planned.

Furthermore, the "punishment" for their "transgression" was to be sent out into the Earth we're all familiar with, away from the unique intermediary/semi-divine plane that was Eden. This was enacted in response to their new status as beings equipped with knowledge that they themselves had chosen to acquire, and they were left to their own devices on Earth.

Well, now, hold on a minute, what the hell?

Adam and Eve were ostensibly created to have dominion over Earth, and that's where they wound up, freely roaming and founding the great family that is humanity. They were also supposedly created in the image of God, a being of infinite knowledge, and they wound up with great knowledge of their own.

Finally, Adam and Eve were "punished" to wander the Earth for the duration of their natural lifespan, ending with death, at which point they would return to the transcendent state. I want you to do something for me now, dear reader; go outside your house, or apartment, or dormitory, or wherever you live. Lift your gaze away from the pavement and the bustle, and look up at the sky, at the treeline, at the ocean, whatever you can see. Feel the wind, hear the birds sing, smell the falafel frying, whatever, and think about anything you want, using that miraculous instrument that is your brain.

Adam and Eve (those lovely metaphors again) were "punished" by being placed into this state.

Not a very harsh sentence, in my book.

TL;DR It's long as hell, I dunno. Religion is metaphor, God is you, me, everyone we know, and everything we don't, humanity is in a good spot.

The Frog

Brace yourselves, everybody, this one's gonna be random.

So if you have a frog and drop him in really cold water, he immediately goes "OI WOT" and jumps immediately back out, as he finds the freezing water to be most disagreeable. Replace the cold water with some near boiling, and he will issue the same proclamation and leap out almost instantly. In either of these extreme situations, the frog is instinctively aware that, if he remains, the water will kill him.

People are like this too; we have a highly-evolved intuitive sense for danger. That's the human advantage in evolution, and the key to why our seemingly physically underwhelming species has lasted so long. We may not outrun the lion, but we're aware of the signs that lions are near, and to a certain extent we have an extra, inexplicable sense for danger. To call it the sixth sense is inaccurate (we have far more than five senses), but the term serves to describe the phenomenon. I don't need to give you examples of this because everyone has experienced the sensation; nothing is outwardly wrong, but you just get a feeling.

In this way, humans share an animal's sense for painful situations, as well as an anticipatory ability to avoid them based on their precursory signs. That's fine. Consider, however, a different scenario.

If you drop the same intrepid little amphibian into a pleasantly warm pot of water, he won't react to it at all, and think something like "ah yiss, dis is niiiiice." That's his natural temperature, after all, and even we mighty humans can relate to the enjoyment of mucking about in warm water. So, he (and we) will swim around aimlessly and enjoy the experience.

Here's the problem: what if you turn the temperature up? Not a lot all at once, mind, but incrementally, a little at a time.

This is a strange paradox. Once the frog gets used to the starting temperature of the water, a little additional heat just feels like the pleasant warmth from earlier. He adjusts again, more heat feels nice again. This can continue for a while, until the temperature gets to the point of fatality, at which point the frog will again think "ahh, pleasant warmth" and, as they say, croak, having never realized how hot it was getting.

"What a foolhardy amphibian, to not notice he's being boiled!" we mighty humans proclaim. "I would surely get out of the water."

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? We humans are even more adaptable than frogs as far as temperature is concerned, having our own internal mechanisms to adjust our bodily function rather than being totally subject to the whim of the environment as cold-blooded creatures are.

Getting used to a temperature is easy, and you can motor along through life at basically any temperature. Spikes in temperature (dangerous situations) are obvious and can be managed; we're smart, generally, and we have fair bit of knowledge about how to not die. Consider, however, the frog who never notices the temperature slowly rising around him because he's so acclimated to it. When you suddenly feel something boiling up inside you and the temperature is spiking, stop and ask yourself:

"What temperature have I been at?"

TL;DR Being used to something =/= it being a healthy state.

