Anyway. I’m half-Indian-half-Thai. I never think of myself as American. Except, I am, legally. Thai-American? I’m not Indian anything. Legally speaking. But legalities and identities travel different roads, and I am far more interested in exploring the latter. I’m Thai before most things—and yet English is the language I’m confident in. I was recently reminded by one of my best friends that I might be convincing myself my Thai is worse than it is.

Thai is a language of flourishes and redundancies. It rolls nimbly off my tongue, shaped by degrees of formality basically defined by how much older than you someone is. Honorifics are not gendered—instead, you have to take a wild stab at whether someone is perhaps too old to be your sibling but younger than your parents (that’s one term), or old enough to be offended if you address them like they’re younger than they are but not old enough to be a grandparent (that’s another)… I’m not exaggerating! People are offended if you speak to them too familiarly, if they’re significantly older than you, because it’s disrespectful. Conversely, they’re also very much offended if you aim too high, age-wise, because then you’re implying they look old!

I don’t fit into Thai social circles. I sound young when I speak Thai, because so much of my use of the language was shaped by my very traditional Thai grandmother. My manners are impeccable, and I can do small talk like a native speaker, but casual and colloquial I am not. It seems to endear me to people, though. Thai, when you’re accustomed to speaking to elders, is deferent without being diffident. It softens you. The restraint to it, though, used to frustrate the Indian side of my family, before I learned to loosen up in conversation with them.

Thailand’s Indian diaspora speaks Thai in a way that is structurally no different from standard Thai and yet somehow entirely their own. The formalities are stripped away. You address an elder the way you would anyone else, without the customary suffixes that show respect, instead demonstrating your respect every other way. It should sound rude, like sitting at the dinner table without any please’s and thank you’s, but it doesn’t. Your body language, word choice, tone, and approach say all that needs to be said. I’m terrible at it.

I’m Buddhist, nominally? Agnostic might be more accurate. I pray every night before bed, more ritual and comfort than faith. My mom was raised Sikh, grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist school. Occasionally I bring up some intellectual curiosity in a concept vaguely theological and I get to watch the teenaged version of her who argued stubbornly and vicariously with her bible teacher rise up to argue heartily with me.

Visiting temples, something my family does regularly if not frequently, always fills me with a complicated little tangle of warmth. They’re beautiful, for one. There’s one close to work that is hundreds of years old, a stunning structure of brick and delicately carved wood. Awe-inspiring detail and fading murals on the walls. I am perhaps less comfortable in these spaces than my parents, but there are things I love about it.

Willing as I am to respect customs and etiquette, I’m not incredibly keen on ceremonies. They often don’t make sense to me; relics of bygone times, steeped in the preservation of traditions that are only remembered and not understood. But we once went to a temple that held a guided prayer—there was a section, more elaborate than any of its kind I’ve ever heard, that was simply this group of strangers being led, in plain language, through wishing good things upon every being in existence. Demons and ghosts. Wayward souls. The lost, the troubled. Family. Loved ones. Your own self. And my favorite—anyone you have ever hurt or wronged, whether you realized it or not. You wish them happiness, peace, and nothing but good things—and then, once they are happy and well, you hope perhaps they will forgive you. So that it will be another bit of peace upon their lives, and the wishing of it some peace for yours.

I walked out of there with a renewed understanding of why it all matters.

I’m queer. This is a complicated one. And not, at the same time. I don’t feel like I came out to my parents as much as I just told them what I’d realized as soon as I realized it. My mom teases me for my taste occasionally while my dad huffs and puffs over how he now has to shoot suspicious protective-dad-looks at EVERYONE, not just the guys. I’m not out to the rest of my family yet, who, now that all my older cousins are either married or engaged, are starting to be very curious about my dating prospects. I would be the first openly queer person in my immediate family. My parents always tell me it’ll be far less of a fuss than I imagine. They, the first intercultural couple in the community, broke through so many barriers, and were revolutionary in a way I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around. That is another story, and their own. But revolution runs in my blood, is my point, as well as firsts, and at this point no one really expects me to be quite what they expect. Regardless, I am holding everyone off at the moment by keeping them at varying levels of concern over my career prospects instead.

I kid. Mostly. But this is where I have to talk about the tattoo artist part—my life would be terribly incomplete without the tattoo artist part.

