The bubble. I know only my own. It’s a small thing really,
following me around wherever I go. Sometimes it's like a cloud of cotton,
sometimes it's sticky and clingy in all the wrong places like plastic wrap. It
used to be invisible, but now I sense it all the time. Borrowing from my favorite
bubble author, I’ll call the sensing of this bubble seeing. Where
he just italicized it, I’ll also bold it, just in case.
The bubble works for us best and most efficiently when we’re
totally unconscious of it. Unfortunately, it also causes immense problems:
narrow mindedness, what I call tunnelvision, perfectionism, dogmatism, and a
host of human biases that have been dealt with by others elsewhere.
The problem I have with my bubble lately is that it can’t
hide very well anymore. At least not all of it. As a result, I’m constantly
playing with the edges of it and they are getting quite worn and frayed. Most
of the internet argumentation I see online seems to be argument at the edges of
our own bubbles and of those we argue with.
I’m of the older cycle and am seeing the newer
cycle in my children’s generation. Unlike some other philosophers, I don’t see
my view as necessarily superior. It works for me and worked for my time. It is
most of the bubble I still carry around.
Castaneda spoke of tearing out of this bubble, but as I’ve
said, mostly I’ve succeeded in fraying its edges. True madness has eluded me,
which is what it would look like outside the bubble: incoherent shapes and
patterns.
Maybe the easiest way to sense your own bubble is to take a
textbook or other book on a technical field you know nothing about and attempt
to read it. Or even a book in another language. You’ll immediately see the
limitations of your own bubble. A way to play with the edges of it is to look
up random articles in an encyclopedia. You’ll soon see how tiny your bubble
really is.
Most of us spend our lives meandering around our bubble,
keeping it tidy and self consistent. This is called sanity.
