Content, Structure & the Self Ruchika Nambiar
[1 SAMPLE CHAPTER DRAFT] Limited Sharing
2
Ruchika Nambiar
Part I: Content
20
Ruchika Nambiar
[Insert driving story comic: I’m secretly terrified of getting caught up in a conflict with other drivers. When I paid the driver 3k just to end the conflict. I’m terrified of other humans because I’m acutely aware of how situations can devolve in the most illogical ways where people resort to bullying, taunting and strong-arming other people to get their way, something that I’ve never been built to cope with. I’ve never known how to fight when people aren’t playing fair. It’s the same in life itself, I try to get by, confidently but unobtrusively, only flexing my confidence in places where I know it won’t challenge anyone, never to get on the bad side of a truly dominant personality, one that isn’t afraid of a fight. I’ve been lucky, both on the road and in life itself. Because when it comes to actual combat, I fold. Very quickly.]
Ruchika Nambiar
21
CHAPTER 1
An Exercise in Driver Profiling Deconstructing ‘Content’ and ‘Experience’ “The way we do anything is the way we do everything.” – Martha Beck Driving a car (or whatever your chosen mode of self-operated transport may be) is like a condensed crash-course version of life itself, freed from its more cumbersome socio-cultural frills and stripped down to its bare, largely unadulterated essence. Meaning you’d only need to profile the driver to produce a revealing enough snapshot of how a person navigates through life in general, given you know what signs to look for and don’t fall into the temptation of fluffy metaphor-making. Driving is an optimized, compressed version of life that squeezes large concepts, ideas and decisions down to minutes and seconds while at the same time allowing you enough room for personal expression and interpretation of the world around you. You have to follow certain basic protocol in order to make the car run (similar to how you have to breathe, eat and sleep in order to live), and yet you have enough freedom of expression to develop a “personality” as a driver, just as in life in general. So if you boil it down to the basics, most people drive pretty much the same (we typically drive in straight lines, we prefer to avoid traffic, we try not to crash into things), just as how in life everyone pretty much functions the same (we all want to be happy and successful and healthy, we seek love and companionship, we want meaningful careers). And yet within that larger scheme of functioning, we have enough room to express and interpret ourselves in a variety of ways. Just as how drivers can be reckless or cautious or aggressive or laidback on the road, people can
22
Ruchika Nambiar
be narcissistic or introverted or immature or happy-go-lucky in their lives. The broad strokes of driving are almost entirely congruent with that of life. When you’re on the road, in a vehicle that operates upon your whim, where a mistake can potentially fall anywhere on the spectrum between mildly irritating to immensely life-threatening, you tend to very quickly cut through most of the ideological fat that otherwise has the luxury to fill up your existence. If you go by every survival movie ever made, you know that you have to be stranded on a desert island or trapped on a liferaft in the middle of the ocean before your “true self” comes out and begins entertaining cannibalistic fantasies about your best friend. But that’s an extreme situation, too rarely encountered to give us any insights that would be applicable in our mundane day-to-day. There’s a far easier way to tease out this “true self” at a much lower, more useful volume. Simply observe yourself as a driver and you can strip right down to the essence of who you are and how you function. The road is like the world we inhabit. It operates on rules, some of which are spelled out, but most of which can afford to remain unspoken. It operates on mutually agreed upon codes of conduct that everyone abides by such that, for the most part, you can unremarkably go about your activities and make it home unscathed at the end of the day. These codes of conduct are situated within a larger framework of contextual rules, just like how the codes of conduct in your life are shaped by the region and culture you live in. For example, just as the culture you live in may dictate whether or not abortion is frowned upon, the culture you live in may also determine how seriously speed limits are followed. On the road, you are acutely aware of the fact that you are at the mercy of strangers whose primary concern is unapologetically themselves – a fact you cannot begrudge them because it is true of you
Ruchika Nambiar
23
too. In this environment you are able to make your peace with that reality unlike in any other environment where you seem to take issue with the selfishness of others. You’ve more or less accepted the unfairness of the likelihood that you could die for no mistake of your own, from the stupidity or selfishness or carelessness of someone else – this is an assumed fact, so indisputable that it would be a waste of time to mull over its unfairness. You are given control of a machine that is intuitive and expressive enough to pick up on and reflect the changes in your mood and intentions. In essence, the vehicle is you, it has the capacity to physically manifest the nuances in your behaviour – the aggressiveness with which you might rev up, the meekness or impatience of a honk, the recklessness or hesitance of an overtake. So much can the car mould itself around your intentions that the interaction between your car and another car on the road would be almost equivalent to how you as a person would interact in your truest, most honest sense with the other driver. What makes this analogy especially effective is that you have practical constraints and limitations within which you must operate, just like in life itself. Your car, your outer vessel, may not always match the expectations you have of it. You may not always be satisfied with your body or your clothes or your profession and believe that they don’t accurately represent who you are on the inside. In the same way, you may want a vehicle that looks different, or perhaps doesn’t break down so often, or perhaps was of a larger stature or a more expensive make. You might be saddled with a truck that is large and ominous but can only move so fast because of the load it carries. You might have a wily little rickshaw that can stubbornly wedge its way into any nook and cranny. You may be stuck with a beat-up, dusty secondhand hatchback when you think you deserve a sleek, luxurious sedan. The point is, the vehicle also has the capacity to be separate from you, to encase you within limitations and constraints that you don’t feel are intrinsic to who you are, that you may feel trapped by. And yet those
24
Ruchika Nambiar
limitations still define you to those who interact with you. And the way you cope with those limitations and conditions – whether you embrace them, resent them, resign yourself to them or overcompensate for them – is also reflective of who you are, whether bitter, insecure and jealous, or perhaps secure, confident and unfazed. [Comparative field guides of drivers I’ve known - Vittal, Kiran, myself, my brother, my dad, suhas] The act of driving tells you things about yourself, things that are consistent with your values and priorities in the rest of your life. It reveals to you your truest reactions towards irritants, it tells you which scenarios you’re sympathetic and unsympathetic towards. It tells you which opposing value systems offend your sensibilities the most. It tells you whether you’d forgive a young driver for your own early mistakes or whether you’d give him a hard time because he “deserves it” just like you did. It reveals to you the differences in your driving based on who’s watching, based on who’s sitting in the passenger seat. It reveals to you how you approach and tackle unfamiliarity, the degree to which you resist or avoid the unknown. It reveals to you the situations that make you fickle or hypocritical. It reveals to you your instinctive methods for conflict resolution, your tendencies towards fight or flight. It reveals to you the scenarios that bother you, scare you, worry you, the scenarios that get under your skin, the scenarios that make your blood boil for vengeance, the scenarios in which you assume indifference or ignorance, the scenarios in which you adopt modesty or bravado. It also reveals to you your true capacity for showing empathy towards the invisible causes/triggers behind the things that impact you. For example, your ability to foster an imagined sense of empathy towards the truck driver ahead of you, carrying a load of bricks, and unable to make it past a certain speed. Do you incessantly honk at him or do you patiently wait for an opportunity to overtake him? Even more significantly, do you overtake him with a
