Humanity’s ability to innovate is what has cemented us at the top of the food chain. Whilst beavers happily build dams all day — and they are very good at building dams — no beaver is thinking about what a better dam could look like (or if beavers even need dams at all). In other words, beavers don’t have to suffer existential thought experiments because they don’t live in the abstract. They are constrained, yet somehow liberated, by their reality: sticks and water.
Beavers are a nice reminder of the joy of the unabstract: the trapdoor underneath the magic trick, or the corrected real estate valuation of WeWork. Reality and integrity are so refreshing because the abstract is often a ‘created identity’, a lie in other words, that we have to live up to. Reality and integrity are escapism. Indeed, selling ourselves as ‘living the dream’, in the abstract, is exhausting for anyone who didn’t win the gene lottery or find themselves born with a distant relationship to the aristocracy. Do you know how utterly tiring and unfulfilling it is to be an Instagram influencer?
Some things humbly remind us that whilst we own the food chain, we are still in the food chain. Needing to defecate, whilst an inelegant example, is something that no animal has been able to abstract itself away from. Evolution has made it difficult for us to create the best abstractions, in fact. We have excellent vision, but we still eat and communicate with the same hole. It does seem fun to explore what a ‘new breed’ of human could look like and what Frankenstein modifications we would make. Yet, in our lifetimes, we won’t augment our bodies with much more than laser eye surgery and a new hip.
So why do we live in the abstract? Quite simply because facing reality is too hard. We all talk about living a simple life in the woods, washing ourselves in the stream and cooking exotic animals on a makeshift barbeque, but, to be blunt, absolutely fuck that. We want our double-ply toilet roll, cheap wine from the discounters, and aspirational marketing telling us that next year, yes, we will be fit and look like a tired and unfulfilled Instagram influencer.
We keep ourselves busy and firmly in the abstract to avoid the ‘human condition’, probably best summarised by the phrase “You’re born alone; you die alone”. If we had to face the reality of mortality and existentialism at every moment, there wouldn’t be enough drugs in the world to keep even a small % of the population sane and sedated.
So we must accept the need to live in the abstract as a normality: a necessity, a means to an end. If we simply acknowledge the human condition, without entertaining it to the extent that we are depressed by the inherent limitations of living in a bag of bones on a conveyor belt to the grave, we can become liberated like the beavers. This obligatory ‘comfortably numb’ attitude seems at first uncaring, exhibiting an undesirable ‘laissez faire’ sense of having given up. Our culture makes countless references to it: “It is what it is”, “C’est la vie”, and more.
But there is a better cultural reference which helps us see that life is a gift. We may be obliged to live in the abstract, but we don’t need to live abstract lives that have only the goal of impressing others through shoes or followers on Instagram, although the reference permits it. It is quite simply this:
“Live your life be free”
April 2020
