If you deconstruct the world... shit is really weird. Let me paint you a word picture...

I have wanted to tackle this question for a while, it represents quite a challenge to me for a couple of reasons. First, l am no Linguist, nor a Philosopher, or Physicist (yet), so I know that whatever my take is on this, my knowledge is limited, but then again, everyone´s knowledge is limited, isn't it?

Writing about this question is a challenge and a risk I am more than willing to take, even excited to, because this is one of those things that keep me up at night.

We live in a very strange world, limited by our language, by our understanding of ideas, and mostly by our blind confidence that things really are. Stay with me for a second. I don't have the words or the literal background to tackle a philosophical question like: “Do things really are?” But what I can do is just acknowledge that if they are, they are really strange.

Let me land this a little, because I know I am talking in a very general and vague way. What do I mean when I say “our blind confidence that things are”? I am referring to the active practice in our social structures that needs us to agree on things in order to operate, examples of this go from the government, people need to trust its institutions in order for it to work, to language itself.

To explore this idea about language, here is an example: I come in to a coffee shop and order a “cup of coffee”, the barista I am speaking to needs to understand what I mean by “coffee”, you know, the drink created by boiling water with crushed roasted beans of a plant that grows mostly in the Caribbean, and that I do not mean milk, or chocolate, or Coca-Cola.

This sounds like common sense, right? That is why we are taught, mostly, the same things when learning a language, that is its purpose, that is how we communicate. And it works, almost to perfection, although you still can catch its subtle imperfections, for example with the question: Do you see the same green as me? We could go our whole lives not knowing that that thing we refer to as “green” is different, and we do not have the tools to clear it out. Language simply has its flaws.

I understand that we have to agree on some kind of common ground in order to have complex structures, and that is fine. My intent with this essay is to draw attention to the fact that sometimes, if not all of the times, the things we agree on are really weird in themselves, and we just do not acknowledge them.

Language is a powerful example of this, and what I wrote before was just a glimpse of a very rich area involving these problems, people like Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, or even painter Reneé Magritte have deconstructed and explored this questions on their own. Wasn't that really a pipe?

But this goes even further, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre talked about how the things we interact with are weirder than we think, and that is where I want to focus the rest of this essay.

Let's talk a bit about Physics. Physical constants are fixed arbitrary numbers that can be found in our Universe, anything from the speed of light, the gravitational constant, to the Planck's constant, or even the absolute zero (0 K°). We understand these constants, we use our beautiful systems like Math and Language to describe them, but that doesn't distract me from the fact that we have no idea of why they are these particular numbers. I mean, some of them are so arbitrary that it almost seems like someone or something is just messing with us by limiting the speed of the universe to 299,792.458 Km / s, and not rounding it up to a nice and smooth 300,000 Km/s. It is really weird that there is a point where things can no longer be colder, there is no “below 0 K°”, we know what happens when we try to approach that temperature, and we have theoretical models of what that temperature looks like, but we have no idea why it is that number and not 5 degrees hotter or colder.

It is fair to say that we could reinvent all math structures so that these numbers are other numbers, but we can do nothing to change the fact that the arbitrary fixed limits are there.

But, enough about systems, I want to put our world into perspective, I will be using time as a way to show how almost everything we think of “normal” and “mundane” today, is really a very new, and weird thing if you stop your day to think about it for two seconds.

4.1 Billion years ago, evidence shows, life emerged. But 3.5 billion years of that, life consisted of single-celled organisms. 3.5 billion, take a second to think about that. Our species emerged about 200K years ago, it is not that long ago actually. The Industrial Revolution, which arguably marks the beginning of the modern world, happened about 250 years ago, it is 5 seconds ago in perspective. Almost every one of our problems is bound to these new institutions and commodities that we convince ourselves to appear normal. And, they are, most of our problems are normalized by now, it is not uncommon to focus effort in things that not only did not have a name a few hundred years ago, but that didn't even exist 10 or 15 years in the past. I agree, as I said before, that this is how and why society works, amongst many other reasons, though it really troubles me the strangeness of it all.

It is really easy to go with our days without giving a moment of thought about how strange and unique it is that, for example, you are upset because you happened to arrive 5 measurements of 60 times 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the outermost electron between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom after the transporting unit of metal, plastic and other materials, powered by electricity, left the agreed upon location by the institution that you contribute to monetarily, mostly year by year, in exchange for infrastructure and commodities.

Or in other words, you are mad because you missed the train after arriving 5 minutes late to the station.