I work in a tattoo studio. Grew up in one, really. If you happened to be passing by a very specific street at a very specific date, you may have peered through a window and spotted a little girl—probably in a tutu—tucked into a little cranny on our equivalent of take-your-kid-to-work day, drawing with one of the free tattooers or watching Barney on headphones on a little DVD player. I’m told I used to hop up occasionally to dance enthusiastically along to the songs, much to the befuddlement of everyone present.

I am very rarely scared of people. I can be shy and tend towards being quiet, unless I know you or my brain is in work-mode—but regardless of how comfortable I am, I am not often afraid. I was raised amidst scary-looking, leather-clad, big, loud, outwardly-intimidating people, the kindest, sweetest people I know. Everything I know has taught me that the people the world assumes are frightening are the same who used to cook with my mom and pick me up at school with her on Thursdays, who howled with laughter at my gleeful four-year-old antics, who helped us move and came to see us off at the airport before we made the flight across the world. If there’s anything I have learned, it’s that the people the world would have you be afraid of are not the ones who deserve that fear.

After a lifetime surrounded by it and a couple years immersed in the craft, I managed to fall in love with every single aspect of the job… except the actual tattooing. Don’t know how I managed that. I have, nevertheless, so far done thirteen tattoos. The incredible thing about working in a tattoo shop is the sheer diversity of the people I have had the privilege of getting to meet and talk to and connect with, even just for a little while. I’ve chatted with everyone from politsci professors to school librarians, musicians and therapists and animators and computer engineers. I have fallen utterly in love with traditional coil tattoo machines, made stencils and been trained to check needles and disinfect stations, and had my music taste utterly taken over by the 80s new wave I grew up with. And a side of modern indie/folk. Whatever that’s about.

I also grew up surrounded by art glass. I have been making pieces since I was bitty. Have you ever seen Pandora beads? Yeah. What I do these days is like that. It’s a wonderful, fascinating, occasionally infuriating process. Glass as a material has an astounding amount of personality. It is wont, at least when doing lampwork, to explode in your face—sometimes without explanation. It ‘shocks,’ cracking or shattering dramatically, if exposed to extreme temperatures (i.e. your torch flame, or, you know, if said glass was recently molten, air). Every completed bead requires ‘an annealing process to relieve internal stresses.’ Absolute diva of a substance. I have also begun to learn silversmithing, and am beginning to consider a career in jewelry making.

Let’s see. What else makes up a person’s identity? I was homeschooled—or, I DIY-ed my own education, as a friend put it. A few years of primary school, before my parents noticed the slow death of my innate curiosity—and then independent research projects and online curricula, culminating in almost three years of strong-arming my way solo through trig and chem and graduating high school with a 4.0, thank you very much. I have also been a dressage rider, a climate activist; I do typography and photography; I told one of my dad’s friends, at around three years old, that I wanted to grow up to be a little, tiny giraffe. I am only getting started. With the things I will be, not my transformation into a tiny giraffe.

I am also, as you might have guessed at this point, a writer. I guess that, really, is where this starts.

Whatever all this adds up to, whatever I left out, I am myself. I think it’s amazing that I get my whole life to figure out what that means.

I’m on Lanzarote with my grandma. It’s my first time here, her third. She’s 87 years old, and she explicitly asked me to spend the week with her. Of course I said yes, because she’s my grandma and I genuinely like her; but also because I could never afford a vacation here and was curious what she wanted to show me. I didn’t quite know what to expect.

Today is the second day here, and since I’ve arrived I’ve had this strange feeling I couldn’t quite place. A slight pressure in my chest, a weird mixture of a dull ache and an immense joy at once. Something between yearning and melancholy. In German, there is a word for this feeling: Weltschmerz, pain of the world. Of being in the world, of longing for it. I’ve felt Weltschmerz before, but never this sudden and for a period that lasts longer than thirty minutes.

I’ve been feeling in between. Between the raw, volcanic landscape that’s otherworldly enough for ESA to use it to simulate life on Mars, and the white, artificial hotel landscape with turquoise pools next to the ocean. This morning, I sat on the balcony, looking out at the sea and the rising sun, and below me an elderly, overweight man sat on his shiny, motorised walker scrolling on his phone. It was strangely disturbing.

