SIGH™
The Impossible Problem of Being Here While Everything Else Is Happening Somewhere Else
The mind transforms awareness of countless unexperienced possibilities into an illusion of personal deprivation, overlooking the extraordinary reality already unfolding directly before us.
SIGH™
The Impossible Problem of Being Here While Everything Else Is Happening Somewhere Else
The mind can turn the simple fact that countless experiences are occurring elsewhere into the illusion that their absence represents a loss, even when the life directly in front of us is already complete.
Finite consciousness does not suffer because it cannot experience everything. It can suffer when its capacity to represent what it is not experiencing converts infinity into a personal deficit.
There is a peculiar problem built into consciousness that has little to do with whether life is good, bad, interesting, boring, abundant, deprived, adventurous, or quiet. A person can be perfectly content with what is occurring and nevertheless become aware that, at precisely the same moment, an incomprehensible number of other things are occurring elsewhere. Once the mind represents those alternatives, a strange psychological transformation becomes possible. “I am not experiencing those things” can quietly become “I am missing those things.” The first statement is merely true. The second introduces loss.
I used to notice this particularly while sitting in meetings. Somewhere in the middle of whatever discussion was occupying the room, the thought would arrive: right now there must be hundreds of thousands of other meetings taking place all over the world. People are sitting around tables, arguing about budgets, planning projects, complaining about management, drinking terrible coffee, examining documents, checking clocks and wondering when they can leave. Every one of those rooms contains an entire little world of personalities, histories, alliances, irritations, jokes and concerns, and nearly all of them are completely inaccessible to me.
SIGH™.
The comedy becomes apparent as soon as we try to solve the problem. Suppose I could hop and skip from meeting to meeting. I could spend five minutes in one, teleport to another, then another, racing around the planet in a heroic attempt to experience what had previously escaped me. The project would fail immediately. While I was attending a committee meeting in Tokyo, I would be missing a condominium meeting in Miami. Race to Miami and somewhere in Belgium an insurance meeting would proceed scandalously without me. Catch Belgium and Nebraska would slip away.
SIGH™.
The problem is not insufficient effort. It is not insufficient travel. It is not insufficient curiosity. It is not even insufficient lifespan. The problem is structural. Reality contains simultaneous mutually exclusive experiences, while an individual consciousness occupies only a minute portion of them. Experiencing one event necessarily entails not experiencing innumerable others. No amount of experiential accumulation can abolish that condition.
This becomes psychologically troublesome only when nonexperience is converted into deprivation. Not experiencing something and missing something are not equivalent states. If they were equivalent, every person would be suffering catastrophic deprivation continuously. At this moment I am not standing beside the Ganges, examining a beetle in Brazil, listening to somebody play piano in Vienna, eating a mango in Mumbai, watching a thunderstorm in Kansas, hearing a joke in Newark, observing an argument in Cairo, or attending what may be an exceptionally tedious municipal meeting in Des Moines. None of those absences establishes that anything is missing from my present experience.
The distinction sounds almost embarrassingly obvious once stated. Yet ordinary language constantly erases it. We speak of things we “missed,” places we “never got to,” opportunities that “passed us by,” experiences we “should have had,” and things we “haven’t done yet.” The grammar quietly turns the unexperienced portion of reality into an inventory of personal omissions. An event can exist somewhere in the world, become mentally represented, and then acquire the peculiar status of something absent from my life.
But something can be absent from your life without being missing from your life.
That distinction becomes even stranger when the supposedly missed event is not especially desirable. The meeting thought exposes the mechanism precisely because I did not actually want to attend hundreds of thousands of additional meetings. Their simultaneity itself fascinated me. They represented the staggering fact that reality was continuing everywhere outside my field of awareness. The mind could represent this enormous parallel existence while being physically confined to one chair, one room, one conversation, and one instant.
There is an important difference between yearning and this awareness of excluded simultaneity. Yearning ordinarily attaches value to the alternative: I want that. Awareness of simultaneity requires no such preference. It can simply produce astonishment at the enormous quantity of reality from which every observer is necessarily excluded. The mistake begins when awareness of an alternative is treated as evidence that the alternative belongs in one’s life.