P.S. I came to this realization after burning myself in the shower. Just in case someone thought I was being insightful or something :P

Fundamentalism vs. Fanaticism

It's time for another Semantic Distinctions that Irritate Me for No Reason At All post!

In these last few years we've heard the word "fundamentalist" thrown around in the news a lot, especially (let's be real) with regard to Islam and Muslims. It was an understandable reaction in 2001, and I don't think I need to remind anybody why. Religious extremism was, and is, a very scary thing, to say the least.

At this point, I think it's important to delineate the difference between a fundamentalist and a fanatic. Firstly, "fundamentalism" as a word was originally coined to refer to a specific set of Christian doctrine, specifically in opposition to so-called Modernist Theology. The differences between those two aren't the topic of this post (or something I especially care about, to put it crassly), but there's the word origin. Fundamentalism, in its very least refined form, could be put as "sticking to the basics." It pertains to a political movement as well, also known as being "conservative" (although God knows that word gets a bad rap now too). "Fundamental," the root word, refers to something "forming a necessary base or core; of central importance."

As an interesting side note, if the word was stripped of its connotations, I could be labeled a fundamentalist Christian. It's that part about believing in things "of central importance;" the details of doctrine are essentially unimportant when measured up against underlying core concepts. That, unfortunately, is not what the word refers to, and is also off topic. I return.

The word "fundamentalist," deprived of its Christian context, structurally goes like this: strict adherence to the written tenets of a religion. You could think of it as similar to what Constitutional strict constructionists believe, modified for religion; use what is written and do not modify it, essentially. That segues with comical slickness into my next point.

The people responsible for the World Trade Center attacks were not fundamentalists. If I was being properly fiery, I might even say they weren't genuine Muslims at all, drinking the warping poison of al-Qaeda as they were. A "fundamentalist" Muslim, reading the Qur'an through the lens of a strict interpretation, could never have conceived of anything like the motives behind the attacks, let alone actually carrying the bloody things out.

I'm going to digress briefly to give you some quick facts about Islam and simultaneously explain why the media have got it completely bass-ackwards, as they say. First of all, Allah and God are the same entity. I saw a news report attempting to explain "Allah vs. God" to the American public, and I just about gave up completely. Yes, one of these names is used by a religion that originated in the Middle East, and the other is used in a religion that originated in... oh.

The errata: Moses is mentioned more than any other person in the Qur'an. Mary is mentioned more times in the Qur'an than in the New Testament. Other little details in the Qur'an include lots of people like John the Baptist, Solomon, David, Noah, Adam, and Job, and so on ad infinitum. The one I want to bring to your attention is a minor character named Jesus.

That's right, everybody; Jesus is mentioned as an ordained prophet in the Qur'an. So no, I don't think it's valid to try and explain all the ways in which Islam and Christianity are different or how one is the enemy.

This, obviously, begs the question: if they weren't fundamentalist Muslims, what were they?

Fanatics. We didn't kill a Muslim when the S.E.A.L.s (er, excuse me, DEVGRU) executed bin Laden; we killed a fanatic. And fanatics everywhere, no matter the color of their skin, or the beliefs they claim to represent, or where they were born, or how they act out their fanaticism, are the same.

TL;DR "Islamist" is not a word. I could keep elaborating, but you're smart and you undoubtedly caught on.

East vs. West Fight Night II

I did a thing about the differences between Japan (that is, anime) and the United States (that is, poorly-executed action movies) a while ago, and I've been thinking a lot more about the differences between the "East" and the "West" recently. I've already talked about our differing perceptions of the snake in another post too.

I think it's fair to say that East and West have been pretty different right from the get-go. Here's where the broad brush comes out; I'm grossly over-generalizing, but stick with me. Western society tends to focus on individualism and devotes a lot of attention to those who deviate, or strike out against convention to be their own person. Eastern societies, on the other hand, often have a greater emphasis on social duty, to the family on the small scale and to the overall community at the larger scales.