I am not writing this to judge all the tourists who come here and spend their days driving from one Tourist Center to the next; I am one of them, after all. In fact, visiting the Tourist Centers has been truly inspiring to me. They are locations designed by the Lanzarote artist César Manrique. Manrique was not only a painter and visual artist, he was also an architect. His work integrates natural landscapes with contemporary design. Living rooms in volcanic caves, bars integrated into mountain faces, lava stone that flows into the room rather than staying outside the window.

Something about his work moved me deeply, because it captures exactly that feeling I have been feeling since the moment I arrived. Nature and modern Western culture; somewhat of a contradiction, yet somehow connected in Manrique’s work. I read an article by someone who argued that his work is cinematographic: it creates scenes that visitors enter and participate in, without even being aware of doing so. Taking the time to drive across the island from one scene to the next means participating in Manrique’s movie, in the narrative he envisioned for his home.

I’m not an art critic and I probably wouldn’t hang any of Manrique’s paintings in my living room, but being part of his own personal movie moved me (literally almost 100 km a day), because it speaks of a world that embraces its contradictions and evolves with them. Manrique was a fierce advocate for the protection of natural habitats and Lanzarote’s landscape. His calls to protect the island still echo today with the local inhabitants. He strongly opposed unregulated mass tourism, even though his work–deliberately–encouraged visitors to come here in the first place. He somehow lived in the in-between: deeply connected with nature and the people around him with their (economic) needs at once.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading a bit of The Artist’s Way. The author, Julia Cameron, argues that it’s essential to take your “inner artist” on an artist date once a week. Just you and them, no one else. It can be anything, from visiting a museum or a fleamarket to taking a long walk in nature or spending too much money for an hour in a trampoline gym.

Essentially, it’s about actively participating in life; to “fill your well,” as Cameron calls it. And it makes sense: for there to be creative output you need to have a source to draw from and that source, that well, needs regular refilling.

My time on this strange island has been one big artist date so far. Being immersed in this world of stark, but integrated contradiction speaks to me. If artist dates are about participating in life, this is all I do here. It’s spending the time with my grandma, being fully present with her and listening to her tell me stories of her youth and family. It’s driving her across that island and seeing her happy when I am as excited as she is about whatever it is she wanted to show me. Maybe it’s also the thought that this is our first and possibly last big trip together, at least abroad. It’s all at once: the joy, the sadness, the being present and being pulled away.

We don’t have wifi in our hotel, because that would cost extra, and for the first time in ages, I don’t have my laptop with me; only my e-ink tablet. Before I came here, I hadn’t realised how often I acted on impulse. As soon as a (creative) idea crossed my mind, I would take out my laptop and start working on it and end up with lots of unfinished projects. Now, I don’t have that option. I have to let thoughts fade and see what sticks. In a way, I am letting myself be guided; it’s like I am taking the train that arrives at my platform at a convenient time, instead of running over to the other side of the station to reach one that is about to leave.

I know all of this might sound somewhat cheesy; after all I’ve only been here for a couple of days (by this paragraph, three to be exact). But this feeling I’m talking about actually already started on the plane. Usually, I would’ve spent those hours typing, working on some idea that briefly crossed my mind (I am not a patient person, as you might’ve guessed). This time, I just sat there and looked out the window. Read a short story. Took time to reflect on it. Ironically, without planning to do so I wrote a poem and drew a little during those hours. Of course I knew that my phone was distracting me, but I hand’t realised how much my laptop was as well. Not because I endlessly scroll on it, but because I use it to impulsively give in to the first-best creative impulse. For weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out a system to keep track of my various projects and their progress. I was constantly stuck between being trapped and overstructured and feeling lost in where I was going. But I think maybe the solution I’ve been looking for is time. Time and trust that things will stick; that what matters will stick.

The one thing this trip has showed me so far more than any other vacation I have been on is the importance of embracing the in between. And to do so without needing to fix it. Manrique did so by amplifying the beauty of his home and inviting people to visit, and at the same time standing up against mass tourism and ecological collapse. He was a true hedonist and an activist at once. His work is fully anchored in reality, in the landscape, and imagines what could be at the same time. All this didn’t come to him because he thought his way through it. It came to him amidst all the grey, the contradictions, the messiness.

