Matryoshkas

I had a realisation last night. It goes like this:

1) If you take anything, any idea, thought or action which is important and makes sense, and widen its context enough, it will eventually cease making sense and become unimportant.

e.g.
- If you are playing a video game it is important to beat the boss, get an item, not lose lives, etc. However if you broaden your sphere of thought to include day-to-day life, these things no longer make sense.
- If you get legitimately angry with a friend over something they’ve said, it usually makes sense. But if you begin to think in terms of your whole life and their whole lives and everything they’ve ever said and everything you’ve ever said, suddenly it seems less important. And If you further widen the context to include war and hunger, it no longer makes sense.

2) There isn’t an objective limit to the contextual widening - the only limit is how large a scale we are able to think in.

e.g.

- Many things which are important enough to drive our whole lives - ambition, status, doing things, going places - are easily made trivial by considering the nature of the universe and what it could all possible be for.
- A lot of great films have a super-villain who wants to destroy earth and create a new and better society. To us it seems sick and senseless, but if one thinks on an absurdly grand scale, one can understand their reasoning. This archetypal figure of the evil overlord (which can be compared to some figures in Modern History) is simply stricken with an ability to think in a context which is much larger than what is considered appropriate.

Consequences:

Everything you can ever think to be important in any context is vulnerable to being rendered nonsensical by widening or shifting the sphere of thought.

It makes argument and debate very difficult. For example, when I’m debating with myself about what makes music good or bad, I inevitably wind up asking questions like “well what is the point of music anyway?”, which leaves the original issue kinda trampled and pointless. A conversation about how important it is to brew coffee less than three minutes after grinding the beans can easily be made to look ridiculous by talking about the scarcity of food and water in some parts of the world.

Does this make it wrong to discuss coffee as if it is important? I don’t think so, because if we were all just trying to widen and widen the playing field for our ideas, then I think we would all wind up as the evil super-villians discussed above, or be completely crippled and paralysed by existential crises.

I think that the idea of the “existential crisis” can be linked to blowing out your context to such a scale that nothing makes sense anymore. I wonder if perhaps the recent emergence of this phenomenon is due to the fact that humans in the first world are increasingly able to think on larger and larger scales, whereas in previous eras, limited access to education and knowledge of the outside world prevented this.

So how do we deal with this? I don’t know, obviously a balance is important, and an ability to shift between small-picture and big-picture thinking. But what scares me the most is the apparent unlimited-ness of the power of context to render everything in your life futile. It really does seem to be to be unlimited, in ways that I find it difficult to describe in words.