Religions from the two regions are superficially very different as well. Western religions (those that survive, anyway) are generally monotheistic. Eastern religions tend to be polytheistic (at the surface level; more on this later). Western religion also generally holds humanity to be fallen and morally corrupt in some way, casting humanity as undergoing a struggle to overcome its wicked nature and reunite with divinity. Eastern traditions also hold that humanity has its flaws to overcome, but tend to emphasize a much more positive view of nature, both human nature and nature in general.

The differences continue endlessly, but that's a good baseplate for what I want to talk about: the underlying reason all these cultures sometimes seem incompatible across the imaginary East-West "line."

The main division is one, simply, of world view. I mentioned that the two regions' religions were respectively mono- and polytheistic, and I may have been a little disingenuous; that isn't actually the problem. Many of the superficially "polytheistic" religions are merely paying homage to many avatars and aspects of one essential divine entity, when you consider them more deeply. So if that's not it, what is?

My opinion, anyway, is that the fundamental difference is how the divine entity is positioned in our mind, as opposed to an issue of its single or multiple nature. Western religions as a whole hold the divine being to be a sort of great originating point, a single Fact that was, and from which all other things and energies emanate. Take, for example, the Jewish title Ehyeh, sometimes translated as "I AM," or Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, confusingly "I am to continue to be" (essentially equivalent to the Christian "was, is, and is to come"). Christianity speaks extensively of God the Creator, the single primary entity that always has been and looked out into nothing to create everything.

The East has a different and somewhat more complicated view of the whole matter. All the gods of Hinduism, for example, are manifestations or representations of an ongoing and consistent energy flowing through all things. Well, wait, isn't that the same as in the West? Ah, tricky. No, the East has gods that represent aspects of an all-powerful energy, and the West generally has one single deity that is the energy's source.

So, put shortly: the West thinks God is the starting point from which all other things proceed, and the East thinks God is also present in the procession of things. In the West, God is the source of all energy, and in the East God is closer to being the energy itself.

This is a post mostly intended to a) express my opinion regardin the starting point of the fundamental differences between the East and West and b) inform the reader. I know I don't propose any solutions here, but I thought this would be something useful to think about while understanding various cultures and how they interact.

Also, to be clear: difference does not imply a hierarchy. No, I do not think Western religions are evil because of the Crusades, nor do I think India is full of heathens praying to false idols, or whatever. It's impossible, in my opinion, to study religions and come up with many really negative thoughts, if you're doing it right.

The History of Creativity

Creativity is something people usually associate with painting a picture or writing a story or something like that, but I think its broader definition is important to remember. "Creativity," says the almighty Wikipedia, "is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created." "Something new" is a seemingly mundane phrase that I think has much more meaning than we give it credit for; what it really means is "there is now something where before there was no such thing."

Creativity isn't strictly human, either, though we seem to be the only beings truly capable of relating to it and performing it. For instance, at the very beginning of things, all the universe existed in a hyper-concentrated blob, wherein temperatures must have been so high that we can't accurately apply our modern rules of physics to it. At some point, the blob underwent a cataclysm of indescribably huge proportions, resulting in the blob un-blobbing. As it expanded, the blob also cooled.

At one point during the Great Un-Blobbing, atoms formed. It's easy to read that sentence very casually, "oh, atoms, those things that are really small and make up stuff," but I want to stress exactly how remarkable that event actually was. In our studies, we've found atoms to be the essential building blocks of us and everything around us, and they've existed for huge amounts of time, so a human perspective can very easily turn "an unthinkably long time" into "forever." But think about it: at this point in the Big Bang, there weren't any atoms, and then all of a sudden there were.

Skip forward an unthinkably long time, and we have stars forming out of those atoms through gravitational runaway. At this point, pretty much everything is hydrogen, and if it isn't hydrogen it's helium resulting from hydrogen being fused. Everything's cooking along nicely, until suddenly, oh no! Some stars run out of hydrogen to fuse. Stars rely partially on the energy of fusion to hold their structure, and when they run out of fuel they start to collapse.

