Baseline Assumptions: Introduction
For the first 22 years of my life, I desired understanding just as much as any other person, but felt forced to settle with the fact that it was a reality outside of my reach. I had spent more years than not in arrangements where rigidly controlling what information I did or did not reveal had direct impacts on my safety. I was raised in circumstances shaped more by solitude than connection. I was molded to take information in without regard for getting it back out.
When you gather information strictly for your own purposes you don't bother cataloging it. You don't bother considering how others may access it. You don't arrange it with any care for how it could exist outside of you.
By focusing exclusively on ideas and completely neglecting labels, I have effectively robbed myself of the ability to quickly call upon and reference large bodies of work through the shorthand of names (authors, schools of thought, time periods, movements, etc.). I pull from an internal library - and it is a vast library - that fails to offer up any clues to its sources. It's more than just unscholarly, it's a hindrance to communication.
As an example, I can give you in-depth descriptions of how suffering connects to the human experience, and the benefits it endows - but it would do us more good if I had situated these remarks within their context of origin (stoicism). To do this for every concept I attempt to share, it's taxing, it's exhausting. At my most despairing, I feel like a walking cautionary tale on why academic scholars speak in broken name-dropping shorthand - because at a certain point there is no other way to get a collection of ideas across quickly enough before coming up against time and focus constraints.
The Other Problem
Most people reasonably assume that others adhere to common beliefs and assumptions. Were I equipped to declare myself an adherent to certain schools of thought, that I resonated strongly with certain well-known creators, or that certain books/movies/articles had permanent residence in my mind, I would be able to communicate my starting points without needing to give a particularly lengthy explanation.
How many people have I met who think similarly to myself that were never given the chance to find out? People who reasonably assumed that without explicit declaration I was aligned with whatever beliefs they find to be most common? How many missed opportunities?
Further complicating the matter, my opinions and stances and even relationships to truth and fact itself have changed drastically over the past three years. No one who knew me prior to the end of 2022 would have any reason to think I feel anywhere close to the way that I do now. A topic for another time.
And so, I would like to create the opportunity for shared understanding to emerge again.
I am going to put my brain on a platter and serve it up to anyone willing to take interest, and if you hear a song that's familiar, please do us all a favor and shout the name and who it was performed by, and I will add it to my now more-intentional archive, so that I don't forget again.
