I love a hypothesis. Especially silly ones. It’s not about the outcome, it’s all about the journey. Just like Strictly Come Dancing. A while back I was trying to explain how my mind works, “basically,” I joked, “I’m Wednesday Addams”.
I am not Wednesday Addams. I’m a middle aged professional from a pleasantly leafy area of rural England. But writers rarely pluck a character out of nowhere. Even Pinky and the Brain were based on real people. Somewhere there might have been a real Wednesday…
Before I go any further I have to add a content warning. This gets really dark, really fast. Right after this kitten picture.
I Think, Therefore I am Irrelevant
Fundamentally I can’t avoid the fact that I’m a Nihilist.
It’s quite beautiful, in a strange way. One day nobody will say your name. One day nothing you ever did will matter. One day this entire race of talking apes along with the rock to which we cling will be of no more significance than TOWIE.
“Oh but you can’t really believe that?” I get asked. A lot.
Of course I don’t; it’s a matter of fact so belief is not required.
No, you’re right, that never helps.
It’s also unfair, because the question people ask is about belief. The answer is that I’m an unwilling Nihilist. Sure our entire solar system will eventually collapse into a into a black hole but that is no basis for deciding if you should let the old lady with only one item ahead of you in the queue at Sainsbury’s. Both Wednesday and I like to believe that it people matter because our immediate reality is that they do.`
In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Carl Sagan – from The Pale Blue Dot
The Call of the Void
Wednesday loves all things dark. The clothes she wears, the books she reads, even to the humour that cuts a conversation dead. Me, I don’t feel the need to wear that on my sleeve.
However…
A friend once described me as “relentlessly analytical”. It was mostly a compliment. The barb is that word “relentless”. He was always telling me to chill out, not to overthink everything. Occasionally, in a particularly frustrated hour, I wish I had that option. The mind that creates the algorithms that move equipment and people to save lives is also the mind that sees what the magician’s other hand is doing, literally and metaphorically.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t want to see, that I want to believe in magic.
Cleverness, insight, whatever you want to call it is a blessing. Relentlessness is a curse; a brain that just won’t stop analysing, smashing through anything and everything in its path. It destroys all wonderment, renders everything down to nothing more than mundane parts.
Beauty is just survival of the fittest. Love is just a chemical imbalance in your brain. There is nothing that is not pulled to pieces and wrecked.
You might be tempted to think that this must make me desperately unhappy. It doesn’t.
Not for me, but I am all too aware of its potential. Ask yourself how you stop a brain that just relentlessly keeps on feeding you the most negative, hopeless interpretation of every situation?
I don’t sleep so I don’t dream so I don’t wake up frightened.
The Sisters of Mercy – On the Wire
The easiest thing to do is to stop it thinking. Drugs work, alcohol works too. Both are temporary, both have short term and much longer term consequences, some of which are decidedly ugly.
Downhill mountain biking works. It’s kind of difficult to mull the essential pointlessness of being when every fibre of that being is fighting to avoid slamming into a tree at 60kph. In fact, playing any sport works pretty well, but you can’t play sport all the time.
Meditation helps, mindfulness helps in that taking time to take care of your brain enables you to get some perspective and understand what’s really important.
I might have hit a few mental health triggers there, so I need to clarify. I wouldn’t change a thing. For the all the times I just want everything to shut up there are more when I see how a control room dispatcher is using a system I designed to get crews to an incident faster and save more people’s lives.
One version of me does not exist without the other.
Agents for the Good of Humanity
Despite all I’ve said, people sometimes get scared and think I must be terribly unhappy. Wednesday gets that too. All the evidence, however, indicates the exact opposite. Wednesday is a highly driven, forcefully positive person. She makes things happen. She and I might not have normal views on what is positive, but you can’t deny that we’re both motivated…
However, whilst we might be agents working for the good of humanity: that doesn’t mean we have to like it. Humanity that is.
Fundamentally I’m a geek and there’s a reason geek cafés exist. Rarely do people think, “I know, I’ll invite that computer programmer to my party, they’re always good value at social events.”
I’m kind of lucky though, I grew up with the arts as much as science: I’ve learnt the protocols, I’ve learnt to read the room. It’s not natural for me, but people are often surprised to find I’m quite so technical.
I get the impression that Wednesday and I differ here. Wednesday does appear to be genuinely antisocial and I’m not. I like people, I just find them tiring.
Doing the Right Thing
It’s easy to understand why authority, why rules must exist. They are both, however, blunt, imprecise tools. Sometimes the rules get in the way of achieving the right result.
Wednesday has an advantage over me here, because she’s a fictional character. She can break whatever rules she likes in the certain knowledge that the writers will ensure that the correct outcome happens in the end.
Being an actual, real human in the real world complicates matters. You can easily find yourself facing stiff penalties for trying to do the right thing. Rules annoy me in the same way they annoy Wednesday and I’m inclined to disregard them, but I have to be a lot more careful.
The Twist At The End
How can we wrap this up then? Well, personally, I think the main four of the Addams Family are just different expressions of the same character. Make Wednesday (more) stereotypically male gender, give her more experience, more confidence, make her more comfortable in herself and with others and you have Gomez.
The answer to the real hypothesis then, could I be like someone who inspired the main characters in The Addams Family? Yes, very easily I could. That wasn’t my point, though. It really was all about the journey – which means that someone, probably in America, some time before 1938 had a lot of the same character traits as I do.
We know this, of course, but in a society that contains so much pressure to be normal it can be lonely and isolating to find yourself outside of that. This can be particularly true when you’re younger. If you relate to anything I’ve said here know you’re not alone, we’re actually not that uncommon at all.
If you’re thinking I’m describing someone you know then hopefully you understand them a little better. People are complex, we have different skills and abilities, but we also have different baselines, different ranges of thought that are normal for us. Being outside that is unhealthy, but it’s quite normal for someone to be in their normal range and outside of yours.
Humanity became the dominant species on Earth because of its diversity, adaptability, its ability to communicate and work as teams. Our differences are not things to try to hide or normalise out, they’re things we should celebrate. The world would be a much better place if we all remembered that.