This has never happened before either; stars have been for a long time, but never has there been a collapsing star. Again, all creation was totally uncertain as to what would happen when these crumbling suns passed their breaking point. What knew? It might have been the end of everything; there was no precedent for this solar tomfoolery.

But it wasn't the end of everything. The endgame of any star can result in a display of godlike destructive power, but out of this cataclysm came something new. Fusion of new elements happened. Where there had previously been hydrogen and its helium cousins, suddenly carbon and other elements were splattered out into the cosmos. Now this was interesting.

So, we skip another indescribably long and important period of time, and our little planet has collapsed together from swirling dust and gravel. Theia has come by and nearly destroyed it, ultimately forming the moon-Earth complex. The surface of the planet resembles how most people today would draw hell; meteors slam down into the surface with unpleasant regularity, the air is mostly ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide, the surface is still so hot as to be liquid in many places, and so on. It's called the Hadean Eon, to give you an idea.

Let me be clear: nothing is alive on this version of Earth. Nothing swims in the hot baths of acid, nothing crawls over the burning rocks. Nothing flies. Hell, there's barely enough of an atmosphere for flight to even theoretically work. "Inhospitable" isn't the word.

And yet, suddenly, at some point, something was. We still struggle to figure out when, and how, and what exactly, but something happened. A crude sort of membrane developed, the first example of something with an inside and outside, and in that little chamber tiny molecules collided to form bigger molecules and then suddenly it lived.

We'll ignore how breathtaking that is in the interest of speeding along as we follow our brave little post-Hadean hero. It, and its friends, soon discovered that the only way to continue being was to drink in the energy of the sun and use it to assemble other compounds, so they invented photosynthesis. This was great. Life was actually doing pretty well as the Earth began to relax and hell subsided. Great colonies of these old bacteria spread all over, replicating freely.

They, unfortunately, had made a crippling oversight in their development; they made oxygen through photosynthesis, and there was only so much oxygen the earth's iron and oceans could absorb. When the oxygen level in the atmosphere passed that point, it was discovered that oxygen is poisonous to the things that were making it.

Uh. Damn!

So, yet another change was necessary. Through yet another incredibly complex, time-consuming, poorly-understood process, the tiny organisms learned to live in groups and specialize, ultimately forming single larger masses that we currently know as eukaryotes, or, with a little extrapolation, us.

At all these junctures, something arose, or happened, or was invented that had never been so before. These were not modifications of things, mind you, but entirely new things arising out of nothingness, at times when the universe could only be personified as shuffling its feet in uncertainty.

So the point I'm getting to is this: when you're uncertain in life, it's pretty normal. It was 14 billion years of uncertainty that created you, after all. Uncertainty is our natural state. The best things, the most lasting things, always arise out of turbulence of some kind, whether that means the boiling surface of the young Earth or the whirling, distracted realm of your mind.

Don't worry about being uncertain. It's a stressful sensation in itself, obviously, but what I mean is don't worry over the fact that you're worrying. "But I don't have all the data!" Nothing, and no one, ever has. Creativity is just the act of applying energy to uncertainty until something amazing is created.

TL;DR You are the latest in iterations beyond counting of uncertain things. There are infinitely varied and equally uncertain futures available to you, and all of them are the right one.

Restlessness

I hear lots of people (myself really included) complain of a feeling of restlessness or a sense of non-direction. They do many things, from class to games to drugs to advocacy, but nothing seems to quite put us at ease, and it's annoying in the extreme.

This is the sort of uneasiness targeted by professionally-crafted advertisements, whether we openly acknowledge that or not. A lot of advertisements, boiled down and deprived of all their bright colors, come down to "Feeling unsatisfied? This is what you are missing, and I will sell it to you, for money!" Consumerism and some materialist philosophy is actuated on this principle; the uneasiness I feel is because I perceive the things I have as insufficient, and wish to acquire more things, of one form or another.

