abstraction
perhaps what we yearn for is not merely to be seen. perhaps it is for a self simple enough to be seen. a self without the ugliness and contradiction that comes along with being human. a self small enough to be accepted in full.
every part of me that I show to someone will be different than the part of me I show to someone else. different contexts, different moods, different fears. different standards I hold myself to. when I speak about myself, how can I know that anything I say is true?
contradiction is a part of human nature. you're never really going to be perfectly in sync with yourself, as much as you might want to be. the goal isn't to figure out what some imaginary "true self" wants, it's to create that true self through conscious decision. if you make all of your life choices chasing fleeting desires, all you're ever going to find is a bunch of indecision and false starts.
modern capitalism is an attempt to "mass produce" human beings like products, and to do so it must eliminate contradiction. humans without contradiction can be manipulated en masse through data structures -- that is, through a set of answers to predefined questions. name, date of birth, gender, race, mental illnesses, et cetera, et cetera. of course, this process of discontradiction is entirely artificial, because none of the really important questions about people have simple answers. do you love her? are you happy? is this the right thing to do? all simple yes or no questions on the surface, but any answer to them will have color and texture, context and contradiction, far beyond the simple answers demanded.
yet instead of accepting and indulging in the complexity of these questions with joy, we are tormented by anxiety at their unanswerability. it ought to be so simple, we say to ourselves, I ought to know. I should understand myself completely, be master of my own territory, so why does the answer elude me?! we feel foolish, comparing ourselves to the versions of others that they put out into the world, not knowing that what we are looking at is an abstraction of a soul as layered in doubt as our own.
even at their most honest, people cannot truly bare their soul. a truly accurate map would be as large as the territory it maps. the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. any attempt at abstraction will eliminate details, and that is unavoidable. in fact, this is precisely what makes it useful in programming. instead of directly describing each individual step of an algorithm, programmers can use languages to describe functions, and then describe other functions in terms of those functions, and so on and so forth, until the entire program becomes a simple sequence of functions, each of which hides enumerable complexity. it is to start by describing how a root is, how bark is, how leaves are, how branches are, and then to combine those into a tree, and then to combine those trees into a forest.
the dangers of abstraction come from how readily it convinces us that we understand, that we can fit more in our heads and in our rational frameworks than we really can. I can look at a tree and say, "this is a tree", and I can measure its roots, and bark, and so on, and I can attempt to reproduce it on those terms, but can I really say I understand that tree? why it has grown the way it has? what it means to others? what it means to me?
any time you feel the world grow too small, study. study the patterns of stones in the ground, study the folds and valleys of the bark on the trees, study the formations and colors of the clouds at sunset. realize how precious it all is, realize how incapable you are of holding the world in your mind and twisting it to your will, and let it go.