Ruchika Nambiar
25
quickness that lets him know just how much he inconvenienced you? Do you want him to know how considerate you were being by not honking at him? Or maybe you give him a kind nod as you pass him by, letting him see what a mature, compassionate person you are. Or maybe you just pass him by without a second thought, your irritation forgotten as quickly as it came. When it comes to driving, you can really drill down to the minute specifics of every interaction on the road and it will reveal to you the strains of your personality in very high definition. It reveals any hidden strains of narcissism or insecurity; it tells you how you move through life and assess your place in relation to other people – do you believe it is your right to be allowed to pass so that you can get to where you need to be? Do you feel wholly justified as you impatiently honk at the people who may be driving too slow or getting in your way? Do you feel wronged when people going about their daily lives gets in the way of you going about yours? Are you more concerned with establishing your position in relation to others or are you content to let conflicts go if it helps you reach your destination faster? If you really start to pay attention, you will find these same qualities reflect analogously in the rest of your life. On the road, in a car, you’re in an environment that accepts you in your most selfish avatar – not only will no one question or object to such behaviour, they assume it to be natural, allowing you to comfortably settle into a slightly more primitive version of yourself. And you watch as the world, nevertheless, continues to miraculously function in a reasonably cohesive manner based on some dynamic unspoken agreement between everyone. As pointed out earlier, you seem to make it back home safely without incident on most days. One needs some restraint as one applies this metaphor. Its playfulness can be tempting and one is very likely to glibly make this-and-that comparisons that are cute and clever but aren’t experientially
26
Ruchika Nambiar
concurrent. It has to be a more measured, meditative activity where you compare and evaluate the impulses, instincts and resulting states of mind between two given scenarios and whether or not they’re congruent – do you avoid unfamiliarity on the roads the same way you avoid it in life? Do both produce the same quality of comfort? Do you take to conflict and confrontation with the same aggressiveness as you do in life? Do you resolve them in analogous ways? Do you become indignant when slighted? Does the need for revenge or retribution become all-consuming? In any case, this can only be demonstrated through example, and you’ll find a number of such comparisons that I’ve catalogued for myself throughout this book. There’s a reason I’m relying so heavily upon this metaphor specifically. Driving is a fairly perfect example of an activity that features a near-equal ratio of instinctive:cognitive behaviour, a ratio that is not as easily recognized in most other activities. We tend to have an inaccurate understanding of the relationship between instinct and cognition. Oftentimes much too much responsibility is placed upon cognition when in fact, a lot of our actions that appear cognitive are actually more instinctive. And therefore the ratio between the two is more even (if not lopsided in favour of instinct) than is commonly believed. The reason I use the example of driving is because this ratio is more easily recognizable – the motives that dictate your actions are more transparent and there’s not much leeway to hide behind sophisticated cognitive rationalizations. We can acknowledge that a fair amount of driving falls under instinct (the changing of gears, spatial awareness, speed and depth perception, tracking objects in our peripheral vision, reflex actions, etc). But we can also acknowledge that the experience of driving is made up of cognitive components as well (deciding what route to take, law abidingness, right and wrong, unfair behaviour, unjustified action, conscious choices, etc). And I’m suggesting that in almost all our activities – be it writing or talking to a friend or cooking a meal – the instinct:cognition ratio is just as even
Ruchika Nambiar
27
as it is with driving. The only difference is, that ratio is not as easy to recognize, wrapped up as these actions are in layers and layers of complex cognitive reasoning. This is only possible because most such activities aren’t as intertwined with our physical survival as driving is. They have the luxury to sit around and spin elaborate justifications for why they were performed. Driving, with its far closer relationship to survival, can cut through the cognitive fat in a way that most other activities cannot. It doesn’t have the luxury of as much cognitive intervention. I start with the example of driving because, once you understand exactly what to look for, it becomes easier to detect this ratio in other activities as well. All our actions are made up of both conscious and instinctive components in various permutations and combinations. Our actions are performed through our cognitive and experiential selves with varying degrees of dominance. But while this is easy enough to understand, we often get the ratio wrong. And as a result of our miscalculation, we end up wrongly placing most of the responsibility for our actions upon our cognition, without pausing to analyze the extent to which our experiential self might control those same actions. We wrongly believe that the more knowledgeable we grow, the more our cognition masters, the more we’ll be able to consciously control our actions and perform them with greater cognitive intelligence. What we fail to understand is, our cognitive intelligence doesn’t have as much power as we think it does to intervene in the functioning of our experiential self. We fail to understand that the increasing power of our cognition doesn’t actually diminish the power of the experiential self, it only cloaks it. And so our experiential self roams around increasingly unfettered and unmonitored, acting as it always has. And it now does so with almost no accountability because, with our attention increasingly trained on our cognition, we lose our stamina to study, understand and train the experiential self. It’s like a child that we keep theorizing about in the abstract, but never actually
28
Ruchika Nambiar
interact with, so it never really has to grow up. Cognitively, we’re full grown, very intelligent adults, and experientially, we’re infants. And all signs point to this gap only widening with time. We are becoming further and further isolated from this experiential self the more we focus on our cognition and demand answers from it for every choice, every decision, every action. And we make this mistake because several of our actions appear cognitive even when they may not be. This is what skews the ratio in its favour and doesn’t allow us to fully perceive the experiential dimensions of our actions, in turn distorting crucial value frameworks that rest upon this foundation. And this happens because actions can appear cognitive when they are performed through means of cognitive content. But before I delve into any of that further, I need to first establish exactly what I mean by ‘content’.
Formats of Knowledge One evening, I was watching my father watch an episode of Money Heist. My brother was trying to introduce our parents to the modern concept of good television (in his attempts to wean them off their usual fare of tawdry Hindi soap operas). And in the episode in question, one of the characters was talking about her son, describing what their life was like before she lost custody of him.