Nothing gets lost. Whatever needs creating will make it through.

There’s a lovely term in Thai that, translated directly, means “warm-heart”—as in a feeling of warmth in your heart—and essentially refers to the feeling of warmth, comfort and security. Like when you’re around people you love, when you feel safe and seen—the way the warmth of it settles around your heart. I have been trying for years to figure out how and where my grief has taken root, and I realized today that much of it is in how that feeling—warm in my heart—has eroded away.

This isn’t meant to be a depressing piece, I promise. I have been trying for days to come up with interesting essay topics, to plan and outline and draft in my head, but it’s all been inexplicably stalled (I blame a recent bout of the flu)—and here we have this instead. A piece of softness and clarity, hopefully, while the rest of my brain works itself back into gear.

My family’s dog, the beautiful, cheeky soul who was my partner in crime from the time I was six years old, passed away after years of slow deterioration right as my grandpa was preparing for open heart surgery. One year later, a day after my seventeenth birthday, my grandpa passed away after a year of illness. If, before all this happened, you’d outlined these events, and asked me to imagine the days and months that followed, I would have imagined an implosion. A shift in the fabric of my world. A big, gaping hole, the indelible impact of sorrow.

Instead, after months spent in the hospital, watching ambulances pull away from the door of my grandparents’ home, months of stress and pain, years of losing sleep as an elderly dog screamed through the nights, late nights rushing to the vet, after it was all over, life…. slowly went back to normal.

There was joy. My cousin had a baby, the first great-grandchild of the family, a beautiful, beaming little ray of sunshine. Another cousin had a daughter, almost a year later, born on the second anniversary of my grandpa’s passing. I finished school; started working in my parents’ studio. We narrowly escaped a catastrophic flood. We lived through an earthquake (again) (it’s a long story). I still don’t know how to drive. I stare up and waggle my eyebrows at the portrait of my grandpa smiling over the kitchen table all the time, commiserating whenever my parents start to bicker. Both my grandmothers, now widowed, have continued living their lives with awe-inspiring grace and dignity.

I remember with vivid clarity every single person who was stunningly kind to me when times were difficult. The friends who checked in over and over, regardless of whether I’d managed to reply, patient and steady in their support. The lifelong friend of my parents’ who hugged me with such warmth at my grandpa’s funeral, the love in the way her hands remained lightly on my shoulders as people crowded around. The way another friend of my mom’s, of Chinese heritage, cheerfully called herself “Masi” (auntie) without a second thought and taught everyone in her immediate vicinity the correct etiquette for entering a Namdhari Gurdwara while I stood by in slightly awed bewilderment. I remember laughing with my cousin through trying to wrangle a print shop into making cards at top speed for the funeral. Munching a slice of pizza at some late hour on the way to a 24hr supermarket, that same cousin and his wife prodding me into picking out fruit to take home. The lot of us pouring outside in sweatpants and slippers to greet and probably scare the bejeesus out of another cousin’s boyfriend (now fiancé—apparently we didn’t scare him that badly) for the first time.

It’s an unthinkably overused cliche, but life does go on.

All the while, I waited for the grief to hit.

It’s been three years. It still hasn’t.

And yet.

I hold onto the reminder that everyone experiences grief differently. I hold onto the reminder that I am not broken, heartless, or wrong. I wrote poem after poem about loss and grief and told people that I was still waiting for the train to arrive. I look back on those poems now and realize I was not outside my family’s grief. I was not separate, or lost. I was living through loss the best way I knew how, which was simply to carry on, and let my heart do what it would.

It’s been a handful of years. These days, I feel a little worn-thin. I listen to songs about loss and roll my eyes at some, play others on repeat. I miss my grandpa like an ache in my bones, but only when I think of it. Of him. Things hit in unexpected ways—I got a fever after finishing a writing project, suddenly conscious of quiet traumas I thought I was addressing and wasn’t. I hold tighter to the people around me. I ache for my heart to feel warm and stumble on steady ground with the way it doesn’t.

Life is the same. Life has gone on. I’m different. But I recognize myself, and my life.

