The single context model
All too often, I find myself distracted by minor existential traumas from things that can be broadly referred to as “what matters”. For instance,
revolutions,
shale gas drilling,
photosynthesis.
These concerns fight mundane daily stresses for my priority of thought, messily like in a reality TV elimination, and often they win the consolation X-box. It’s difficult to even begin justifying my evaluations of worth for these various things, so my solution is now to think about dinosaurs instead of any of that other stuff. To think about dinosaurs, for instance,
giving each other library fines,
trading tempeh recipes
and blowing each other up with long-range missiles.
I remember as a child going to a nature reserve where you could see fossilized dinosaur footprints still in the earth. I was convinced it was a hoax. How could the soil we kick up be so old when old people already seem so old? How could the earth have belonged to these creatures that a) basically sound like dragons (which are not real), and b) are the stuff of Spielberg franchise?
The idea of all of this however, nostalgic child-naivety aside, is to produce a context. It seems to me that there are far too many contexts, which is where problems with evaluating importance occur. So, to make things easy, I propose only one context: that all things are of more OR less significance than the impossible fact that dinosaurs walked around for millions of years, in a The-Time-Machine-remake (2002) kind of way, in your house. That is, where your house is now. Generally, in the context of dinosaurs, whether you marinate your tempeh before cooking it, for instance, hardly matters at all. I find that imagining dinosaurs enacting these valuations is an easy method for realising that basically nothing especially matters.
Test the model yourself. Imagine:
Dinosaurs putting things into context.
Dinosaurs being meta about putting things into context.
Dinosaurs trying to be humorous about their meta-ness, because they feel that the self-reflexive thing is old hat.
Dinosaurs wearing old hats.
You might now have some questions, which can fortunately be addressed through a further demonstration of the model:
Dinosaurs debating specific flaws in the model.
Dinosaurs debating circular reasoning.
You are welcome to be more elaborate in your imagination of these scenarios. You can imagine a small group of stiff-collared creatures at a conference, banging their claws on the hard desks and screeching “reductio!”. You can imagine that, meanwhile, those dinosaurs that have embraced the logic of the single context sit variously in positions of comfort in places of beauty, texting their sweethearts about what a lovely day it is and perhaps they could drive to the beach together in the evening. These creatures drive for hours to get to the very nicest beach, because in the context of themselves the travel-time is negligible. They set up a picnic blanket and gaze up into the night sky, because in the context of themselves the moon and the stars are marvelously important. They relax, make out, watch the stars become brighter, and are relieved that the single context has provided a meaning for them that is far beyond their control.
Things only then become problematic for this placid couple when you begin to imagine
dinosaurs seeing an asteroid come hurtling toward them, but luckily
dinosaurs having control over the earth’s physical processes! or, something like arcade game style dodgem tactics! but somehow
dinosaurs being unable to conceive of the world outliving them by hundreds of millions of years, and
dinosaurs preferring to do nothing.
And perhaps now you can see the real value in the single context model, for all of a sudden none of these things that you imagine matter at all.