“That kid is a survivor, you know?” she said. “At three, I had to take him from my mother’s house because her husband was giving him
Ruchika Nambiar
29
alcohol when I was away, because he didn’t like the crying.”1 When watching something with my parents, I tend to find myself very absorbed in watching their reactions rather than the show itself – to see how much they’re processing, how much is going over their heads, what makes their brows furrow in confusion, which jokes make them laugh. And so, I noticed when my father’s expression changed at this point in the episode. An infinitesimal shift in the set of his mouth, barely noticeable. You could see that he wasn’t going to comment on it, given that no one else seemed to be voicing any surprise, but he was just the slightest bit unnerved by the casual reference to feeding a three-year-old alcohol just to keep him quiet. He wasn’t taken aback enough to dwell on it too long, but you could see the wheels in his head turn as he briefly asked himself, “Who would do such a thing?” There is after all a difference between being theoretically aware of the darker fringes of human behaviour versus seriously contemplating such behaviour yourself. My father is a very good example of someone who has relied upon first-hand experience alone to inform his understanding of the world around him. Having worked his way through a rather modest childhood, he never had the inclination nor the opportunity to develop any vast second-hand understanding of experience via books or movies or television. As such, experiences that did not cross his path first-hand remained largely outside the realm of his experiential knowledge. He may theoretically be aware of the existence of cannibalistic psychopaths, but he has no means to experientially process it. He’d find himself completely confounded and bewildered if he were to stop and really think about them. On the other hand, if you 1
Money Heist, Part 1 Episode 5, 25:00, quoted from the show’s official English subtitles
30
Ruchika Nambiar
told me of the existence of cannibalistic psychopaths, I might just respond with some rather unearned jaded indifference. “What about them?” I might ask. It’s not necessarily that I can empathize with said cannabilistic psychopaths, but I am aware that there are ways to empathize, I’m aware that this phenomenon exists in the world and can be understood. I’d dip into my fairly vast pool of second-hand experience to make sense of it. I might remember newspaper articles I’ve read, I might hark back to an episode of Criminal Minds that featured a similar psychopathy and delved deep into the criminal’s history. I might listen to interviews and documentaries and podcasts that unravel the minds of famous serial killers. I might think back to The Silence of the Lambs (despite the fact that I’ve never actually watched or read it) and note the prevalence of this psychopathy in mainstream media. More broadly I might think back to the literature around psychopathy itself, the studies that exist around it, the currency that psychoanalysis has in our world today, the effort people have put into understanding various atypical proclivities and deviances that exist in the world. I might look up stories on cannibalistic tribes where such behaviour is considered perfectly normal. I might wonder at the person’s childhood and try to figure out what possible circumstances could forgive his particular inclinations. I can perhaps identify the parts of my own personality that could have, under different circumstances, developed into psychopathies of their own. I could maybe feebly join the dots between where I am and where this hypothetical cannibal is and have some means to put myself in his shoes. The point is, despite the experience itself being just as foreign to me as it is to my father, I still seem to have a frame of reference within which to situate this experience such that it isn’t entirely other to me. I have a way to place it within the same world that I inhabit, no matter how far away it may be from me. I have a way to process it such that it doesn’t entirely confound me. In a way, I’m jaded and unsurprised
Ruchika Nambiar
31
despite my lack of experience. My father, on the other hand, has had no second-hand medium through which to normalize experiences that are foreign to his own. In fact it’s somewhat impressive, because despite that, my father is a rather worldly man – very analytical, very knowledgeable, very tolerant of unfamiliar points of view. He doesn’t like to jump to conclusions, he doesn’t allow himself to become steeped in dogma. Xenophobia doesn’t catch hold of him as easily as it does other people. He’s quick to retract a judgment or rectify an opinion that he might have made in haste or ignorance. (Though as my mother might qualify, all this goes out the window if he’s having a fit of rage… but that’s besides the point.) It’s impressive because it’s very easy (so easy it’s almost worthless) to be those things today, what with the abundance of second-hand knowledge we have access to. It’s almost too easy now to be worldly, to be tolerant, to be knowledgeable, to be open-minded. But to learn to be those things via first-hand experience is a different matter altogether. Because at the end of the day, things like xenophobia, intolerance and narrow-mindedness are very natural, instinctive inclinations – to overcome them cognitively through theoretical knowledge is one thing, but to overcome them through experience is another. These two approaches create very different learning habits and change the way we absorb and assimilate the world around us. Our bodies and minds become accustomed to certain formats of knowledge, and when a learning is presented to us in a format that is less familiar, it takes us longer to absorb it. Just as my father may have trouble absorbing a new experience second-hand, I find myself somewhat overwhelmed and even humbled by actual first-hand experience. Despite all my intellectual self-assurance and familiarity with a concept, when I encounter the actual experience itself, it’s an unfamiliar thing. It fills me with the same nervousness, the same
32
Ruchika Nambiar
wariness, the same caution with which you might approach a new person. I’m reminded suddenly that no matter how much knowledge I may have of the experience, my experiential self (my body, my emotions, my state of mind) still approaches it as if it were the dark unknown. Even if you’ve been given a crystal clear photograph of a room and you know where everything is, you’ve fully memorized its layout and all the objects within it, you’d still be wary if you entered that room for the first time in pitch blackness. Knowing of something does not make it experientially familiar, because the experiential self only learns of the world via experience, no matter how much your cognitive self may try to study the world on its behalf. The learning habits of these two selves are different and their formats don’t translate. As such, now in his early 60s, when my father suddenly finds the time and luxury to sit down and watch a good movie, one can see that a second-hand experience, no matter how beautifully and realistically represented within a piece of content, is an unfamiliar thing to him. He doesn’t absorb it as quickly as my brother and I do. It doesn’t permeate his body of knowledge as swiftly as it does for us. There’s the slightest, almost negligible resistance in him, a resistance that tells him, “This experience is alien to us, we have not experienced it ourselves, we don’t understand it.” He’s not quick to resonate with something that he has not experienced first-hand, he’ll take longer to come around. My brother and I don’t face that resistance nearly as much. Or rather, we’ve overcome it over the years, accustomed as we are to receiving our experiential information second-hand. We’ve built a predominantly cognitive body of knowledge that is very used to receiving input in this format. To us, there is nothing particularly eyebrow-raising about a man who feeds an infant alcohol, or a chemistry teacher who goes rogue and begins cooking meth (Breaking Bad), or a vigilante serial killer who works for the police and kills other serial killers to get his own fix (Dexter). We’ve, in some sense,
Ruchika Nambiar
33
“seen it all”. We may not have experienced those things ourselves, not even close, but we're intimately familiar with them nonetheless. It's not so much the experience itself that's familiar to us, rather it is our inbuilt tolerance for unfamiliarity. We are completely assured that we have ways to understand an experience no matter how unfamiliar it is to us, completely eliminating its dimension of “alienness” and therefore removing any need for surprise. Something feels alien, not because it has not been understood yet, but because we believe we may not have the means to understand it. And today, we believe we have the means to understand practically everything under the sun, so really what need is there for any eyebrow-raising? How can any concept take us by surprise? And it’s only when our understanding is tested against actual experience, that we have any real way of knowing whether this conceptual “familiarity” might be somewhat illusory. At the very least, even if not illusory, it’s limited in its scope. Conceptual familiarity, no matter how vivid or detailed, is only cognitive and may not help us navigate the actual experience. And unfortunately, one hardly ever has to test the bulk of this knowledge against actual experience. [Scene from The Piano Teacher example] You may be able to test your knowledge against more commonplace experiences – for example you may be able to compare your television-fueled understanding of what it means to have an insufferable coworker versus the actual experience of having an insufferable coworker. You may be able to test your movie-driven concept of “college life” against the actual experience of college life. But who’s ever going to encounter the meth-dealing chemistry teacher or the vigilante serial killer to see how one really responds to those people or situations? I’ve watched countless police interrogations on procedural TV shows like Criminal Minds. I’ve been a close witness to the demanding, emotionally grueling lives of the doctors on Grey’s
34
Ruchika Nambiar
Anatomy. I’ve observed the disorientation of time travel (Dark) or the bewilderment of amnesia (Memento) or the tragedy of drug addiction (Beautiful Boy) or the thrill of a bank robbery (Good Time). I’ve become intimately familiar with the struggles of a fictional female Jewish stand-up comic in the 1950s (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). I’ve breathed in the stifling air of Soviet Russia through Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. Some of these may not even be good representations – I don’t think particularly highly of Criminal Minds or Memento or Grey’s Anatomy – they may be clichéd or overdramatized or even factually incorrect, but regardless of their credibility, they still inform my concepts because they’ve been crafted with such vivid detail and nuance. My conceptual world is rich and abundant with experiences that I’m most likely never going to encounter in my lifespan. Our body of conceptual knowledge today is so vast and diverse that most of us are only going to experience a very very tiny sliver of it first-hand. The rest will simply remain theoretical what-ifs. What if I were questioned by the police? What if I were a Jewish divorcée aspiring to be a stand-up comic in the 50s? What if I were in witness protection, having to move to a new city under a new name? What if I were the Queen of England? I could make-believe and give you fairly comprehensive answers to all these what-ifs because I have a vivid conceptual understanding of these experiences. But I’m never once going to have to test my apparent familiarity in practice. And so the large bulk of our knowledge has the luxury of flying under the radar, practically untested and never having to prove its real-world usefulness.
