Life doesn't like to be observed

There’s a strange part of the modern, scientific human being that likes to observe the world and its functioning. If something good happens, we say, how do we make more good things happen? We try to deduce it to an exact science. You might also find me contemplating, as in previous posts, things like “nature rewards this or that” or “life tends to act this way or that”. The reality of course is these are dumb, blind guesses, and are at best bizarre personifications of a world whose “true nature” we know little about.

I’ve noticed the more I try to observe the world and try to extract patterns and deduce aphorisms, the more I wind up hurting myself. Perhaps it’s subtle, but if you lean too much on one angle, you’ll fall quickly when it’s taken away or reshuffled. We tend to ignore that the external world is changing just as quickly as our internal one.

Emerson writes:

Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

Life likes to be lived. It’s sort of a respect for its “realness”. When you begin to question whether you are in a simulation or whether the universe is lazy-loaded—or, more grandly, when you begin to try to inspect the source code of the world—it’s a sort of pervertedness of trying to look down nature's blouse. She doesn’t like it. She much prefers you play her game instead.

So, you’ll probably see less contemplations from me in the near future of the “mysterious inner-workings of the improbable universe” and more of who knows what.