Semantic Distance

i thought about my old feeling of too-muchness, and what would it mean to surrender to that “softness and permeability” that ehrenriech describes. to be permeable to the tides of story and history, to let everything that feels like too much flow freely through the mind and body. this is the way to live joyfully and defiantly, whether in politics or in the individual mind. this is the only way to escape the preordained, damning plotlines that expand to fit whatever empty hollows they are allowed and can exert so much painful pressure when we try to control or undo them.

as a researcher, there was something so poignant about chihaya’s description of this seemingly endless process of reading, digesting, and writing of new materials in her memoir bibliophobia. while she explores this concept through the lens of ozeki’s a tale for the time being—her observations can be extrapolated nonetheless. this idea she presents of feeling physically bloated with ideas, hoping they’d whoosh away as articles get finished and papers are presented, is a phenomenon i have yet to be articulated in such a way. that other metaphor of metastasization is especially effective for me. while this is mostly coming from my experience with sometimes severe hypochondria in college, i still felt that foreboding ache when thinking about my brain for too long.

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as i was operating outside of my comfort zone as a newly minted undergraduate researcher, i felt with every conference proceeding i went through, the larger this imaginary tumor would grow inside my head. it’s like my neural pathways were being excavated by the jargon of hci researchers, desperately trying to position my social science knowledge correctly on this axis of quantitative inquiry, worried i might be forgotten somewhere in the peripheries of the third quadrant.

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i too have felt too-muchness when diving into fields like formal methods or program synthesis, subjects that are anachronistic in its applications and learnings. you can ask questions about user interfaces and stretch its concepts to the actual syntax itself (the brackets, the keywords, the symbols) to gauge where we can decrease the bottleneck in our gulf of execution as code writers. it’s funny to think about how i got to this field by way of ai-assisted coding, fully obsessed with structured knowledge transfer between developer eyes and programming agents. i think i’m just fond of correctness and verification. while this quote from flusser’s gestures (a collection of essays that ask heady questions like “does writing have a future?”) is a little too cynical for my taste, the gist of the excerpt still rings true. every discipline feels like its some applied version of the one below, abstracting more details in order to observe relationships between concepts more clearly.

the so-called humanities appear to be working on such a theory. but are they? they work under the influence of the natural sciences, and so they give us better and more complete causal explanations. of course, these explanations are not and perhaps never will be as rigorous as those in physics or chemistry, but that is not what makes them unsatisfactory.

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it comes to a point where i want to be separated fully from the human world, in some flyover state, equipped with stacks upon stacks of books with no major objective other than to consume knowledge. similar to celine nguyen, i really believe that everyone is entitled to the development of their own intellectual ecosystem. it really makes you feel less lonely. we all have the birthright to challenge ourselves and ask others for help when we don’t know the answer. this is partly why i never got the conversations about college being worth it after we’ve been entertaining this talking point since i was researching this exact same topic as a 14-year-old for an english assignment. the prospect of obtaining mastery in anything should be enough to satiate us for a lifetime. i want to be “smart” not to impress other people, but as a matter of keeping track of my interests in real-time. how can i be a better person to those around me with my knowledge? am i willing to give up some of my life for the pursuit of expertise? is that going to be fulfilling?

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there also exists a tension between learning for the pursuit of personal fulfillment and learning because we are giving into a culture of endless optimization, with ideas being used as currency to gain ethos online. the feeling of knowing too much feels uniquely human to me. sadly we are an ape species that gained incredible cognitive advantages thanks to evolution and we are now subject to knowing about everything going on in the world—it feels numbingly overwhelming. consumption can be for a different end entirely.