Understanding ‘Content’ & ‘Experience’
Ruchika Nambiar
35
We carry our lives out along the experience-cognition spectrum. These two realms aren’t mutually exclusive; rather they form a continuum, a spectrum between them. So while they may gradually transition into one another, one end is certainly very distinctly different from the other. You can, in theory, perform an action that is purely experiential, purely cognitive or, most often, a mixture of both.
The experiential domain is the one in which you receive and react to the environment you inhabit at any given moment. Your experiential self is composed of your body, your emotions, your states of mind – the things that produce your reactions in their most raw, unprocessed forms. It’s the self that cries while watching Mufasa die in the Lion King, or the self that unthinkingly cusses when rudely cut off by another driver on the road. On the other hand, the cognitive realm is the space within which experience is recognized and reflected upon and inferences are drawn from it. Your cognitive self is made up of your conscious thoughts, choices and decisions. It’s the self that smirks at a clever joke or engages in witty banter or gets into a heated debate on politics. But alas, I’m nitpicking and drawing lines where they don’t exist. Truthfully, there’s no clean way to separate the cognitive and the experiential selves because, as I’ve stated before, it’s a continuous spectrum, and every action contains experiential and cognitive components in various ratios. Any perceived line between them is in constant flux and shifts with every given situation, perhaps even shifting several times within a single scenario. These distinct “selves” are merely theoretical constructs or visualization tools that will help us spot this elusive line more easily and allow us to keep our eye on it even while it wavers and shifts.
36
Ruchika Nambiar
With these examples, all I mean to point out is, in a given action, it is possible to identify which of the two selves might be exercising greater dominance. A basic example to demonstrate the distinction would be the difference between feeling guilty and admonishing yourself. The former originates closer to the experiential realm, the latter closer to the cognitive. It requires greater cognitive input to process your experience of guilt and then decide to admonish yourself for your mistake. In fact, feelings of guilt, remorse, contrition, penitence, shame, rue, repentance, regret would all appear at different points along the spectrum between experience and cognition. The experiential realm is not to be understood solely as involuntary physical/physiological responses to sensory stimuli. Rather, I see this realm as the exact threshold at which typical physical/sensory stimuli as well as “socio-cultural” stimuli (if I can use that term loosely) function in the same manner – in that they both induce an instinctive even if not instantaneous physical response. It is the threshold at which reflexively yanking your hand away from a flame is the same as reflexively smiling at someone who greets you a good morning is the same as having an entire 5-minute long exchange of pleasantries with an acquaintance. Even while prolonged over a significant chunk of time, even while performed through means of conscious spoken word, it is possible for an action to be predominantly experiential. The mere presence of cognitive components (spoken, written, thought, or otherwise) does not necessarily imply that an action is performed predominantly in the cognitive realm. Again, one must firmly keep in mind the visualization of a spectrum and not think in absolutes. One could say that reflexively yanking your hand away from a flame is more experiential than commenting about the weather to your coworker. But it’s still possible for that weather comment to reside on the experientially dominant half of the spectrum. One could say that, theoretically, a newborn child only has an experiential domain to start with, its entire spectrum is purely experiential, and the child builds
Ruchika Nambiar
37
and develops his cognitive realm over time as he learns to process and assimilate the world around him. And there are two ways in which we learn about the world around us and build our cognitive realm – (a) first-hand through experience itself and (b) second-hand through content that represents experience. Take depression for example – you may know something of depression if you’ve experienced it yourself, or you could also learn something of it from a movie or book or documentary or news article that deals with depression. Of course, the two learnings aren’t really comparable to each other, but they both do teach you something of the experience. If the concept of ‘depression’ were a container inside your head, both those learning methods will fill that container in their own ways. They may not fill them correctly, they may be riddled with biases or inaccuracies, but both will inform your conceptual understanding of it in one way or another. And with every passing decade, our learning has tended to lean more and more towards the latter second-hand medium, given the constant accretion of more varied, nuanced forms of content that try to represent experience as closely and immersively as possible. Content today has mutated into a large, powerful, unstoppable beast. It’s like the intelligent robot that man invents to ease his life, only to realize that it has grown intelligent enough to take matters into its own hands. But in order to grasp the significance of this mutation, it is important to understand exactly what content is at a very fundamental, granular level. Content is any cognitive material we generate from experience. When we record & preserve an experience within a tangible form, we create content. All cognitively generated material, from conscious thought to spoken or written word, to complex and compound media forms such as literature, film, music and more – all these content forms are designed to represent (preserve, record or recreate) actual human experience in one way or another. Content is the tangible
38
Ruchika Nambiar
artefact that is extracted from experience and used to represent it long after the experience itself has ceased to exist. This tangibility doesn’t necessarily have to be physical. A film or a book may be very tangible forms of content – they can represent highly complex experiences through words and images and sounds. But content doesn’t always have to be that complex or advanced. A simple conscious thought in one’s mind is also a form of content with some degree of tangibility – the thought is coherent; it has form and dimension and can be “held” in some sense. If, for example, you were feeling cold, if you were to think to yourself, “I’m cold”, that thought is a tangible representation of your experience. Feeling cold (experience) is different from acknowledging/recognizing that you are feeling cold (thought) even though they both happen so close together that it is difficult to separate them. This thought – “I’m cold” – is not the experience itself, it stands separate from it by one tiny degree. And yet, once the experience itself has ceased to exist, this tangible thought can continue to live on. It can represent the experience in its absence, stand in as a proxy for it. Much after the cold has passed, you can call back this thought and cognitively reflect upon the experience of feeling cold.
