Most people either push life's enigmas away to keep their day-to-day equilibrium, get paralyzed by them, or go on a lifelong crusade for the answer; choosing to live with mystery is a fourth option.
Where it appears 1
Connections
Themes and ideas
More insights from this episode
- Equanimity can't answer an enigma
Stoicism, Kipling and the Gita teach you to meet joy and sorrow evenly, but an enigma is neither: it's a 'why', and it pushes you onto more treacherous philosophical paths.
- We would choose the unknown anyway
Following Alan Watts: given total control over every dream, we would eventually tire of certainty and choose a life like the one we have, where we don't know what happens next. There is…
- Fiction soothes us through others' enigmas
When you hit the limit of what you can know, one of the few ways to soothe yourself is fiction: watching other people live through their own enigmas.
- Only non-fiction breeds false control
Reading only self-improvement breeds the illusion that you can control everything just by saying so; reading only fiction can leave you living in a fairy tale. You need both.
- Fiction teaches unconsciously
Fiction's lessons rarely arrive as a one-to-one character arc. They work unconsciously: ruminating on the problems characters face helps you deal with your own.
- Lessons live in the conflict's resolution
Fiction must resolve its conflict somehow, even in a downer ending, and the way an author resolves a character's trap is where the reader finds a usable lesson about getting through.