There is an even stranger possibility: sometimes the yearning may arrive before its conscious object. This morning, after papaya, guava, lentil soup seasoned with rosemary, mint, chives, and basil picked from my garden, and a chocolate protein shake with raspberry powder, I was neither hungry nor thirsty. Yet my mind began hankering for some elusive taste that I could not identify. That is theoretically important because, at the level of conscious experience, there was no particular food producing the desire. There was simply a vague wanting followed by a search for something that might satisfy it. This does not prove that the underlying neural process began without an object; unconscious associations, learned cues, sensory appetite, memory, and fluctuations in reward processing could all contribute before conscious awareness. But the phenomenological fact remains striking: the wanting was consciously present before I could say what I wanted.
That reverses the ordinary story. We tend to imagine an object appearing first, anticipated pleasure attaching to it, and desire following. But conscious experience can present the sequence differently: wanting arises, and cognition then searches for an object to explain the wanting. The brain has apparently decided to issue the yearning first and let management figure out what the hell it’s for later. The internal memorandum might as well read: There is apparently a taste-shaped vacancy. Kindly locate the unidentified substance that belongs in it. This makes yearning especially unreliable as evidence of deficiency. If the supposed missing thing cannot even be identified, the sensation of wanting cannot logically establish that some particular thing was absent and caused it.
Food makes the mechanism unusually easy to see, but the larger question is considerably more important: how often do we discover something desirable and begin wanting it, and how often are we already wanting and merely recruit something to become the object of desire? A trip, purchase, adventure, achievement, lover, companion, or mysterious flavor can become a candidate for a vacancy it did not create. Sometimes desire does not report a hole. It draws one first and then sends consciousness looking for something to put in it.
Modern abundance provides an extraordinary amount of material for that search. A mind capable of representing alternatives now lives inside an environment capable of supplying alternatives almost without limit. At nearly any moment it can be shown another destination, meal, possession, activity, lifestyle, person, accomplishment, or possible version of itself. The important issue is not merely that modern culture offers choices. It is that possibility can be converted into personal omission. “That exists” becomes “I could experience that,” which becomes “I am not experiencing that,” which can finally become “I am missing that.”
But the final step does not logically follow.
The absurdity becomes clearer if we reverse the perspective. While I am supposedly missing what somebody else is experiencing, that person is missing what I am experiencing. During a magnificent sunset, I am not experiencing thousands of other sunsets occurring elsewhere. But everybody watching those sunsets is also not experiencing mine. There is no privileged observer standing outside the system collecting the complete set.
Years ago, while sitting outside at my sister’s house, I happened to witness something I had never seen despite having spent much of my childhood practically glued to the woods. A wasp and a spider were fighting in midair only inches from my face. Eight spider legs and six wasp legs became a tiny whirring tumbleweed, twisting furiously in the air. The wasp ultimately gained control, carried the spider to a small hole in a telephone pole, stuffed it inside, and flew away.
I was approximately forty-five years old and astonished. How could I have lived that long, spent so much time outdoors, and never seen anything like it?
More importantly, if I had turned my head, I would have missed the entire thing.
That observation exposes an error hidden inside many of our ideas about novelty. We tend to imagine that “here” is known while “elsewhere” contains the undiscovered. But a familiar environment is not an exhausted environment. Countless events can occur within inches of us without ever entering awareness. Attention samples only a minute portion of what is occurring. Familiarity with a place therefore does not amount to possession of everything that place can contain.
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The unknown is not geographically distributed according to our travel plans.
Paris does not possess the unknown while a familiar backyard possesses the known. The unexplored is not synonymous with the distant. A telephone pole one has passed repeatedly can suddenly become the destination of a tiny airborne struggle unlike anything one has witnessed before.