Ruchika Nambiar
39
This is how we accumulate concepts and build our understanding of the world around us. The concepts themselves can exist in the absence of experience; we don’t have to be experiencing happiness in this very moment in order to know what happiness is. We have a concept of happiness that can stand in place of the actual experience and reserve its spot. You can of course immerse yourself in the memory of the feeling and recreate the experience to some extent, but the point is you don’t need to. You can think of the concept of happiness without feeling it or its memory. And the tangibility of this piece of content makes it portable – you can carry it with you into other contexts. You can talk about things like happiness or anger or boredom in the abstract, you don’t have to be actively feeling those things in order to think about them, discuss them, evaluate them. And given this ability to be transferred and grafted into other contexts besides the one it was created in (qualities that ‘experience’ does not and cannot possess), it is but natural that content is used to judge and evaluate experience. Content is used as the basis upon which one can make valuejudgments about experience. For example, you may decide that happiness is the most important thing in one’s life, and must be pursued above all else. You may decide that death is the most frightening thing, or that love is redeeming, or that pain makes you stronger, or that apathy is a sign of laziness. In this way, you can assign values to your concepts, you can weigh them against one another, you can prioritize them. You can then use this value system to guide your interactions with the world – you can decide who is hypocritical or admirable or trustworthy or naîve or selfish, you can decide your priorities in your life, you can set your goals. But if our understanding of content is proven to be flawed, if our reliance upon it is based on false assumptions, that would mean our judgment of experience is just as skewed. If we have misunderstood the exact relationship between content and experience, it undermines the very foundation upon which we judge experience. And I’m trying
40
Ruchika Nambiar
to demonstrate that our understanding of this relationship is in fact very very flawed. The first thing to grasp about the problematic content-experience relationship is its extreme lopsidedness. Experience is prime; experience is that upon which all content ever has been generated. Even if you have not personally experienced love, your concept of love is informed, however distantly, by someone somewhere who has in fact experienced it. When one becomes cognizant of an experience, one produces content – in the form of thought, speech, and so on. And while content is used to articulate and consciously understand experience, what causes the lopsidedness is the ability for content to exist independent of experience. Once that piece of content is generated and deployed into the world, it no longer needs the original experience in order to further itself. Awareness alone of one level of content is sufficient to construct the next level of content. One can construct content on top of the knowledge of an experience without the experience itself existing. The very purpose of content is for it to be able to exist after the experience ceases to exist. And this by definition means that the content is independent and self-standing enough to form the scaffolding for other derivative content. But what happens as content builds on itself is that it increasingly loses accountability to the actual experience itself. The danger in content is that it can develop self awareness, it can become cognizant of itself. It literally develops and grows and ages the way a living being does. Once it has one ability, it can stand on the shoulders of that ability and develop the next. This is how content deploys itself with minimal investment from the agent. Like a long protracted game of Chinese Whispers, with every new evolution, a piece of content can grow legs of its own and take itself further away from the actual experience that birthed it.
Ruchika Nambiar
41
If the word ‘love’ exists in your vocabulary and if you understand its definition and the terms of its usage, you don’t need to have experienced it first hand to know how to use it in a sentence. The definition can form your scaffolding upon which you can then construct more advanced content around ‘love’. You can potentially construct a sentence around love, a poem about love, maybe even write an entire movie about love. It is possible for you to have a detailed understanding of what love is without having experienced it yourself. Of course, you may say ‘love’ is not such a distinct unit to be understood or not understood as a whole. Experiences are not singular, hard-edged shapes. They bleed and transform into one another, their lines blur. You could use one type of love to understand another type of love. You could have experienced familial love for your parents first hand and not romantic love. And you could then use that familial love as a basis to imagine what romantic love might be like. Your love for your wife may not be the exact same experience as your neighbour’s love for his wife, and yet you could use your love to extrapolate and understand his love. This is true and I don’t disagree at all. This process of experiential extrapolation is in fact extremely necessary for us to develop empathy and coexist. However, that isn’t the point. Yes, you could potentially understand romantic love by extrapolating your familial love. But that isn’t the only option available to you. You could also understand romantic love if you were exposed to an immersive, high-resolution piece of content that recreates the experience for you. You could read Romeo & Juliet and learn that love is so consuming that it might be worth dying for. You could watch a movie like Sleepless in Seattle and hear Tom Hanks say, “I knew it the first time I touched her. It was like coming home.” And from this one short line you could learn that love can feel like a homecoming, love can be comforting, love can make you feel safe. You could learn of the minute experiential details and intricacies of love through content
42
Ruchika Nambiar
alone – you could learn that your heart may start racing when you see them, or you could lose track of time when you’re with them, or you could find yourself tongue-tied or get lost in their eyes. The content form can be very immersive in its representation, simulating the experience rather convincingly for you. You could understand romantic love rather well through this simulation, you don’t solely have to rely on extrapolation. And there’s a huge gaping difference between those two methods. The method of experiential extrapolation doesn’t promise you all the answers, it only gives you a rough idea of where to look and what to expect. Because, at the end of the day, familial love is not the same as romantic love. Extrapolating from it can’t give you all the information you need. But, a well-made, high resolution piece of content can give you all the answers (or at least the illusion of them). Extrapolation can only serve as a starting point, a compass. Content on the other hand could potentially be the entire map. And the point I’m making is, you’d navigate the terrain with a lot more self-assurance if you had a map and a compass, versus just a compass. Furthermore, these content “maps” today are exponentially more detailed, immersive and high-resolution than they’ve ever been before, and our sense of assurance with experience has inflated in direct proportion. Just like our current assurance with Google Maps, given the depth and breadth of content we have access to today, we’re convinced that it’s impossible to get lost. What could possibly be there in the experience of love or depression or apathy that I haven’t heard or read or watched somewhere or the other? Even if there’s something I haven’t yet read or watched, I know that the content likely exists out there for me to track down anytime I wish. What can take me by surprise? What could possibly jump out at me from the shadows of experience when every dark nook and cranny has been illuminated for me?
Ruchika Nambiar
43
So the question I’m really asking throughout this book is, should we really be that assured? Despite its ability to more and more convincingly recreate experience for us, is content really as reliable as it seems to be? And what is our assurance in content doing to us? How much is it blinding us to actual experience? Are there gaps and deficiencies in content that we are unaware of? And what will our ignorance of these deficiencies cost us in the future? More pressingly, what is it already costing us? The problem, as I must restate over and over, is not the map. The problem is the assurance the map provides, the increasing arrogance with which we refuse to look any further than the map and the resulting insulation that blankets us and closes us off from the world.
Puppy Love and Phantom Experiences There’s a reason I used ‘love’ as an example earlier – it happens to be great at demonstrating just how easy it is to know an experience without really knowing it. Given the all-consuming “magic” of romantic love, the world has a disproportionately large amount of content that revolves around it, far more than any other experience. Even a book or movie that isn’t romantic will still invariably feature a love interest and a romantic subplot. Furthermore, this isn’t a recent phenomenon impacting only the more recent generations like all the other content I’ve been talking about so far. Love has been a pretty permanent fixture in every story, every piece of content since the beginning of time. As such we’ve all grown up consuming content that has recreated romantic love for us in varying levels of detail – right from an idealistic bedtime story about a princess rescued by true love’s first kiss, to a mature and nuanced movie like Marriage Story that paints an achingly realistic picture of divorce. We’ve all had ways to develop an incredibly vivid picture of romantic love throughout our
44
Ruchika Nambiar
lives whether or not we’ve experienced it. We all know romantic love whether or not we really know it. And the easiest subjects to study are children or teenagers who fall in love for the first time. I was unquestionably sure that I had love all figured out the first time I fell in love. No one could have convinced me otherwise, my conviction was unshakeable. Such is the case with almost every teenager who falls in love for the first time. And today I look back and say, with just as much certainty, that my teenage self did not know love even if it hit her between the eyes. Such is the case with almost every adult who looks back on their first love. I’m not taking issue with how deluded or not we are about love. That isn’t of concern to me. What I’m trying to point out is the absolute unshakeable certainty with which we think we know love, at every stage. The only reason we can harbour that kind of certainty is because we’ve experienced love in simulation, a million different times in a million different ways from a million different angles. There is almost no facet of love we haven’t experienced indirectly through content. It’s not our fault. If I’d taken a million test drives in a million different scenarios in my driving school’s simulator car, I’d believe I could drive a real car too even if I’d never set foot in one. Learning through extrapolation may promise more accurate knowledge, but learning through content promises nearly limitless knowledge, and when given a choice, we’re obviously tempted to rely further and further on the latter method. And we don’t realize the danger of it because (a) content is very immersive in its simulations and convinces you of its accuracy, and (b) we grow up believing it far sooner than we have an opportunity to test its accuracy. So we’re fairly old and set in our ways before we realize that our content-based knowledge may not actually be equipped to handle real experience.
