Definitive Partial Truths

I have been meaning to do this for a while.

But I was reminded (again) of it tonight in a comment by @vcelier,

When I saw the title of your post, I thought that you were talking of people who were always posting slight variations of the same post.

I am repetitive.

But, there is a difference between being repetitive in topic, and repetitive in thought. For instance, a physicist is repetitive in topic, but if they just keep writing the same equation over and over, they aren't developing their craft, they aren't improving their knowledge base. Some topics have been discussed for literally thousands of years, but they are still not exhausted, because either there is no definitive answer possible, or a definitive answer has not yet been discovered - or agreed upon.

And, while I believe that there is no "truth" that we can know definitively as we are such limited humans, I also think that it is possible to build decent "working truth" models where based on what we know and have available right now, we can move forward. We might not have all the ingredients, but we can still make something so we don't starve before we get to the next source of nutrition.

We are limited by nature, even though nature itself is probably not limited by itself. It is possible that "anything is possible" under the right set of conditions, but that right set might never have existed before now, but could exist in the future from now - we just do not know. Yet, not knowing the future, doesn't mean we can't act upon what we do know now.

So far, this article is a "slight variation" of possibly a hundred other articles I have written in the last seven years here, but I cannot recall a single one. For me, it is a flow of thoughts that are triggered through a range of processes and interactions, where my conscious and unconscious experience the conditions to catalyze ideas that emerge from somewhere within. They are my thoughts, but this doesn't mean that they are unique, because somewhere else, someone else might be thinking the same thing, or already has thought the same thing. Or without ever reading anything of mine, think the same thing in the future.

For instance, today over a coffee with a friend, we were talking about some part of human nature and he mentioned that what I was saying reminded him of something he read recently, from someone I have never heard of before. Thoughts are generally based on observational (conscious or unconscious) experience of the world, and then built into some kind of coherent story. Because we might be observing similar things, it is likely that we are going to build similar stories and even make similar inventions.

For example, around the world, different groups of people who had no interaction together, all invented in a relatively short time frame, the wheel. It doesn't have to be the spread of alien technology, or mental telepathy, it can just be that based on what the groups were doing, and the way their brains were evolving, happened to mean that they came to a similar conclusion and put it into practice. It is also possible that there were other groups at the time that had similar thoughts about making a wheel, but decided not to act upon it.

Maybe they told their friends about it and one had said, "what a stupid idea" and the fear of being left out of the group was enough to stifle innovation in the region for another few hundred years.

I realize that as I write this, it is not a slight variation of another article I have written at all, but it might be a variation of slices of maybe a thousand different articles I have written in the last seven years. However, we live in a world where "new" information can be gathered daily from all over the world, and for much of it, we don't care who originally had the thought, we just care that we have access to it now. We don't even care about the person we got the information from, or if they have any other thoughts, because tomorrow we find another creator who takes our attention from somewhere else, talking about something else completely.

There is no longer that much consistency or continuity in regards to the thought streams of a person, which likely makes what I have been doing here daily on Hive for seven years quite unique. Just think, there are 6189 other articles all numbered in time sequence and verifiably mine, that someone would be able to trawl through and discover a huge amount of ideas. And, most of them aren't brilliant ideas, but maybe there are some quotable gems hidden among the 5,000,000+ words - and that is in the articles alone. There are also 64,000+ comments to reference also.

But, most importantly, it is possible to see the progression of thought, experience, and relationships through those articles and comments. Thousands of unique people interacting, hundreds of semi-regulars, and dozens of regulars, all adding into a massive conversation that could go into several large topic buckets, such as philosophy, health, Hive, investing, mindset, psychology, art, poetry, literature, storytelling, family, parenting....

And this is one of the problems I see with a lot of the content out there, as while it might offer something specific, it doesn't necessarily fit itself into the arc of our daily lives, making it largely useless. I was saying to my friend that time isn't the most precious resource we have, our attention is. Where we put our attention matters and if we aren't doing things that add value to our life arc, we are likely wasting our attention.

And, there is plenty to waste it on.

The digital space has no shortage of content to choose from, all on-demand, a lot of it polished by a professional team whose job it is to engage the audience, to take their attention, and leave them feeling that they are better people for having consumed what they produced. But, is it the truth? Are we better for having watched that clever short clip on YouTube, or that epic movie? Are we better for having spent a couple hours stalking through Instagram, or reading witty burns on X?

Maybe?

But, I doubt it, because most of what we are doing is consumptive, not interactive. We are not sharing thoughts with others, discussing topics at length, and understanding the individual nuances and motivations of our counterparts. We aren't part of each other's progression through life, we do not get to know each other, get to learn about personal idiosyncrasies, or know where we have each come from to get us here today, or what drives us toward tomorrow. And we aren't applying it to our lives, because it hasn't changed us.

Most content today is akin to a one night stand.
We consume it and are gone before the sunrise.

Are we fulfilled?

I am repetitive. But with each repetition, there is a little progress, some evolution, some growth. Sometimes, there might be regression too, hard times that push me a step backward into those old habits that die hard. It is like a relationship, a marriage that sees ups and downs, better and worse, sickness and in health. And it is here on Hive, with the scars of my life embedded into this blockchain. If it wasn't me, I would find it incredible.

But it is me.

And all I see is what isn't here. The limitations. Partial truths.

The only truths I know.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]