BABBLING. 🗣️

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ” – John 1:1

…and that was the only thing that mattered because, within the Christian narrative, was all I knew the world to be. But, I think it all changed for me when I accepted that my parents didn’t vibe with each other. Eventually, in college, I was diagnosed with depression, and for all the CBT I went through, I became a drug addict. (Disclaimer: I’m over a year sober at the time of this writing.)

I’m not too sure where I’m going with this introduction, but, in conclusion, my teenage brain went through some pretty serious deconstruction and reconstruction into the pile of neurons I’m working with today. I guess I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to answer the question: “Who am I?” Sometimes-I mean, very rarely-I think that it would be okay if all my closest friends, my cute-ass dog, society, or literally the entire universe went up in flames if it could mean that I could fully understand who and why I am.

I know that that’s insane to say out loud. To be honest, I’m just telling you the shit my brain comes up with after I’ve been staring at the ceiling all night. I would never set anybody on fire, especially not my dog. He would never deserve that, not my little fur baby.

I don’t know. We’re all selfish about figuring out who we are, aren't we? Since self discovery is a self fulfilling process, aren’t we all just trying to preserve our well-being enough to enjoy life and spread our genes, hoping to figure out what the point of it all was along the way?

I mean, for fuck’s sake, I made it all the way to Harvard, and that experience kicked my obsession to figure out my identity into hyperdrive. Everyone else around me seemed to have it all figured out. All that’s to say, I ended up majoring in Human Evolutionary Biology and Psychology because, maybe, if I could understand how my body and my mind came to be, I could understand why and who I am. Sort of like… if you studied a machine’s parts enough, you might be able to figure out its function. So yeah, what is my function/purpose? In other words, since our purpose and our identity are irrevocably interwoven, who the fuck am I? I’ve spent 5 years nerding out, learning from the best and brightest giga-nerds in the world. What did I learn? What do I have to show for my tantrum against the universe?

Well, for starters, an important area of focus during my studies on evolution was the concept of communication. Most living things, in some capacity, are able to relay information to others in an effort to facilitate their survival and reproduction. Anybody who has seen a nature documentary on television has likely heard David Attenborough’s voice appreciating the hums of humpback whales and the grumblings of gorillas. The occasional green thumb may also know that trees communicate nutrient status and seasonal information with one another through webs of fungi that join their roots beneath the forest floor (google search: “mycorrhizal network”). Even bacteria share rings of DNA called plasmids in a process called conjugation to confer genes for metabolizing new substrates and neutralizing antibiotics. All this is to say, in some way, shape, or form, most living things don’t just live next to one another, but amongst one another, joined by their preferred means of communication.

A fairly intuitive conclusion that we can make about biological communication is that the more advanced the life form is, the greater complexity there is in the means and content of that communication. So much so that for animals that we consider “intelligent”, such as ourselves, communication serves to lay the foundation for psychological connection, which then sprouts into even more complicated relationships, emotions, and experiences.

It goes without saying that our species displays the most advanced iteration of communication in the animal kingdom. Namely, literacy: the ability to communicate with symbols. This ability is exclusive to our species and unique in its capacity to store information that can then be shared across long distances and, most significantly, generations of time. Because we can continue to build upon the discoveries of those who were here before us, we are now able to coordinate philosophies, blockchain, and rocket launchers. And with these innovations that our symbolic communication has afforded us, we are now the first organism to have broken the ancient spell of evolution. In other words, we are the first animal that has forced the environment to adapt to itself rather than adapting to its environment.

We touched on it briefly, that communication creates connection which creates emotions and relationships. Well, another feature of the human species that evolved concurrently to our ability to engage in social intercourse is consciousness. Not just literal consciousness in the sense that we are awake and alive, but psychological consciousness in that we can reflect and wonder about the others and the self. Lifetimes of philosophers and their philosophies that have filled libraries and online blogs testify to this. Somehow, we are no longer just a product of our evolution but are able to seek out answers to larger questions regarding the cause, effect, and intent of our evolution. You could say that consciousness, in the way I’m defining it, is that very “intelligence” we humans possess which delineate us from other life forms we deem mere “animals”.

So now that we’ve established that we are a literate and conscious species, is there a reason why we are a literate and conscious species beyond the fact that it served to make us an apex predator?

Well shit, I still don’t know.

“In the image of God, He created them.” – Genesis 1:27

If God is real and we are “made in his image”, maybe it’s because God is also a conscious and literate God. But does that also mean God has no idea who or why He/She exists?

I used to pray, but it didn’t feel like God could hear me. Was I babbling?

A few summers ago, I was exploring Tokyo, and this random Japanese man on the street wanted to have a conversation with me – and I tried – but Google translate sucked ass.

We were trying to talk, but we couldn’t understand each other. Were we babbling?

I hate that the older we get, the more our own life experiences shape our worldviews, paradoxically bottlenecking our understanding of those worlds that we share with one another.

The more we learn, the less able we are to teach. Are we babbling?

What a terrible irony to write a literary expression of my inability to discover myself despite literacy opening the door to human discourse and discovery.

The more I write, the less I understand me. Am I babbling?