Emotions are Richer

Our emotional palette is richer than any other experiential continuum, I think.  We have, in other words, capacity to experience permutations upon permutations of unique emotional responses, even when the situations that we respond to are not unique.

This is part of the reason that we can experience the approximation of beauty wherein something will be stunning--i.e. unexceptionable intoxicating and/or fulfilling in the put of the stomach way that we cannot quite get our words around.

This is also part of the reason that we have long swaths of emotional reality throughout our lives that only become clear, if they do, in retrospect, and why we can only talk in generalities about certain things even when we feel something very specific.

This is also why there will be no end to new music.

Proper Scope

It is easy enough to not take someone seriously.  All that is necessary is to expand or contract the scope of their argument into unrecognizable proportions and treat that as their core insight.

While everything is either meaningless because we're so small, or too meaningful because of the color of someone's blouse or the way the direction her feet are pointing signal something intrinsically sinful, it is actually hard to live a balanced life, with a consistently balanced perspective, all joking aside.

Partly this is because we only have each other as reference points.

Hard Truth -

Is that most of us don't actually become anything of note, at all.

Whose Status do you chase?

I think the craziest thing about status is how, sure, there are some universals, there's also a lot of silos operating simultaneously, such that the status I may seek is somewhat independent from yours.  I might want to make it to Assistant Director, and you, Partner, or you might have a number in your head that represents the appropriate amount of sales and I have a school name in my head.

That's interesting because it provides insight into how we all value other people who hold the virtues that we seek for ourselves, and those who don't.

And it shows how sort of small our worlds are, even though lots of status will likely bring lots of money, which is universal in a sense, how we spend that money signals which groups we want to appear to be part of, and that's much more interesting.

Is the Desire for Knowledge Dangerous?

I recently finished reading a mother of a book about Robert Moses.

I also happen to live in NYC and I also happened to buy a car recently.

Of course, these fact may suggest that I'm now suffering from near all-time highs of cognitive dissonance.   I'm not.  I know why I want and need the car.  I also don't like what cars do to the landscape of American cities.  I never have liked it, and I especially don't like it now that I've read the book.

I think that trains are generally better than cars, and that car growth has generally destroyed some neighborhoods.  Compare commercial strips that exist under a raised highway against commercial strips that are under raised trains tracks and the results are striking, no?  I mean, there are no more neighborhoods left under raised highway.  They're dead zones.  Train tracks?  Not the same.  The neighborhood might not be perfect, but it is almost always vibrant.

Anyway, I proceeded to get into a ridiculous argument with my wife over this very thing as we drove, appropriately, toward the highway.

She said: but sometimes you need to drop off your mother with three bags and there's no train.

And she was right.

But that doesn't mean we need to restructure our communities toward highways.  The efficiency of trains just wins hands down in cities with heavy core like NY, where lots of people come every day (without their mothers and three bags).

But it strikes me that all of my reading on this subject might be detrimental.  Perhaps I'd be better off letting go of it and just not thinking of it.  Ignorance would lead to less fights with wife.  Less fights would lead to higher levels of happiness.

So the old motto has a foundation after all?