The Purpose of Vision is to Become Blind
A decade ago, I warmly welcomed the resurgence of Stoicism, largely thanks to ’s brilliant work. Books like “The Obstacle is the Way” and “The Ego is the Enemy” felt like a necessary anchor. At a time when I was grappling with the challenges of being a good person and maintaining a resolute moral code, these ancient ideas provided a framework. The civic truths I had taken for granted seemed to be collapsing under the weight of Brexit and the first Trump presidency, and Stoicism offered a path to personal resilience.
But a paradox began to trouble me. The world I saw was full of vision-capable, 21st-century citizens who were actively, almost deliberately, voting for very real obstacles to be placed in their own paths. To the blind, a boulder is an unavoidable obstacle. But for the sighted, shouldn’t the entire point of vision be to mindlessly and effortlessly walk around it?
This led me to a counter-intuitive insight that has since shaped my entire worldview: the primary benefit of our senses is to allow us to become consciously ignorant of almost everything they perceive. The essence of being a functional, “neurologically stoic” human is to operate 99.99% of the time as a zombie. Our brains are masterful at automating the millions of micro-decisions needed to navigate the world, freeing up our conscious mind from the overwhelming flood of sensory data. We don’t consciously process every crack in the pavement or every passing car; we mindlessly avoid them.
This platform of near-total unconsciousness is not a flaw; it is our greatest strength. It is upon this foundation of “ignorance” that we are sculpted by our environment and our emergent thoughts to select a pathway of meaning. It is only within this tiny sliver of conscious awareness that we can choose to place obstacles in our own way, or assign the label of “obstacle” to the boulders that lie between us and a meaningful destination.
The process isn’t simply “The Obstacle is the Way.” It’s more fundamental: The ignorance, then the label, then the assignment of an obstacle is the way.
This realization was the spark that took me on a journey from a general interest in systems dynamics to the rigorous formalism of Constructor Theory. It provided a consistent and powerful framework for understanding how we, as agents, create capabilities. In Constructor Theoretic terms, my insight could be stated as: The substrate, the task, then the challenge of a possibility is the emergence of a constructor. We don’t just face obstacles; the very act of defining a meaningful task and rising to the challenge is what constructs the new skills and knowledge we need to overcome it.
The nostalgic comfort of Stoicism was a vital starting point for me, but it wasn’t the destination. Understanding that we are architects of our own obstacles, not just resilient victims of them, is a far more powerful and agentic way to navigate the complexities of our time. It moves us from simply enduring reality to actively constructing it.
This is an emergent construct of the Objective Observer Initiative, published by the starl3n persona.
