The most fundamental premise underlying everything is that no one can know everything. No person can grasp the whole of reality. So we reduce the world to something manageable. Physics sometimes erases friction to explain phenomena. Economics converts people into a handful of variables, and software design organizes countless events into interfaces and state transitions. Mathematics closes the boundaries of a problem with definitions and axioms. Programming, too, cuts out a slice of reality and handles it as inputs, outputs, states, and rules. We are always trying to simplify the world.
People cannot know everything, yet they are constitutionally unable to bear that anxiety, and so they pour out endless theories and hypotheses.
In every turbulent era, people grow anxious and shout their own theories. Within that noise they form groups, and from those groups they either attack other groups with a collective voice or are absorbed into them.
It is fair to say that we are afraid of uncertainty.
When the future feels unstable, people want a clear story rather than "I don't know." When you're anxious about whether your skills will become obsolete, what you should be learning, or whether the time you've invested was wasted, it is psychologically easier to pick a side. Conviction doesn't increase the information you have, but it gives you a reason to act.
The closer a period of transition gets, the louder these voices become.
But when you think about it, that's a strange thing. What does it mean for something to be right, or to be clear? Such values are simply assigned by humans.
We get buried in abstract concepts and cling to whatever we believe a given era demands of us.
But isn't that strange when you think about it? What is right and what is clear is always determined only within certain premises, a particular time horizon, and a web of interests, and even then it is nothing more than a constructed value that humans have assigned. Yet people erase those premises and present their own stories as if they were the truth of the age.
Even so, in every era such statements appear again and again, demanding a decision from us.
"Kids these days have no manners."
"This technology will change everything."
"This profession is about to disappear."
"If you don't learn it right now, you'll fall behind."
"This time is different from before." Each statement may contain a grain of truth, but the problem is that a partial observation immediately expands into a story that claims to explain an entire era. The statement "kids these days have no manners" repeats every time the times change. It erases the individual circumstances of the younger generation and defines them as a single, uniform group.
The zeitgeist of success and failure is simply a group-specific bias that people themselves have constructed, amid information asymmetry, to serve someone's interests and to manage anxiety. Of course, economic success and economic failure have material consequences. But what level of income, wealth, occupation, and lifestyle gets called "success" shifts depending on the era and the interests of particular groups. The problem is that the standards created this way are not presented as one possible standard among many, but as a law of nature that everyone must follow.
The portraits that countless media outlets draw of "the happy family" and "the middle class" are merely descriptions of the groups that happen to align with their own interests. You don't need a car to be happy, nor do you need a large house. Some people want to live close to nature; others have no need for it at all.
Once you start measuring yourself against external standards, you can never be satisfied, because the goalposts are always moving. We always describe ourselves as complex and difficult to understand, yet we define others as simple and easy to read. Rather than staring at uncertain reality for long, people prefer to name that reality, divide it into sides, and build rules for action.
The stories produced that way are not so much predictions as stress regulation mechanisms for managing anxiety.
The current discourse around AI is much the same. If you don't use AI, you simply aren't using it. If you use AI, you simply are using it.
It changes according to the behavioral patterns of whatever group you belong to, and that isn't each person's correct answer; it's just a matter of finding what you yourself want to do.
Yet we get buried in worrying about how we look to others and in the illusion of "happiness" demanded by the social networks we've been forcibly plugged into, and we try to reshape ourselves to fit that illusion.
The fact that values are human inventions is not really the point. What matters is whether a given value is one I have genuinely accepted, or one that someone else has imposed on me as if it were a law of nature. Some people stake everything on honor, some on money, some on family or creative work. If you have chosen it yourself and can bear the consequences, that is enough.
Of course, what we can actually call "my own choice" is not entirely clear either. My worldview is built from countless fragmentary values layered on top of one another. I imitate others and import their worlds into my own. At some point, those borrowed ideas become part of my world. Where my own thinking ended and someone else's began — even that boundary cannot be drawn with any precision.
But the fact that a thought originates outside of me does not mean it is not mine. There may be no such thing as a completely original worldview for any human being. What we can do is accept the things we are given, reject them, modify them, and rearrange them. What remains after that process is what we provisionally call our worldview.
I don't hold to my worldview because I'm convinced it is purely my own. I hold to it because I have no other way to live; I simply decide to treat this imperfectly assembled world as mine and carry on.
I've been active on English-language sites, worked in the field alongside Korean professors, met people at large corporations, and peeked at the social media feeds of well-known academics, and they were all just small, anxious human beings.
Some were trapped in the past; others were buried under external benchmarks.
And this is precisely my own contradiction: even my judgments about others are yet another simplification I have made, and I cannot escape this simplification. The very act of labeling them as merely anxious humans is itself the cognitive simplification I was describing, and it is evidence that I am human too.
In the end, I am no different.
Humans simplify the world in order to understand it, yet at some point they mistake the simplification they have made for the world itself.
And when that small, cognitively constructed world encounters a world that doesn't fit it, they tremble with fear and start shouting again.
Human beings are pretty unremarkable creatures.
And I find myself thinking that it's perfectly fine to be unremarkable.
I just think that and live with it. I don't know what I know, I don't know what I'm certain of, I can't tell what is mine and what isn't, I'm socially unremarkable, but everyone else I've watched has also been an unremarkable creature.
That's why I like myself.
Because I'm no different from anyone else. And because I'm so thoroughly foolish.
And also because I can so easily simplify others and see phenomena at a glance — the telescope I use to observe the world has terribly poor resolution, but I'm satisfied with this much.
I like who I am.