I realize that I am fortunate. The tragedies I’ve experienced are far from unusual, or overwhelming. They are common, familiar, in some ways inevitable griefs, part of being alive and having people to love. At the same time, they are not negligible. I am no more or less worthy of this grief and compassion than anyone else. It is a strange space to navigate, feeling so okay with such an ache in my heart.

It is nothing like I thought grief would be. And yet, I am still learning to recognize my own heartache, to permit it to take up the space it needs. There is no wrong way to grieve. Joy in the midst of loss is not a crime. We are alive, and we are allowed to waver—to laugh, to long, to forget we are sad. To feel sad, and forget why.

As much as I miss the people (and schnoodle) I have lost, I also miss that feeling of warm security—that warm-heart. The realization that loved ones can be lost changes something in you—however much it doesn’t strike the way you expect, feel the way you think it should. It is solid, certain ground gone from under your feet—and the lack of that warmth is a feeling I associate with the world we’re living in today as much as with my own personal losses.

I have responded to the world the same way I have to loss—I love harder. Hold on tighter. Waver longer. There is a grief and a compassion that belongs to each and every one of us and it is tragic and a blessing all at once.

I don’t know how to navigate this world any more than I ever knew how to navigate my grief. At no point did I feel, “ah, yes, got it, I know what this is now.” I don’t expect to, going forwards, either. But in the face of this uncertain future and a weariness where once my heart was warm, I think the same principles apply.

Life will go on. I will waver, and ache, and miss the days when my heart was warm with certainty and security and easy, unthinking comfort.

But I will also love harder. Hold on tighter. My family has pulled together more than it ever has, over this last year or two, and I am grateful for them every day. We are more brittle, some days, more worn down, but happy and here and loving. Steady. I don’t feel certain, but we don’t live in a world that allows for much certainty. We’re trying, trying so hard to do the best we can for ourselves and each other, and that’s all that really matters.

That’s all that really matters. We still have a future ahead of us, and I don’t need to be able to imagine what it’ll be like. I have people to love, and lots of practice trusting my own two legs on shifting ground, and that’s all the warmth I need.

I recently read the essay How to Understand Things by Nabeel S. Qureshi. It has (as of now) 20,515 likes, 140 comments and 3,925 restacks. And to be honest: I don't quite understand why. There are three major points (leaving out some minor aspects) that kept me from liking it:

1. The author draws illogical conclusions.

2. The author constantly confuses the term intelligence with knowledge.

3. The essay's conclusion — when in doubt, go closer — lacks perspective.

This is not to say that I disagree with everything. There are also valuable insights included, just to mention a few: I do think doubting things can oftentimes (with limitations, as I will discuss later) lead to a deeper understanding. I do also agree that there is a physical component to understanding and that having a "hook" to work with is important. And splitting up your learning process into smaller questions to go after is certainly also a good idea.

So, why would I take the time to write about an essay that, mind you, is already 5 years old and that even includes points I agree with? Isn't it pretty normal to read something and to agree to an extent, but to also have points to criticise? While that is definitely true, there are three main reasons why I felt like it was worth writing about this essay.

First of all, as a person with OCD I have a different perspective on the topic of doubt and questioning yourself and your work — also in an academic context — that I felt was worth sharing and thinking about.

Secondly, Nabeel‘s claims about intelligence don‘t align with scientific consensus and can actually be harmful. 1

And lastly, I think it is important to reflect what we like and why we like it. Just because this essay has 12k likes does not mean it is infallible or doesn't include errors. To be honest, I also first clicked on it because I saw the title, the cover and the number of likes (thank you, Substack algorithm) and thought, damn, that must be a good essay. And if I hadn't properly reflected on what I’d read, I might have even stuck with that notion. This is to say — very much in line with what Nabeel said in his essay — keep asking yourself what you really think about something instead of blindly following numbers.

Before I get into details of the three points mentioned above, let me point out that it would (obviously) make sense to read Nabeel's essay before this one and make up your own mind about it. And, as a disclaimer: this is not hate. Though I disagree with Nabeel on some points and promote independent thinking regardless of the number of likes, this essay is meant as one perspective in a broader discussion. Feel free to disagree with me at any time. (But please, don't rip me apart.)

Ok, let's get into it.

1. The Author Draws Illogical Conclusions

Nabeel's essay starts with the following paragraph:

The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. […] I concluded that what we call 'intelligence' is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about 'raw intellect’.

