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The meaning of life carelessly exposed by a biopsych GSI

Shaking the Tree

By Katie Hutchins

Early last Friday morning, I rolled out of bed and journeyed to East Engineering (now known as East Hall, as many uppity psychology professors will tell you). Little did I know, my biopsych GSI was about to tell me the meaning of life, and I thought I'd share it with everyone.

It's two-by-two cell charts, guys. That's all it is. "It's a way to think about all kinds of social interaction," he said triumphantly. From ground squirrel alarm calls to the cost-benefit analysis of raising your children or leaving to make more, it all boils down to cell charts.

I hurriedly copied this into my notebook and began plugging in my love life, my decisions about grad schools and my choice for the next president of the United States. But I discovered -- to my dismay -- that charts don't explain everything. Neither does chemistry or physics or religion or literature (although the last one comes close). The fact is, everyone's clueless.

Most of us are confused as hell about life, and to keep ourselves from going totally nuts we reduce it all to words, symbols, line graphs and numbers. Everyone has found his favorite way of explaining the world, and what follows is the development of universities and the various disciplines within them.

If we really thought about all the possibilities, we wouldn't be very productive. We'd sit around thinking all day. So we categorize. And classify. And pull out our pocket calculators to do differential equations so we can feel smart.

Every part of our lives is based on a category that somebody else constructed. We're run by the wristwatch, the daily planner, the scale, the computer and the textbook. Those of us who consider ourselves more enlightened find truth in music (and all its notes, keys, measures and styles), fashion (whoever decided we had to wear underwear, anyway?) and poetry (rhyme, rhythm, meter and quality). More noble, perhaps, but they're still social constructs.

The result? We have people who consider themselves experts in these fields. Professors, chemists, systems analysts and engineers can speak, and we'll take their word as truth. It creates this whole culture of systematic learning and knowledge, and Americans are trapped in it. You can't be successful unless you go to college and grad school and then follow in the footsteps of many other young bright pre-professionals.

But this learning is not knowledge, per se. It's something more sinister. The symptom of it is those snotty kids in class who think they know everything. Who raise their hands and say, "But Dr. So-and-So, are you sure that the t-test would be preferable to the ANOVA?"

ANOVA? I'm sorry, but the only thing relevant about that is that it almost made me fail Stats 402. And anyone who reads far enough ahead in his textbook to know what it means really doesn't have a clue.

I'm not claiming to have the answers. I don't, because I'm trapped in this culture too. Time that would be better spent musing about those ominous crows in the trees by Angell Hall is spent perusing anthropology books or learning some random researcher's hypothesis about plant growth. I'll stay up all night to get an A in English, but I won't do the same because I'm pondering the existence of higher beings. That's dangerous, and -- when you truly consider it -- extremely misguided priorities.

I stood outside Angell Hall at 4 a.m. last night (and the night before that, and before that, and before that) smoking a cigarette and thinking about the implications of it all. About the tremendous power this society has over us, that it can make all these incredibly intelligent people sit in front of computers at risk to their health and spiritual well-being for hours on end, most of them pulling good quotes out of texts they haven't read and trying to write a cohesive paper without plagiarizing. That's not learning.

I was half tempted to pull a fire alarm and get everyone to see how great the weather was and how cool life would be without the stress. Perhaps I could have gotten a drum circle going or maybe a textbook-throwing contest. But I value my life, so I resisted the temptation.

There's really nothing wrong with learning what others have said. But there is something wrong with thinking others know better. We're all part of this thing called humanity, and that makes us all experts -- Ph.D. or no Ph.D.