The wasp episode also reveals an important distinction between wonder and culturally designated wonder. Nobody had informed me that I was supposed to see the wasp. There was no admission ticket, travel brochure, famous landmark, bucket list, or cultural instruction announcing its significance. The experience came first. Astonishment followed.
That has not always been my experience with officially designated wonders. Decades ago, while traveling, I repeatedly encountered people who seemed unable to comprehend that I had no particular interest in famous human structures. The assumption was that because something was culturally classified as important, I must desire to experience it. The Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, and other celebrated monuments were treated almost as obligations. Fame had somehow been converted into a prescription for attention.
The logical steps are rarely examined. Something is famous. Something is available to experience. Therefore I ought to want to experience it. Therefore if I do not experience it, I have missed something.
The final conclusion simply does not follow.
This cultural hierarchy of attention can work in the opposite direction as well. When I tried to explain how astonishing the wasp and spider had been, the reaction was flat. My sister responded mockingly, “That’s nice, Rita,” with the unmistakable implication that my excitement belonged to a less mature category of conversation than the serious matters adults were supposed to discuss.
Yet consider what had actually occurred. A predatory insect had located another animal, engaged it physically, gained control of it, transported it to a precise cavity, and provisioned that cavity through behavior produced by an evolutionary history vastly older than any real-estate market. Fourteen legs had briefly become a whirring airborne knot six inches from my face.
Apparently we needed to get back to property values.
Culture therefore does more than distribute prestige among possessions, occupations, and destinations. It distributes prestige among objects of attention. Property, money, careers, recognized destinations, and socially certified accomplishments receive automatic seriousness. Fascination with a tiny unscheduled event in the natural world can be dismissed as childish. Losing responsiveness to such things may even be mistaken for maturity.
That creates a remarkable psychological arrangement. We can be trained simultaneously to undervalue extraordinary events occurring around us and to yearn for officially approved extraordinary experiences occurring elsewhere. Ignore the wasp six inches from your nose. Fly five thousand miles and look at the tower.
Surprise is one powerful route into wonder because it prevents anticipation from prescribing the experience in advance. The wasp was astonishing partly because I had not ordered it. I had no itinerary instructing me to report to the telephone pole at three o’clock for the scheduled fourteen-legged aerial performance.
I was already where I was.
Then:
WOW!!!!!!
There is an enormous difference between seeking an experience because its value has already been represented and becoming available to an experience whose value could not have been predicted. The first can become acquisition. The second is encounter.
This does not make travel foolish, monuments worthless, or curiosity pathological. An unfamiliar place can produce genuine discovery, and a famous object can genuinely astonish someone. The important distinction concerns the inference being made. Curiosity about an alternative is not evidence that the alternative would improve anything. Awareness that something exists does not establish a deficiency in its absence. Wonder does not require dissatisfaction as its entrance fee.
That may also explain why the question “What else is out there?” can survive even when a person is extraordinarily satisfied with life. The question need not mean, “This isn’t enough.” It can mean something much more elemental: reality is enormous, and I know I am seeing almost none of it.
“I wonder what else exists” is curiosity. “I am not experiencing everything that exists” is fact. “Therefore my present experience is deficient” is an inference.
And it is a rotten inference.
The impossibility of experiencing everything does not impoverish the experience occurring now. Indeed, the wasp teaches almost the opposite lesson. The world is so extravagantly larger than our awareness that even the place we think we already know remains partly undiscovered. The unexplored is not confined to distant countries. Sometimes it occupies six inches of air directly in front of your nose.
There will always be another place, another conversation, another animal, another landscape, another person, another idea, another meal, another road, another flavor, and, regrettably, another meeting. If nonparticipation is interpreted as deprivation, consciousness has been assigned an impossible task: experience reality exhaustively or regard itself as perpetually shortchanged.
Nice fucking scam.
Perhaps the saner distinction is brutally simple:
ABSENT ≠ MISSING.
While I am here, billions of other experiences are occurring without me. While they are occurring, this experience is occurring without everyone who is elsewhere. Nobody receives the complete universe.
Somewhere in Belgium there is another boring meeting you’re missing.
