I promised myself I’d take a break from nerding about social stuff to nerd on other things... but I keep seeing/learning new things about social stuff

Reality is complex and non-linear, everything is happening all at once

Human speech and writing - and experience - is mostly linear. You read one word at a time, in order. You speak one word after another, in order. You live one day at a time, in order

This is an agonising limitation of communication. It takes lifetimes to say everything, and even if you were able to thread that impossible needle, people can’t and won’t listen to all of it. “the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao” etc etc

Almost any act of communication is such a tremendous act of good faith if you think about it. The brazen, naive idea that anybody at all will understand anything that you’re saying. It’s wild that society somehow kinda functions at all, despite this

If you could speak in “full complexity”, which you can’t, nobody can listen

If you speak in models and representations, which you have no choice but to do, people (including and especially you!!!!!) will make all kinds of errenous assumptions about what you’re saying

The resulting tension is either comedic or tragic, IMO you have to either learn to laugh, or be utterly eaten alive by frustration / anxiety. I suppose the most common approach is “don’t think about it”