I Love Nihilism

Story time! In early 2004, I was driving a beautiful 2002 Honda Accord Coupe (to explain the "beautiful" part of it, you should understand that I had it customized. Not that rice rocket body kit and decal shit, but actual body work and paint finishing). I loved this car, but I could not resist the pull of "better, faster, cooler" when the latest model of Acura TLs were announced. Indeed, the Acura was much faster and had tons of cool gadgets that no other car before it had. I put my baby up for sale and placed my name on the waiting list for the manual transmission TL. The problem was that nobody would buy my Accord. Being its owner, of course I overvalued its sleek paint job and unique rims, so nobody wanted to match my price. People would come to see it, but my idea of beauty was different from theirs and they walked away without a word.

At the time, as a function of my living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I worked in the porn industry. My boss, whose girlfriend was a model, approached me to see if I would like my car to co-star in a little bikini car wash photo shoot. I didn't hesitate to display my approval. Out came the hose, the suds, the tits, the camera and the baby oil. "The baby oil," you ask? Yes, this girl was covered in it. And for your information, baby oil does not wash off a paint job with car soap. Though my car would go down forever in the Bragging Rights Hall of Fame, it was left with a slimy residue where the model pressed her slick bosom against the carbon fiber body of my joy ride. My boss, feeling a bit of guilt for greasing up my car, offered to pay for a detailed cleaning since he was going to do the same for his Mercedes. Once again, I accepted.

9:00 am, the day after the detail: My car was resting in the garage, too clean to even drive. I had already secured an appointment with the Acura dealership to purchase the new TL later that evening, but my car had not sold and I didn't have enough money for the down payment. I had stopped updating the listing for my car weeks before, resolved to the idea that I might have to bite the bullet and trade it in for a huge loss. My phone rang, waking me up. I pretended to be coherent as the voice on the other end asked if my car was for sale. It most definitely was. The man explained that he was far inland and would take 2 hours to get to me, but he liked what he saw on the ad and was really hyped about the opportunity to buy.

When he arrived, I opened the garage door to reveal my baby in its pristine beauty. The paint job had never looked so clear, the interior was newborn and even the engine had gotten a steam wash. We took it for a spin and I explained the source of every bump in the ride. The man nodded his head and told me that he knew was he was getting into with a custom job, he was just thrilled to be able to get a car with such great body work. The next stop was the bank. We happened to enter the branch at the right time to be seated with the assistant manager. As we explained our situation, she lamented that the check would take several days to clear, but I had just a couple hours before I was due at the Acura dealership. Coincidence stepped in again when the buyer produced a check made out from the Armed Forces credit union. The assistant manager, citing experience with the union, then informed us that she would use her authority to approve the funds immediately. And just like that, I had a down payment.

I waved goodbye to my baby and had my mother take me to the dealership, where I ended up driving away with my new love: a 2004 Acura TL 6-speed. And I lived happily ever after... until 6 months later when I sold everything and moved to NYC.

Now, this true story is filled with coincidence after coincidence, but it wouldn't be worth telling if it had played out any differently. That's what makes the difference between history and nothingness. It wasn't like the events in my story were the only things that happened in that time span that had an effect on the outcome and we can't even be sure that everything I mentioned really mattered either. If you wanted to, you could give a reason for it all to happen the way it did: I'm a good person, I'm lucky, god gave me a gift, I worked really hard. If information is a pill, then justification is a tall glass of water that you wash it down with. Likewise, it is our selective view of history that makes things appear more coincidental than they actually are.

Sometimes, you can't help but justify the reason for something. In fact, it is a natural tendency for us to concoct stories and meanings around the things we observe. What this does is tie many unrelated facts together into a single idea that is easy to store and remember. Consider: John's house burned down. John was arrested for arson. These two facts are itching for a link. John's arson arrest could be completely unrelated, but we wouldn't be satisfied knowing that. It is not enough to know the two pieces of information; we are likely to relate one to another and assume John lit his own house on fire before we are told otherwise.

Beyond explaining things, we use this method to help us store concepts. School teachers help students remember the colors of the rainbow by arranging the first letter of each color into a name: Roy G Biv (This may be dated as I understand there was some controversy regarding the last 2 colors). We take seven pieces of information and combine them into one. By extension, this is what a narrative does to history; it arranges many relative facts into a streamlined story with a coherent plot or outcome. The problem is, with the benefit of knowing the ending when the narrative is written, the author can arbitrarily leave out "irrelevant" facts to shape the story to fit the moral. History is thus condensed to fit a narrative for the sake of a lesson, not necessarily for accurate representation.

Belief is a hugely emotional aspect of our cognition. Skepticism, or the application of rationality, can be seen as a lack of emotion. Interestingly, skepticism can be modulated with the levels of dopamine in one's brain. Dopamine increases the brain's desire to be rewarded, spurring us to follow leads that promise positive results. With more dopamine, the likelihood of belief in a fantastic story (possibly because we WANT for it to be real) is high. Treatment for Parkinson's disease, which involves a precursor to dopamine, L-DOPA, has resulted in new found gambling addictions, religious convictions and cult memberships. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the lack of dopamine can result in ADD (which I have) and reduced emotional response. Our emotions implore us to give the data in our brains status through the emotions we feel when we recall them.

Without the physiological imperative to give things meaning, events by themselves are meaningless. It is only through the scope of hindsight that we attribute causation and correlation. Of course, without a handy theme to fit events into, it would be too much to ask if our brains to hold thousands of compartmentalized pieces of information without a judgment on their meaning or purpose. You can't recite a novel word-for-word, but you can summarize it in a single sentence or two. Unless you're an idiot savant, you can't replicate the New York City skyline by memory, save for the few famous buildings that stand out amongst the many nondescript structures. Remember that without those more demure buildings, the skyline would not be what it is. If the skyline was remarkable for only its famous pieces, replications would only have a few buildings against a flat ground.

Knowing that conviction is not necessarily tied to truth, but to chemistry, helps us bring the world into clearer view. Though it is impossible to treat information out of the context we give it, we must understand that with our brains' cataloging process, we lose details and re-imagine them every time we recall. Those new nuances are transcribed back into memory, becoming a part of the next narrative, replete with its own new flavor. Think of a picture you've taken on your brand new digital camera. Fresh from your memory card, the image is too large to email or to put online, you have to re-size it and save it at lower quality to convey it in a form that others can handle. But what happens when you try to blow that new image up to its original size? The quality that once existed in its first form is now gone and it doesn't look quite right. And so, the more you recall, the more the memory changes. (You can try this experiment by repeatedly saving the same image over and over at jpg quality 60, then look at the result: a splotchy mess of a memory.) Still, these are the same memories that we base our current convictions on. Is this such a good idea?

This is a fresh memory.

This is a memory after many recalls.

The moral is: nothing happens for any reason, but we would be lost if we didn't give it one. There is no plan and there is no path, only conveniently corroborating events, overtaking the clutter of reality that does not fit the theme of the story it is being used to convey.