There is a certain satisfaction to a loud keyboard, to the drone of unknown engines in the background as one plugs away at creating verbiage in the midst of a building constructed for work. One has to be careful to get the balance and setting right, but the clack-clack-clack of a keyboard that makes noise carries with it the connotations of productivity and purpose and even poise that the modern bepajamaed laptopper knows little of, or at least has recessed in their memories like so many anachronistic episodes of Mad Men. Surely typing should make noise, like the Prius inventors discovered driving should in the wake of tests where their cars snuck up on pedestrians, inducing near-fatalities in their silent stealth.

For all the self-examination I do, I find that there are certain core principles that rarely get dragged into the mudslinging of recrimination and the fiery kiln of retooling along with everything else I think and believe. Among these, it seems, has been the quest to be understood, a core unquestionable bedrock principle for time immemorial. I don’t know how to breathe without wanting to be understood, and so many of my secondary and tertiary assumptions and principles rely on this foundation. And yet I’m coming face-to-face with the daunting realization that what Fish always warned me was right – no one is/was ever going to understand me. They haven’t built me to be understood, any more than they’ve built a refrigerator to walk. It’s just not part of the program. And I could be a sad little refrigerator dreaming of walking some day or I could find ways to get comfortable with stagnancy.

I haven’t made up my mind yet, quite, how to react to this burgeoning conclusion, because I’m still in the wake of grappling with exactly how much of my life is governed by this high-level desire. While Emily was quick to lampoon me as someone who “doesn’t care about happiness,” (Evidence of my inability ever to be understood? Perhaps!), this is an exaggeration. But certainly I would prioritize being understood above being happy. Of course, the desire to be understood might make it a core component of being happy, so it’s hard to precisely put these two values in conflict. We can imagine scenarios, though, and move on from there. But beyond that, it’s just essential to what I even look for in another person. The first question I ask myself is whether they seem capable of understanding me. It is primal. I don’t even know what a candidate for replacement first-question would be. I don’t even know how to undertake the process of evaluating other people on a personal level without that as my compass.

Part of the problem is that, as with most of my high-level principles, there’s a lot of backing for the status quo here, even if I don’t drag it through the fieriest parts of my reconsideration process all the time. A huge amount of literature, music, poetry, and discussion with other humans has led me to conclude that the desire to be understood is close to inescapable. That it seems to dictate most sincere intelligent rational behavior and interaction. Indeed, it seems at the very core of the notion of interaction. If we don’t seek some fundamental acknowledgment of our own experiences from other souls and perspectives, what are we even doing engaging with them? Why be a writer? Why lay down anything, from a silly quiz with some political overtones to a lengthy allegorical novel to this very blog post? If I don’t seek understanding, what the hell is my goal with all this expenditure of language? Why am I even coaching debate?

Now of course there’s a distinction to be made here, to be careful, between what might loosely be termed as “being understood” and “Being Understood.” Certainly if you are following any of what I’m talking about herein or relating to it, then you understand me in the lower-case sense of what we’re dealing with, and there are minor satisfactions to be gained from that, even some positive reinforcement to carry forward. But obviously this is vastly shy of the upper-case sense, wherein you would know me, my perspective, and my proclivities so fundamentally as to be able to predict my future behavior and reactions and empathize with my very way of interacting with the world. And that, my friends, is what is starting to seem unreachable. Already I can hear a lot of you cynics out there decrying that I ever believed in such a height of mutuality in our world and where did I get off being so naive?

Well naive or no, it’s informed countless numbers of my decisions and approaches over the past three decades and change. Or probably short of three decades – it would be interesting to trace the etymology of this desire back to its deepest roots. The fact that no formative experience around this ideal springs to mind upon cursory glance indicates just how essential it is – I can pretty well trace pacifism, vegetarianism, non-drinking/drug use, monogamy, and almost all my other core values and aspirations back to their initiation. But this one just seems prehistoric. I can even evoke instances of it from times when my memory stretches to its utmost, such as the fabled issue I had with how I was taken out of my car seat and how I felt about my parents either understanding me or not based on whether they did it the “right” way without being asked. Jettisoning this desire would be such a transformative change that I don’t even know who I would be or what I would look like without this. And maybe you can add up the last 31 years and say “good,” because I’ve been doing things so wrong that something diametric has got to be right. But I’m not altogether sure, and the precipice looks mighty high from here.

It gets me wondering, though, what other people are living for. I mean, I know a lot of folks don’t spend a lot of time introspecting and seem to be just sort of putting their head down and getting through whatever allotment Earth gives them and still others seem to derive tautological pleasure from the pursuit of happiness. Feeling good isn’t bad, on face, but it sure seems like an awfully empty thing to put all of your energy into. And yeah, there’s helping people, and that’s important, and that’s a high-order principle as well, especially in slightly less personal pursuits (although in personal ones too). But why do we help people? Honestly, there’s probably nothing I want to help people with more than their own pursuit of being understood. As I do, because I’m a human, I’ve probably projected my own priorities and desires on tons of other people (nearly everyone?) and I derive a lot more satisfaction and fulfillment from convincing someone else they’re not alone or that I empathize with them than I do making them happier or digging them out of poverty or something. It’s that poverty of spirit that the lonely have that concerns me most about our experience here. Which also seems fundamental – in believing that the world is a physical metaphor for an aphysical reality, the deeper emotions matter a lot more than the material plusses and minuses. God, no wonder I end up with different conclusions than most other people. Even recent conversations with relatively relatable intelligent people have turned up how embedded in hardcore materialism (philosophical materialism, not capitalist materialism, though there’s probably some of that too) everyone else is.

I’m in a library and I have a list of physical amalgams of pages bound together to try to pick up so I can digest and absorb them, come to a deeper understanding of people I will never meet and their perspectives on invented people who are illustrative metaphors for those I know. Would I even pursue these kinds of activities under a newly adopted regimen of personal goals? Why or why not?

My entire life, I’ve garnered the most hope for our species from the idea that we can learn from each other’s mistakes and not have to endure every one of them on our own anew. It’s a simple idea, much espoused, and is probably the basic principle which ants and cockroaches will utilize to long outlive us. They’re better at it than we are, but this doesn’t negate our ability to use it too. Giving up on being understood would seemingly have a corrosive impact on even this key solace. And yet, if it’s more realistic, who am I to blow against the wind? If only this wind weren’t so particularly cold and, well, unfeeling.