THINGS I’M
THINKING ABOUT.

Someone sends those four words and you can spend the afternoon inside an argument that hasn’t happened. You hear a tone they never used, prepare your defence and get angry at them for how badly the imaginary conversation went.

The feeling is real, but it doesn’t settle what the message means. That gap interests me: how quickly something happening inside us turns into a fact about someone else. Maybe ask what they wanted before making them apologise for the screenplay.

There’s a particular kind of cleverness that explains love as chemistry and waits for everyone to stop enjoying it. Dinner is also just molecules, but I would still like some. Finding a mechanism doesn’t make the experience counterfeit.

Knowing how a song is made doesn’t stop it moving you, and meeting someone by chance doesn’t make them matter less. I want to understand what we are without using the answer as an excuse to care less. The strange part is that any of this gets to feel like something at all.

A group that knows your name, notices when you disappear and brings food when you’re sick is doing something valuable. It’s easy to sneer at someone’s beliefs and miss the people, routines and comfort holding their life together.

When changing your mind might cost you everyone you love, “just look at the facts” leaves out quite a lot. I’d like more rooms where you can question the story without being thrown out of the family. You shouldn’t have to agree about the universe to bring someone soup.

Religions, countries, companies, political movements, even our little groups: shared beliefs help us organise, cooperate and build societies with people we’ve never met. We can work towards something together because we believe there is a ‘we’, with a common purpose. Quite an achievement for animals who struggle to share an armrest.

The trouble starts when ‘this is what we believe’ becomes ‘this is the truth of the universe’, and questioning it becomes an insult. We can’t even ask what a belief is without threatening someone’s entire identity, but killing over it—or over a patch of dirt that predates both flags—somehow passes for duty.

These stories help us live together. Sacrificing the people to protect the story is a fairly impressive way to miss the point.

Waiting for humanity to become perfectly reasonable seems like a long-term project. I’d rather start with things that let imperfect people cooperate: ways to share knowledge, challenge a bad decision and correct a mistake without needing someone exceptionally wise to be in charge.

We’re capable of jealousy, cruelty and some impressively stupid behaviour. We’re also capable of building a world where those aren’t always the winning moves. That possibility interests me more than announcing that everyone is an idiot and calling the investigation finished.