Ruchika Nambiar
45
[CONTENT WORKS IN TANDEM WITH EXTRAPOLATION. It uses your extrapolation to latch onto you. Show how content joins dots for us, it builds on our existing dots and connects to them, this is how we relate to experiences that are not our own through content. E.g. you know what it’s like to be tongue tied (that may be an actual experience you’ve had), then content can come in and join the dots between romantic love and the feeling of being tongue tied, and you suddenly have an experiential link to this notion of love. You know the sense of safety and security that your home provides you, so when someone says that being with your loved one feels like “coming home”, you have an actual experience to link it to. Even if you’ve never experienced what it’s like to be on fire, you may be able to remember what it was like to burn your hand on the stove and then you can somewhat join the dots between yourself and a fictional burn victim in a movie. Show how this makes the web of content + experience incredibly entangled.] Content is so immersive because it latches onto as many real experiences as you’ve had, making connections and joining dots for
46
Ruchika Nambiar
you. It is convincing because it doesn’t just thrust new, alien experiences upon you, it instead connects those new dots to existing dots in your experiential landscape, leaving you with clear pathways to understand things that you haven’t experienced before. Through its comparisons and metaphors and similes, it helps you understand experiences that are not within the immediate range of your own firsthand experience. And we build our concepts this way. We are able to build a concept of love or apathy or shame that is far more intricate than the degree to which we may have experienced it ourselves. But because content attaches itself to as many experiential nodes as it can, it becomes incredibly difficult to separate what is real and what is imaginary/untested/simulative in these concepts we’ve built. And not only are a greater portion of our concepts simulative today, that percentage is continuously increasing as time goes by, and we’re also building these increasingly simulative concepts at far younger ages. Our conceptual knowledge of the world is now almost invariably several paces ahead of our actual experiences, and its stride is only lengthening. [insert some example of perfectly performed teenage apathy] With all the content available to consume, right from Albert Camus’ The Stranger to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of House, a teenager today might intimately know a complex experience like apathy in ways that he’s probably never truly experienced himself. Yet he’ll be able to simulate it perfectly down to every last word and inflection, to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from his actual experience. And this age bar only drops lower with time. So what does this mean for him when, a few years down the line, he experiences real fullblown unsimulated apathy in all its bleak glory? Will his highresolution conceptual understanding help him navigate the actual experiential terrain? How long will it take him to even recognize real apathy and distinguish it from its simulative counterpart? And how
Ruchika Nambiar
47
might his self-assured all-knowing approach hinder him from navigating the experience with some much-needed constructive humility? I ask these questions because my own cognitively simulated concepts have actively wasted my time, making me take months and years to accept that I don’t actually know an experience before beginning the painful, humbling process of unlearning and relearning it firsthand. And I’m nowhere near out of the woods, my feet are still very much tangled in several such simulations. I care nothing for the sanctity or integrity of experience itself. I don’t care if someone chooses to spend their entire life in simulative, immersive fantasies and becomes completely disconnected from the real world. I see nothing intrinsically wrong with it, just as I see nothing wrong with how people of the 21st century would rather take a picture of a beautiful sunset instead of experiencing it in realtime. The sanctity of “real experience” is irrelevant to me. My real issue is simply one of practicality. When a person sets a goal (no matter what it is) with a genuine desire to reach it, effectiveness and efficiency are real measurable entities. The faster and more effortlessly you reach your goal, the more efficient and competent you are. My problem is our conceptual self-assurance wastes our time, makes us increasingly inefficient and causes us to take longer to reach our own goals, by our own standards. Which, again, is completely fine if you recognize that and, with full awareness, decide that reaching those goals isn’t worth more than living in your simulations. But that’s not the case. We do want things. We all want to do well on a job, build a career, start a business, write a book, make good friends, find our soulmates, earn fame or recognition. We aren’t satisfied with just imagining these things and playing make-believe forever, we want them for real. And our cognitive self-assurance is wasting our time with these goals, keeping us locked in simulation-mode longer than we’d like to be, and the true depth of this problem is largely undiagnosed. So we’re all frustrated wondering exactly what is getting in our way when we’re in
48
Ruchika Nambiar
the era of near omniscience. How is it that we have maps to tell us the route, the terrain, the destination, even the weather, and yet still not be able to get to where we want to go? How can we possess knowledge that is so vast and detailed and yet so completely unusable? This is why it’s important to intimately understand what content is, how and why it gets generated and consumed, and exactly what its relationship with experience is. Furthermore, it’s also vital to understand what it isn’t, and to identify all the things content is incapable of. We cannot hope to overcome the challenges it poses unless we minutely study the beast and learn how it operates.
Wrapping vs. Filling The way we perceive and value content is in some desperate need of fixing. Our increasing reliance upon content and the subsequent insulation from experience has caused us to create content-driven value systems, and that poses several interlinked problems. The whole of Part I delves into each of those problems in detail, but first we need to understand the core nature of content and its relationship to experience. Our cognition is linked to our experiential self via action. This path is circular; like a continuous feedback cycle that loops back into itself. We experience something in our environment, we approach our cognitive body of knowledge for answers, we reflect, we infer, we perform an action based on our inference, and the performance of that action then births a new experience, restarting the cycle. [show experience/action/cognition feedback loop] But every time our cognition provides an answer, it also archives that answer for itself. There is cognitive content that gets generated in every cycle, and that content is accretive. Our learning builds on itself, we remember what we’ve learned in every cycle and that stays with us
Ruchika Nambiar
49
and populates our cognitive body of knowledge. As such, the greater our body of knowledge, the more “informed” and rational our actions are. The actions I perform today are informed by the cumulative rationalizations and justifications that my cognition has been building for years. When I was 5, if I laughed at someone tripping on a banana peel in a cartoon, I’d have concluded that I laughed “because it was funny”. Today when I’m 28 and laughing at a dead baby joke,2 I conclude that I laugh “because I’m a person with a dark sense of humour, who knows how to appreciate a joke for what it is, who’s intelligent enough to separate jokes from real life, and has the capacity to appreciate the structure and semantics of a well-told joke.” The latter is a far more sophisticated conclusion that has been stewing and building in flavour for years, drawing pointers from the complex media and content available to me, defining my “personality”, making it more complex and layered and nuanced. Think about the currency and history that a concept like “dark humour” has behind it. For me to correctly use that phrase in a sentence requires me to be aware (consciously or otherwise) of the entire body of knowledge that birthed the phrase “dark humour” and gave it the currency it has. This sentence, this inference – this piece of content that our cognition generates at every stage – then goes into its archive, and over time it constructs a large composite image of “who we are”. This isn’t problematic in itself. The problem is that our cognition is unfortunately not an unbiased entity. It does a fair deal of cherrypicking. My cognition, for example, probably won’t acknowledge the fact that I might still laugh at someone tripping on a banana peel, for the exact same reason that I laughed when I was 5, and the reason is no more sophisticated than it was back then. As one grows older and becomes more conscious of oneself, one begins to process, analyse and systematize his experience, and this 2
What’s funnier than a pile of dead babies? Another one.