Only humans (as far as we're aware) experience this sensation, the strange tension that comes when we're not tense. Every other animal fights to survive and looks for the basics of life (food, shelter, and so on), but we have these pretty well in hand and aren't satisfied. Having figured out how to systematically grow and ranch our food and become a globally dominant species, effectively stabilizing and guaranteeing our ability to fulfill the basic drives of life (for now), we still find ourselves not content.

So what's wrong with us, then? Are we just forever doomed to wander out our short existence, sitting on a hollow throne as we master the earth and find it wanting? Is something just fundamentally and totally inaccessible to us? Do we feel the echo of humanity's fall from grace, of our separation from divinity as many other traditions hold it?

No, sir or madame, this restlessness is no curse to blight the walkers of the earth. This, rather, is the evidence of humanity's single greatest gift. What is it, this buzzing that stirs in all our minds, the voice that nags you when you sit down exhausted after an odious task, demanding you do something else? Why do you wake up at God-awful hours of the night and morning, wondering why exactly a burrito is neither the tortilla nor the things inside, but some greater combination of the two?

The answer is simple. That restlessness is creativity.

People are constantly uncertain about the future, and it causes us a lot of stress. That's obviously not the best thing, but I think there's a silver lining to how "always in motion the future is" with the dark side's clouds and all. The thing about it is that creativity loves ambiguity. Can you imagine how dull your life would be if you were simply handed a script at the beginning and told "welp, here's what we're all doing, go for it?"

No, we feel this strange uneasiness and uncertainty for a reason. We humans, in "natural" terms, are really nothing special. There's no one thing in nature we're good at; we don't run especially quickly, we're not insanely strong, we can't breathe water, nothing. And yet we survived to the present day by creating our way out of whatever mess we found ourselves in. Natural selection acted on our species in a strange way. Given nothing else to work with, evolution simply emphasized our ability to reason and innovate in order to compensate for our physical shortcomings.

Us, and only us, out of all the myriad species of life, countless in their legions and endless in their diversity. Only we see a door and wonder abstractly where the key is, who has it, how they got it.

If ever you're tense without knowing why, consider the possibility that your fundamental essence wants you to be creating something, and I don't mean making a macaroni wreath or anything physical like that. It's totally possible to have a creative experience without doing anything. Just sitting and mentally wandering as you listen to music or the sounds outside can be extremely creative.

We're set up to do this sort of thing, and to not do it goes against our nature. That's why I'm always so concerned when schools start dismissing their art programs or their music departments, and when people write off humanities majors as easy or too "ethereal" or whatever. It's not that more quantitative fields inherently stifle creativity so much as our approach to them does, but that's another point.

There's a spark burning constantly in the back of all our minds, telling us to go and solve that math problem, or showing us a pretty cloudscape in our minds, or figuring out how a type of food is made, or whatever. It's annoying, to be totally honest; it never goes out, and it certainly isn't easy to control (imagine all the times you've suddenly become convinced your desk decidedly needs cleaning when you have a test the next morning). This little spark is a mercurial and fickle fairy, and causes us a great deal of tension by not always being on our side or not being accessible on command, but it's the most beautiful part of every single person.

I think that's what the Bible meant when it said we were made in God's image, not this silly material matter of iconography. We have hands, and eyes, and brains. Other animals can use tools and solve puzzles, but we can make things, inspired by a force we have no words to describe. I think it's easy to forget how wondrous and, yes, divine that power is, the drive and splendor of that little divine fire in your soul.

I'm getting distracted and lyrical, so let me just leave you with an awesome quote. The anthropologist A.L. Kroeber said that the best things can happen at "the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne," and I think that's really awesome to consider. So, there's that.

TL;DR You're not bored because there's anything wrong with you.

P.S. Imma do a history of creativity tomorrow or the next day, depending on many things. Come back! It'll be fun, and there will be scones.