Ugh

I woke up this morning feeling vaguely embarrassed. I couldn’t figure out why. Had I done something last night to shame myself? Martha and I had met our friend Amanda (whose excellent, elegiac Substack is called “Everything is a Wave”) for a drink – had I removed any articles of clothing and danced upon any bar tops? No, no I don’t think so. Then, why am I feeling this low-voltage mortification?

It took me a while but I think I figured it out – I think my embarrassment might actually be chronic and existential, as if my entire life is lived in mid-banana peel slip. The reason I don’t normally experience it more acutely is that my embarrassment is usually buried under dirty laundry piles of shame, depression, and self-loathing. Not today.

The human condition is, frankly, embarrassing. We’re an absurd-looking creature. Upright and naked, dotted with odd patches of hair in strategic locations, we’re among the weirdest-looking creatures on the planet. We’re also the only creature we know of even capable of feeling embarrassment, which makes our ridiculousness even worse. Imagine if pandas felt the slightest twinge of humiliation with their own stupidity; they’d never leave their tree trunks.

I mean…

My own, chronic personal embarrassment sprouts from a variety of seeds. There’s the absurdity of playing dress-up for a living, the nonsense of telling jokes to strangers for a living, the shame of hosting a podcast so obscure it is literally titled Obscure. On top of that, there’s the occasional reminder that the ol’ career remains in the toilet, such as when I am, again, recognized on the street and asked, “Are you still acting?”

But that’s just the superficial, outward-facing stuff. Worse is the deeper, inward-facing stuff, the bizarre set of beliefs I’ve been lately espousing about UFOs and nondualism and non-locality and all the crap I’ve been studying over the last couple years, crap which, at times, crosses the line into the nonsensical, yet which continues to hold an appeal for me because the world itself is nonsensical and the only way I’ve found to make sense of it is to throw myself through the looking glass.

Then again, belief systems, particularly nascent belief systems, should be the source of embarrassment. When we think about the various absurdities upon which people build the foundations of their lives, it’s just one laugh-out-loud belief system after another. What do you mean he died for our sins? What do you mean we get reincarnated millions of times? What do you mean your prophet promises sex with virgins in the afterlife? What do you mean that there’s a freaking God out there? What do you mean that there isn’t?

It’s worse when belief systems aren’t subjected to the kind of scrutiny that would cause an adherent to blush. The more I think about it, the more I’ve come to believe that any believe system is inherently ridiculous because a belief system is a way of explaining the world, yet I don’t think there’s a person on this planet who has much more than the faintest clue about the nature of reality. But that’s a belief system, too, and it’s embarrassing because it suggests that all of our science is nothing more than a partial description of a partial description. To paraphrase an interviewee I recently saw speaking (whose video I cannot find and whose name I cannot remember): scientists understand gravity about as well as a two-year-old dropping her spoon from a highchair.

The American Scientist describes embarrassment as arising when the “social image we want to project has been undermined and that other are forming negative impressions.” As a species, we’re trying to project this whole “masters of all we survey thing” but we don’t even know what 95% of our universe is made out of. I mean, that’s embarrassing.

So, what’s the social image I’m trying to project? And that’s the rub. I think I’m trying to project the image of a smart, funny, and handsome young man, but that’s bumping up against what I suspect my actual image is becoming, that of a vaguely eccentric older relative who keeps asking if you want to see something “really neat”? I’m probably about half a second away from becoming one of those guys who wears a fedora and a cape.

And yet…

We all have a choice to make and I’m happy with my choice. The choice is to either embrace cultural norms because you’re satisfied with the explanations they provide, or you reach out to see if there’s something more “truthy” out there, for lack of a better word. Once you do that, the idea of “truth” itself begins to feel a little slippery. Here’s an admission of one of my own, potentially-embarrassing emerging beliefs: that, ultimately, truth itself is subjective and, therefore, what we think of as reality is subjective. Which leads to the inevitable result that each of us actually has a literal, “personal reality,” distinct from all other realities. Absurd, embarrassing. And yet, I think I might actually believe it.

All of us are contestants on a cosmic episode of Naked and Afraid. We’re all out here in our most vulnerable state trying to figure out how to make it through the night. If we’re lucky, we figure a few things out to keep the monsters at bay, and if we’re really lucky, we’ve got a few people who love us enough to keep our feet planted on this good earth for the few moments we’ve got here. That’s probably the best we can reasonably hope for, but I’m grateful to have that much. Even so, I’d trade places with a panda in a heartbeat.