50
Ruchika Nambiar
systematization is what builds the cognitive realm. This systematization however is a simplification, and for good reason. Simplification of experience is simply a practical necessity, it isn’t logistically viable to go around experiencing the world at full capacity all the time. However, this simplification produces side effects that get deposited in increments over a prolonged period of time, harmless in themselves, but ultimately forming a caked muddy layer that obscures our accurate understanding of experience as we grow older. For the most part, we already understand that the process of systematizing experience is selective. We choose the elements of our experience that can be strung together to form a fairly consistent and coherent story. The gamut of actions and feelings that make up our entire range of experience is too wide and too varied for us to process in its entirety and it is thus processed only in sections and slices by our cognition. And the cognition’s decisions are determined largely by the image we are trying to project of ourselves in a given environment. At any given moment we’re trying to project a specific image of ourselves that we’ve carved out of our complete range of experience, such that we seem like one thing more than another. We want to be seen in one specific way, and we project that one specific image by drowning out its counter image. And we do this by submerging an experience in unconsciousness. It is not that experiences counter to the chosen image don’t exist, it is simply that we choose not to be conscious of them because they add too much cognitive noise and interfere with the narrative we are constructing of ourselves. If I want to project an image of myself that is predominantly cynical, I will make myself aware of the act of raising my eyebrows and smirking at a scene from a stereotypical romantic movie. But I will keep myself from acknowledging the butterflies that flood my stomach when I watch the guy in that same movie race through the airport to stop the girl of his dreams from flying away forever. The butterflies exist, I’m just turning a blind eye to them.
Ruchika Nambiar
51
So if there is a bias, the first logical thing to do is to look for the source of the bias. On what basis does the cognition make these choices? On what basis does it prioritize between two experiences and decide which one to catalog and which one to ignore? I stated at the beginning of this chapter that our actions have a much greater experiential component to them, a far higher ratio that we fail to recognize. That’s because this cherry-picking that our cognition does is very much driven by our experiential self. The reason we get the ratio wrong is because the cognitive self believes it is operating separate and aloof from the experiential self. It believes that its conclusions are drawn from a place of unhindered objectivity. What we don’t easily realize is that the cognitive self is always only operating within boundaries set by the experiential self. The cognitive self makes decisions that are very much coloured and influenced by the experiential self. My cognition chooses to catalog the cynical smirk instead of the butterflies because when I joined art school, the intellectual elitists were all entertaining themselves with thoughts of nihilism and cynicism, looking down upon all things warm and fluffy. And I being the conceited elitist snob I was (or am), my experiential self derived pleasure from being counted among their ranks. It made me feel superior and invincible and respected and heady. I had experiential motives to process the smirk and ignore the warmth. For the same reason, I could have happily watched a chick flick with my girlfriends in school and swooned over its dashing male protagonist, while in college I’d have watched the same movie with my snobby elitist friends only to make fun of it. At every given opportunity, my cognition makes whatever choices are more experientially lucrative. My cognition, autonomous as it may believe itself to be, unthinkingly plays by the rules the experiential self sets for it.
52
Ruchika Nambiar
The difference between the two is the experiential self cares only for its own comfort; it only wants to experience things and it doesn’t care to take credit or responsibility for our actions. The experiential self has no bias, it sees no difference between the smirk or the butterflies, it can appreciate and seek out both. It can also seek out the pleasure of being counted amongst the ranks of aforementioned elitist snobs; it doesn’t care if said snobbery is inconsistent with stomach butterflies. But content is the medium through which we interact with the world around us. Besides our actions, we interact with people through the things we consciously think, believe and say about ourselves. This composite image of “who we are” has to be viable and legible enough to be put on display for the rest of the world to process. So the cognition, while cataloging and generating content to construct this image, is forced to then show some bias. It has to create a composite image that would be attractive to my snobs. It has to create reasons and justifications for why I do the things I do, and furthermore, it has to construct a narrative that makes sense. If our choices and preferences change from one day to the next, the cognition feels responsibility to account for it, to come up with reasons for the shift. It comes up with reasons for why I could happily watch Princess Diaries in the 5th grade but can no longer watch it without severely cringing now. The problem is the cognition, on its own, doesn’t recognize its ultimate subordination to the experiential self, mainly because the experiential self is never conscious enough to make a big production out of its superiority. The experiential self doesn’t flaunt its ultimate autonomy because it, by virtue, doesn’t have the capacity to be cognizant of itself. Our cognition is the only one with a voice, the only one with any ability to think anything of itself. So due to our cognition’s presumptive dominance, we are led to believe that content is what action is filled with, rather than what it is wrapped with. At every stage, as we grow older, we believe that our actions are
Ruchika Nambiar
53
increasingly filled with content – the conscious reasons, justifications, “personalities” – generated by our cognition. We believe that our actions revolve around this kernel. What we don’t fully grasp is that this content, while perfectly valid in itself, is not the driver for those actions. Content is what wraps our actions, packages them for the world and ourselves to make sense of, but it is not the impetus behind the action itself. Actions are not driven by the content that justifies them. I don’t mean to suggest that the content generated by our cognition is necessarily wrong, it is simply generated after the fact. I do have a dark sense of humour. It probably does make me more intelligent than the average person, as studies suggest. My dark humour is the reason I laugh at a dead baby joke. My actions are explained by the inferences my cognition makes. In itself, the content generated is not wrong. And my cognition does need to generate that content in order for me to effectively function in my social environments and establish relationships with other people. The problem is not in the generation of the content itself. The problem is in the archival and subsequent usage of that content to dictate and curate future experiences. The problem is not in my saying, “I have a dark sense of humour”. The problem is in the fact that I might now use that sentence to justify chiselling out portions of my experience that don’t fit under its umbrella. Again, not a problem in itself. So what if I never again laugh when someone slips on a banana peel? So what if that’s no longer funny to me? Except that’s not the case. I do still find it funny and I do still laugh at it. But my cognition, through its continuous lack of acknowledgment, can no longer recognize that experience. It loses its stamina to pick up on it, to perceive it, and if it ever wants to find it again in the future, it’ll take a lot more effort to rebuild its perceptive stamina. So when my cognition has decided to ignore it, that experience, while just as real as the dark humour, is forced into exile. It is forced to become a part of some underground
54
Ruchika Nambiar
