Project Vision 21

Our lives seem to oscillate between what we do every day because we cannot find a way to stop doing it and that which, although distant and poorly understood, appears as something both mysterious and transformative. Yet, as I see it, everyday life overwhelms us to such an extent that we often fail to perceive the mysterious horizon.

For example, a man recently posted a series of short videos on social media complaining that, because of the poor service provided by his cable television company, he could not enjoy his favorite sports because the broadcast kept cutting out. Eventually, the man discovered that the problem was a cable that had been improperly connected to his television.

The next video the algorithm decided to show focused on explaining the hypothesis of a new form of exotic matter known as a “gravitational vacuum star,” or gravastar. It is a scientific hypothesis proposed 25 years ago by Pawel O. Mazur and Emil Mottola as an alternative to the current theory of black holes.

How can we move so quickly from something utterly ordinary and inconsequential, such as a poorly connected cable at the back of a television, to something so scientifically audacious that, if confirmed, it could lead us to redefine dark energy and, therefore, our understanding of the universe?

At times, I think this instantaneous transition from the everyday to the edge of the universe, from the familiar to the unexpected, from the known to the mysterious, from the boring to the imaginal, is possible because, ultimately, we pay attention to neither one nor the other, placing the ordinary and the sublime on the same level. (This is where I should quote the tango “Cambalache,” but I have done that before.)

In other words, we jump from one thing to another, from the vulgar to the sublime, in order to keep ourselves busy and entertained, yet without ever truly “dwelling” in a profound experience, in a lived experience, that might lead us to discover the difference between distinct modes of being and between the different ways in which reality presents itself.

Following Heidegger (Being and Time), we live in a state of constant curiosity, in which the world around us becomes so dispersed that everything must be continually new, without our ever being able to truly make anything our own. In other words, everything, from a disconnected cable to a new form of matter, is equally superficial.

Heidegger connects curiosity with idle talk, that is, with the tendency to want to see and know everything without remaining with anything. Yet, he warns, this is an inauthentic or improper mode of existence, in which “the one” lives absorbed by what “people say,” “people see,” and “people comment on.”

Nearly a century after that landmark book, the need to consume the new continuously in order to avoid a more serious confrontation with our own existence has reached incomprehensible levels.