Age is a bit of a rabbit hole. When we are young it all seems bright and clear and obvious, but then after we’ve seen the same things from so many different angles and through so many lenses and the edges are no longer clear and things are more blurred together on so many different levels, it becomes obvious that reality is not real. The pain is, the pleasure is, but it’s all soup.
What makes reality real is mostly contrast and friction. The problem is we have this monist idealism as a cultural paradigm and are constantly running around, trying to reduce the friction and if the various sides can’t be combined into one, insist that only one side must be right and the other goes to the gulag.
I wrote a fairly recent essay trying to tie the various threads together;
From your essays, you sound like you have it pretty together. As I’ve regulaarly told my daughter, my generation is going to blow the world up and yours has to put it back together again.
