I always liked those text-based exploration games from the 1980s and 90s, like Zork and Myst, where you wake up in a strange environment, with no idea where you are or even who you are. You have to gather the context from the inside out, by wandering around, pushing buttons, peering behind wall paintings, and reading notes left by strangers who were here before you.
I like those games because that’s exactly what it’s to be a human being, if you think about it.
Your life began with a kind of singularity. A personal Big Bang. Without warning, you emerged from unconsciousness into a sea of light, color, smell, faces, feelings, and other completely unexpected phenomena, and there was nothing to do but attempt to navigate it. It was the ultimate “cold open” – no context, no explanation, just things happening.
At this early stage, you know nothing about the world except what you feel in each moment. The feelings are new, intense, and definitely real. It’s a torrent that keeps coming, and at some point, you realize it isn’t going to subside. This strange condition of being tossed in a sea of sensations, which you will one day call “existence,” or “life,” comes no reference point, just one implicit job: make sense of all this.
At first, you have very few tools for navigating this tumultuous sea. You can squirm, and you can call out. Aside from that, all you can do is observe. So you do. Some hints of basic order emerge. There are feedings. You feel good sometimes, and bad other times. There is a great light in the sky, which alternates between being there and not being there. Same with Mom.
You gain the power of self-locomotion, which allows you to make many more observations. Every time you turn your head you witness more unbelievable phenomena. Ants. Dust motes in the sun. Laughter. Dimpled vinyl flooring. The taste of your own fingernails. The unexpected condition of being alive remains mysterious, but some of the phenomena get more familiar as they repeat themselves.
The revelations tumble on. You’re a person, as it turns out, and there are other people. You come to understand that there are happenings aside from your current feelings. Things happened to you yesterday. Things will presumably happen tomorrow. Things happen to others. It takes years to figure out even that.
The complexity explodes when language enters the picture. Using words, the adults describe an unexpectedly vast context outside your daily stomping grounds. Reportedly, your whole world – your house, grandma’s house, the grocery store, and everything you’ve ever seen — sits in a tiny patch of an impossibly large ball covered in plants and water.
Another surprising report: the world around you did not begin when you did. You emerged into it, one random year out of many thousands of other numbered years. So much had already happened. You are assured your big sister was your size once, and that you too were smaller than you are now, and at one point you were not there at all. They prove it with photos.
You learn about the larger context of history. People used to ride horses. Before that they just walked. Your ancestors came from somewhere else. Your city was once a lonely bend in the river, known only to birds.
You learn the names for things. Tree. Brenda. Crying. Purple. There are many thousands of these sounds and symbols. People use them so much it’s easy to forget that the names don’t belong to the things at all — they’re just added as handles for convenience. In different places they use different sets of them.
You learn about what’s normal, what’s expected, and what won’t be tolerated. You get advice, mostly unsolicited, and usually delivered with complete confidence, on how you should go about the mysterious task of living. Most of it surrounds proving your value to others, earning currency you can trade for things, finding love, and possibly serving supernatural beings. You are strongly encouraged to make more people.
You gather these thousands of stories, concepts, and opinions, patching them together into a mental map of the universe, which roughly explains how the parts fit together, from the ants and the grass to table manners and bicycle physics. You add to the map as you go, rejecting any opinions that seem to be wrong (in your opinion), gradually building a context and a strategy for the mysterious condition that began all those years ago. After a decade or so of gathering notes and concepts into your map, you’re no longer at a complete loss about the whole thing, at least not the way you were when you first emerged from nothing.
Because you depend so much on the map, it’s easy to forget that it’s just a map, which you assembled yourself with mostly second-hand material. No matter how good your map is, it’s not the territory. Knowing some psychology doesn’t unravel the mysterious experience of having a thought. Understanding wavelengths of light doesn’t tell you why blue is so blue and red is so red. Despite your reliance on the map, you’re only ever in the territory, and the territory isn’t made of concepts. The territory is the wilderness itself. You can give its parts names and numbers but it never becomes them.
I have no idea if any of this makes much sense to anyone else. I’m trying to make a distinction that I think is important our well-being. When you regard the map as life itself, life can feel dull, limited, and stressful, because you think you can see where all the roads go and where the edges are. Living becomes a boring game of pattern recognition, where you’re mostly guessing what familiar thing will happen today or this week, and performing the necessary procedures. There’s little sense that life is the astounding, ongoing, wordless revelation that it is to any newcomer — or any sufficiently astute observer.
No matter how many concepts you append to the map, the experience of being alive remains fundamentally mysterious, just as it was when you were born into the great unexplained sea. You’re still just a being who woke up in Zork one day, only that by now you’ve had years to prod and explore and talk about it. Don’t let all those concepts fool you – the fact that life is happening at all was never truly explained.
You can learn to see that mysteriousness in the world again, on purpose. You can practice looking at what’s in front of you as an infant might see it. It’s all just textures and feelings, that have no real names and carry no explanation. Looking at the world like that comes with a certain kind of relief to the compulsive mapper, because what’s right in front of you is never as busy as the map.
It’s hard for a grownup to overcome the habit of deferring to the map over the territory. That’s why I’m always advocating weird exercises like pretending time just began, or imagining you’re not in this room, or that you’re visiting from another planet.
However you do it, it comes down to just looking — seeing what’s there, and nothing else, as you once did. Get lost in the fine hairs of a garden carrot, the smooth weave of the seatbelt, and the faint, blurry shapes your eyelashes make in front of everything. That’s the real world. Nothing in it has a name.
