Peaceful Wolverine Someone, somewhere, having at least a passing moment of wisdom — I won’t call them permanently wise without more evidence — came up with this:
“Be kind, for everyone you see is on a hard journey.”
Or something like that. I’ve looked it up before: it was a Scottish minister named John Watson, back in 1897, who put it, “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.” I prefer my own version, which is why it’s the title. It comes from something I’ve worked on for awhile.
For years now I’ve been building my own theory of how consciousness works, from the neuroscience to the evolutionary psychology to the first-person accounts. I know how that sounds. “How dare I?” is a thought I have often, and “how audacious and daring!” and similar things. The full explanation is a long podcast series’ worth of explaining, and Polite Disputes is where I’m doing that. But I can hand you the heart of it right here — it’s up to you whether it survives the Dude test. You know. The Big Lebowski: “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
Fair. So I won’t ask you to take my opinion. I’ll show you something you can check on yourself, right now.
Look at anything near you. A doorway. Your own hand. It feels like you’re simply seeing it — light comes in, the world’s just there, obvious and immediate, no work involved.
What’s actually going on is enormous. Your eye doesn’t send a picture anywhere; it sends up a storm of signals. Your brain builds the doorway out of that storm — papers over a blind spot you don’t know you have, guesses the colours where the light is bad, and quietly leans on what it expected to see and what it’s seen before. And that’s after layers of miniscule processing happenings in moments to detect things as fundamental as lines and angles. The integration of binocular vision. We’re handed the finished doorway, so smoothly that it feels like raw, direct contact with the world.
And you already half-know this. You know an eyewitness can swear, honestly, to something that never happened. You know two people walk out of the same argument remembering it differently, and both mean it. You know the face in your head doesn’t quite match the one in the photo. Learning to record one’s own voice is a trip. We get blindsided constantly by how much our own gear is shaping what feels like plain fact.
That’s the whole claim: the way we experience our own minds is not a clean window onto things. It’s a finished product, assembled backstage, that arrives feeling like a window. Movies like The Matrix, or A Beautiful Mind, or Shutter Island have helped make questionable the feeling of “real-ness.” That kind of confusion is not only possible, but likely, unless all the complex biomachinery in our heads hums along *just so.
If you want a single word for it, I’ve been calling it a kind of hallucination — not pink elephants, or Paul Bettany, but that the smooth, trustworthy feed of sensation is partly made up, all the time. Out of necessity — the whole arises from the parts, so without all that subprocessing, consciousness wouldn’t emerge.
Here’s the part I’m writing about tonight. The same trick runs underneath the feeling of choosing. When you decide something, it feels like you — the real you, hands on the wheel — just picked. What that feeling quietly leaves out is everything that nurtured and natured the chooser: your genes, the language you happen to think in, the family and the country you got dropped into, the plain fact that you’re one animal among billions running more or less the same program. The choice feels like it began with you. Mostly, it began long before you. “This is all my fault” is a very real feeling. It’s also, a lot of the time, about as reasonable as taking the weather personally.
None of us arrives ready. We show up with no preparation and learn by being thrown in — exposure that’s loud, immediate, anxious, and painful, long before we get any say in it. And because the mind you’re learning with is assembled backstage rather than handed the world straight, belief and wanting can manufacture whole felt experiences on their own. It doesn’t much matter whether things are, in fact, fine. The feeling runs its own program.
And it doesn’t, can’t, stop. “The mind” as we perceive it is at the end of a long chain of tissue that is alive. It’s always doing something — if it stops, well, that’s bad. A memory, a plan, a rehearsed argument, a song, the itch of the chair, some low weather of mood, the wincing recollection of that dumb thing you said in front of a roomful of people — all of it arriving in the same “this is just how it feels like” space, one thing after another, with no off switch. Sit still and try to watch for a gap. Something’s already talking.
You know the trick in films where they isolate a ticking clock to wind the tension tight — steady, relentless, until you’d trade a lot to make it quit? Something like that runs in you, toes to scalp: a constant signal from every cell, feeding upward, arriving in your head already sorted into things that seem to mean something simply by virtue of arriving. Every person you’ve met, you included, has spent each waking moment with that metronome going. And nobody hands you the note that says it doesn’t always mean anything — that it isn’t a seeing stone, beaming the true-true straight into you.
We’re trained to interrogate every tick — what does this mean, what should I do, why isn’t it different, why aren’t I different — and that questioning, the spiralling over how things could or should be, is the part that burns. The inputs are just weather. The suffering is the commentary we can’t stop running over the weather.
There’s relief, and most of us have felt it. Get absorbed in something you love — work, a game, a person, a piece of music — and the commentary quiets, sometimes drops away entirely. English doesn’t have a clean word for it; “absorption” is close. But it’s on loan. It ends, and the ticking is still there when it does. If you’re conscious, it’s simply happening, and that’s hard to sit with.
If you doubt how much of living is managing this, look at what we treat as the worst thing we can do to a person. Not pain, exactly. Solitary confinement/isolation/exile — left alone with the ticking and the commentary and nothing to get absorbed in. People come apart fast. The punishment is being handed nothing but your own mind, with the exits removed. Metaphorically speaking.
Being conscious is, in a real sense, a condition you manage rather than a state you simply occupy — a load you don’t get to set down, only distract yourself from, and carry better or worse on a given day. Enough people feel the weight of it that some, looking at a child not yet born, quietly wonder whether it’s fair to hand all of this to someone new. I’m not going to settle that here. I’ll only say the question isn’t crazy, and more people have sat with it than say so out loud.
And here’s the part I can tell you from inside, rather than from theory. The ticking doesn’t stop until we’ve returned to that highly unconcerned pre-birth state. The commentary — the suffering — you can turn down. I know because I did, years ago, and it changed how I move through the world. I won’t oversell it. The deep version, the lasting kind where wanting itself goes quiet for blissful moments (never permanently, and don’t chase the high), takes years of practice — vipassana, if you want the name — and most people won’t spend those years, which is a plain fact and no knock against them. I’ve let my own practice lapse somewhat… the understanding stays, but the muscle for it has gone soft, and I feel the difference. So I’d aim lower than bliss, at something actually in reach: learning, slowly, to let what is be what it is, instead of spiralling over what it should have been.
Every person you pass is carrying some version of this. Most have never been told they could set down even the commentary, and are running it full-blast, alone and confused.
So, be kind. Please.