There Are Things No One Will Ever Know About You

The solitary nature of consciousness means that we can never entirely know or understand one another. However, it is within this very shared experience of isolation that we uncover the potential for deep connection.

The following is my favourite excerpt from Robert Pantano's, The Art of Living An Absurd Existence. It also exists as a fantastically edited YouTube video, however, I prefer to read his poetic words from a page. I love how it so eloquently connects psychology, art, existentialism, the human condition and physics. It is eerily beautiful and truthful.

There Are Things No One Will Ever Know About You by Robert Pantano

There are things that no one will ever know about you. You will live your life possessing qualities, thoughts, and feelings that no one else - nothing else - will ever know. Like a lockbox of secrets about the natural world, the phenomena of the universe inside your head will be exclusively yours until the end of everything. The things you never tell anyone, the things you never admit, and the things you can never access or share because you don't have the words will all remain forever real but hidden parts of the cosmos.

In part, this is profoundly beautiful. We each have secrets kept only between us and configurations of the universe's matter that always keep their promise to never tell. But also, this can be incredibly isolating.

There is so much in our mind that will never be consoled, never be reassured, never hear anyone say I understand. So much of what we think and feel is simply too odd or disconcerting to share with anyone. And even if we do share it, it's often filtered into some vague, watered-down version. This isn't our fault. The mind seems inbuilt with this filter and sensitivity - a need to appear favorably and be accepted. Our skull is merely armor for the pink, naked, pasty body inside it, afraid of the world seeing it for what it really is.

Even if you consider yourself very open, confident, and forthright, there are undeniably still things that no one knows about you - thoughts and reactions that you recoil at and push back down into the unconscious mind. Often, even the things you do share, no one fully understands. And then, of course, there are all the things that you don't even really understand about yourself and all the things you can't share even if you wanted to. All the strange sensations we might refer to as weird, anxious, tired, sad, or anything else never really get anywhere close to the abstract kaleidoscope of what it is really like inside your head. Words always fall flat at the foot of what something is really like, restrained by language's limited ability to share only the symbols of things and never what things really are. One can only wonder what we don't know about ourselves collectively - things that everyone experiences, feels, or thinks - but no one can share because we lack the words or means to do so.

We are all made of different particles, constructed at different times and places, and sent off on different tracks of time and space. No one ever has and no one ever will experience the exact physical track you are traveling across the universe. We are all the sole passengers in our railroad car of experience. The by product of this is an inherent existential loneliness - a background hum we all hear, unsure of whether anyone else does, or if it's just inside our head. Ironically, though, this feeling of separateness, of isolation, seems to connect us all. In his novel, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote, "Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

We can all relate to the feeling of how little others can seem to relate to exactly how we feel. And yet, somehow, despite all this, loneliness is still often seen as something that only so-called lonely people feel - losers, social outcasts, recluses, and so on. But in truth, the only difference among people is the degree of loneliness felt. Of course, there are different degrees. Loneliness in extreme forms, where someone experiences isolation or conditions in which their need for social interaction is not met, can be debilitating and lead to physical and psychological problems. These forms of loneliness are not necessarily something to just write off as inevitable, without reasons or the possibility to combat. But the point is, even the most socially engaged person or the most content socially introverted person still possesses some form of loneliness. "Loneliness," wrote Carl Jung, "does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." Arguably, we all experience this inability and disconnection on some level; we all experience some degree of existential loneliness. And the perverse societal perception of loneliness only makes many of us feel more lonely - a sense that we are uniquely alone in the feeling. And so, what we need is the occasional reminder that to feel separate, to feel strange, to feel mad, to feel like no one knows, connects us all. We are perhaps the least alone when we feel alone.

One place we can often look to find this reminder is art and philosophy. Literature, music, poetry, paintings, or whatever else show us that - just as they are inside us - complex, hidden things are also inside others. If they're not the same things, it's at least the same feeling that there are things difficult to share.

Art and philosophy intimate the abstract or forbidden parts of ourselves that we haven't yet found the people, the courage, or the ways to share. What we tell a page, what we feel with a note of music, and what we understand with a stroke of paint are often secrets we would never or could never know or express otherwise. Art and philosophy don't help us deal with our existential loneliness by reconciling the dissonance between ourselves and the world, but rather, by allowing us to connect over the shared isolation we all feel. There can never fully be a bridge built between the world and our mind, but meaningful works of art and philosophy are like coastal cliffs we can occasionally stand on to see that there are others out there, stranded and alone, just like us.

In the words of David Foster Wallace:
"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties – all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music... in various ways, religion – these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. In lots of ways it's all there is."

For more top tier doses of existential crises and thought provoking ideas, I recommend all of Robert's work - including his books and YouTube channel, The Pursuit of Wonder.