version of myself that not only has no connection with my aboveground self, it’s probably so alien that it cannot even be recognized by my above-ground self. Again, not a problem in itself. I don’t really care about secret inclinations or guilty pleasures, I’m not trying to guard the sanctity of a “true self” that our supposed “hypocrisy” has driven underground. My problem, as always, is a practical one. What does this disconnection from the underground self mean for us? Today at 28, I’m discovering portions of my experiential self that are completely other, completely alien to the self that I’ve been cultivating (in all earnestness) for years. I’ve genuinely believed, with the most rigorous self analysis, that I had studied myself very well, when in fact I could have been studying a housefly for all the good it did me. I’m not just speaking of run-of-the-mill self discovery, I’m talking about experiential needs and desires and deficiencies that could have been addressed far sooner had I known they existed. And instead I was wasting my time constructing elaborate narratives of a completely different version of myself, so very real and immersive, that was entirely cut off from this experiential self. I’d been living for so long with elaborate answers to complex what-ifs that I had no idea that my experiential self, when faced with those actual scenarios, would respond in ways completely inconsistent with the cognition’s narrative of the self. I had spent years watching ambitious career-driven protagonists in movies and TV shows and books and deeply resonated with them. I’d experienced their lives in simulation and I knew exactly how I’d behave in their shoes, I knew exactly what I’d say, what I’d think, what I’d do. I knew the clever comeback I’d make when slighted by my annoying coworker. I’d painted vivid pictures of how confident and assertive I’d be at the workplace. I’d made countless imaginary speeches in front of a mirror. I spent years frivolously constructing on top of this narrative of myself, getting carried away with its details and making it more and more real in my imagination, with little to no
Ruchika Nambiar
55
input from my actual experiential self. Only to one day realize that I’d been constructing a complete fiction that was no longer compatible with my actual on-ground reality. When the stakes are low (which they often are during the safe and sheltered years of your early life), you have the luxury to spin fantasies that don’t conflict much with your reality, because your reality isn’t testing those scenarios anyway. I’d been constructing an elaborate detailed image of myself as a supremely confident person, someone who was decisive, great at speaking to a crowd, an all-round dominant personality. So imagine my horror when, in my mid-twenties, faced with actual scenarios (like a real world job) that demand those very qualities, I find that my voice shakes when I’m talking to a large crowd. I find that I have an involuntary tremor in my hands and there’s nothing my cognition can do or say to still them. I find that I become clingy and needy when I know someone’s angry with me. I find that I lose my train of thought and start rambling when I’m nervous. I find that I fold instantly when in conflict with a truly dominant personality. How do I then reconcile this new, frighteningly alien version of myself with the image I’ve been building and projecting and earnestly believing in for years? And then add to that the chagrin of realizing that, so late in the day, I’m going to have to go back and work on these flaws and deficiencies from scratch, in order to become the type of person I thought I already was! The cognitive and experiential selves have the luxury to live somewhat isolated from each other until faced with an actual experience to respond to. For most everyday experiences – things like casual conversation, picking a restaurant for dinner, watching a movie – the conflict between the two is too insignificant to manifest (especially because the experiential self has no vested interest in asserting dominance; it doesn’t mind letting the cognition call the shots when the experiential stakes are low). So the cognition is very accustomed to its own freedom, making it all the more resistant when
56
Ruchika Nambiar
its authority is challenged. So when faced with scenarios that are more experientially charged – things like conflict or depression or insecurity or awkwardness – the experiential self comes out to play and doesn’t pause before taking back its rightful authority. When faced with these experiences that I was cognitively very familiar with in simulation, my cognitive self with all its knowledge and foresight couldn’t even slightly intervene in the desires of my actual experiential self. But that wouldn’t stop it from trying. And action would keep getting caught in the cross-fire, because the cognition would try compelling me to act on the basis of its knowledgeability while the experiential self would fight to do whatever it pleased. When I started working at my first real job, when faced with actual conflict, I found myself behaving in ways that were shockingly petty and insecure and immature despite my cognition knowing exactly how I needed to do things differently. I’m not simply talking about my cognition giving me good advice and telling me to be more mature the way a parent would – I’m talking about my cognition knowing exactly what it needed to do right, exactly how to respond to an email, exactly how to address a problem, exactly how to speak to my very unlikeable coworker. It knew the exact whats and hows and whys of every single action it proposed and its advice was flawless. And yet it could never inspire me to actually act on its advice. How could I know exactly what to do, how to do it and why to do it, how could the entire map of cause-and-effect be spelled out for me in vivid detail, and still be completely unusable to me? The cognitive self is continuously on a futile quest to tame the experiential self, except it doesn’t work because it isn’t speaking in a language that the experiential self understands. The experiential self can’t be told what to do, it has to be trained over time. And how can we possibly hope to do that when we spend all our time ignoring it and stubbornly refusing to learn its language? The world’s body of cognitive content is expanding at an exponential degree with no end in sight, our cognitive self is growing more and
Ruchika Nambiar
57
more assured of its own knowledgeability and superiority. The more it believes it learns about the experiential self, the more it theorizes about it in the abstract, the more it believes it’ll be able to tame it when the need arises. Except it never makes an effort to communicate or interact with the experiential self and they become more and more distant and isolated over time. So if the gap is only widening, what hope is there to truly reconcile the two? The self-assured superiority of our cognition comes from its assumption that its motives behind generating and consuming certain types of content are purely objective. But they’re not. My reason to perform this study at all is because content is perceived to have the ability to stand on its own, detached from its contextual origins in a way that it only references context in the abstract. Content is the tangible artefact that is extracted from experience and used to represent experience after the experience itself has ceased to exist, and it’s therefore used to make value-judgments about experience. You can learn about the nuanced intricacies of love or apathy or revenge through the content and media you consume around you, your cognition can simulate it for you to great detail and lull you into believing you understand those experiences and know how to recognize them when encountered, all the while generating its composite image with a great degree of self-assurance. From all the content we may consume or generate, we don’t understand the biases with which we’re choosing to only catalog and archive specific slivers of it. Our fallacy here is that, despite the illusions of independence that content provides, it cannot be detached from its contextual origins, not really. Because the very reason content is even generated or consumed in the first place is not for the sanctity of the content itself, but rather as a means to achieving a non-cognitive experiential need whose relationship to the content is entirely arbitrary: content is the vehicle, not the driver and the vehicle could justifiably be of any make or model so long as it gets its driver from point A to point B (though, if
58
Ruchika Nambiar
allowed the privilege, a driver may justifiably have reasons to desire a specific model over another, just as how I preferred to generate content that put me in good standing with the elitist snobs at my college, just as how I choose to catalog my consumption of Camus’ Stranger and not my consumption of Ekta Kapoor’s soap operas. If I was an outcast with no friends, I’d probably be cataloging any content that would put me in good standing with anyone, or alternatively, I might be generating content that could explain why I prefer being asocial and don’t want to be friends with anyone). Content is used to meet a specific purpose within a specific context. Its very worth is hinged and inseparable from its contextual origins. We experience something, reflect on it and then create a selective piece of content from that experience that’s meant to serve a specific experiential goal within that context. But in doing so, we fail to recognize all the other portions of that experience that weren’t relevant to that goal and drive them into the unconscious underground. And then we detach that piece of content from its experiential context and archive it on its own, as if it were a sufficient representative of our experience, while all the discarded portions of our experience continue to coexist in parallel, in exile. And here we are building elaborate card castles out of all the things we think we know, wondering why on earth they get knocked down at the slightest hint of a breeze.
Ruchika Nambiar
59
Thanks so much for your interest in this book. Head to my website and sign up to get notified when the finished book is out: https://www.ruchikanambiar.com/ content-structure-the-self