There are two aspects that make this conclusion illogical.

The first one: Nabeel links the behaviour of the person he describes in the first paragraph to their intelligence. That means, they are smart because of the way they behave and vice versa. But what if they were simply insecure and couldn't accept their solution, because they were incredibly perfectionistic and unable to accept their results? There is no inherent logical connection between intelligence, and finding new solutions for a problem. If this seems somewhat nitpicky to you, I'll get into why this distinction is important (to me at least) in the last section of this essay.

The second one: The conclusion that intelligence is about values such as bravery or honesty is not logically connected to what was said in the first paragraph. It uses the assumption (not logical connection) mentioned above as a basis and does not explain how exactly the described behaviour is a representation of the listed values. While I might agree with the contents of that conclusion - except the fact that I would replace intelligence with knowledge acquisition - the argumentative structure does not hold here. Of course, one could say "Well, this is only the introduction to the essay, he will get into his reasoning afterwards" and they would be correct. But, without an additional explanatory phrase, Nabeel's conclusion is not the conclusion of a well-explained thought process, but merely a statement without reasoning.

There is another example, where the author maybe doesn't necessarily draw an illogical conclusion, but he doesn't follow through with what he's come up with. In section II. he talks about - amongst other things - how intelligent people are not afraid to look stupid. (The relation between intelligence and looking stupid is also not logical, but more about that in the next section.) I do agree that to understand things it is important to not get stuck in abstract considerations, while failing to ask the very basic questions that might make you look stupid. However, Nabeel seemingly forgets his own advice when he advises readers to "go for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts, and then reason up from those facts, (if you cannot experience the things directly)." This is an assumption on my part, but I would say that those kinds of texts are usually more on the abstract, complex end of sources.

So, you should ask the basic questions, but go for as elaborate sources as possible, according to Nabeel. But what if I need to read something that might make me "look stupid" before I am able to understand those kinds of texts? What if the popular science book, that according to Nabeel in section VI. makes me stupider helped me understand more complex studies as I continued with my own research? If I don't understand what a verb is for example, I will never understand a text about verb valency, and I am sure by what Nabeel said about "not being afraid of looking stupid" aligns with just that. But suggesting to mainly read "information-dense" texts with "high amounts of detail and facts" - that's a contradiction to me, at least when it's suggested as the one suits all go to approach. Read that first grade definition of an adjective, if it helps you.

2. The Author Constantly Confuses the Term Intelligence with Knowledge

Maybe the examples above seemed somewhat nitpicky to you. Maybe you think to yourself: "Okay, using a statement instead of a conclusion — what's the big deal? The most important thing is that I can follow the author's train of thought." And maybe you'd even have a point, that last section was very much focussed on smaller details in a pretty long text.

However, there is one illogical conclusion that outdoes all the ones I mentioned before and is actually problematic: the idea that intelligence equals knowledge. Throughout the text Nabeel links being smart/intelligent to knowledge acquisition and being "stupid" to a lack thereof. Let me give you an example. In section I. Nabeel states (the emphasis is mine):

Moreover, I have noticed that these ‘hardware’ traits vary greatly in the smartest people I know — some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators, readers, whereas others are ‘slow.’ 2 The software traits, though, they all have in common — and can, with effort be learned. What this means is that you can internalize good intellectual habits that, in effect, “increase your intelligence.” ‘Intelligence’ is not fixed.

The part I want to specifically focus on is the one I highlighted in bold. Now, let me get one thing straight: I do agree with Nabeel in the sense that we shouldn‘t view intelligence as this static concept that you either have or you don‘t have. But what I strongly disagree with is that intelligence is inherently linked to knowledge, or as he phrases it “good intellectual habits.”

There are many definitions of intelligence, but to start things off let’s look at the definition by Gottfredson, 1994 (emphasis is mine):

A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings — “catching on”, “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do. 3

In this definition we already see an important aspect that is vital to the concept of intelligence: being intelligent ≠ being booksmart. The definition above is obviously not the only one that exists, there are countless attempts to define intelligence — and they are all imperfect. As de Judicibus puts it:

As you can see these claims look reasonable and acceptable — we could also say that they are mostly true — but they seem to capture only some aspects of intelligence. If we compare the intelligence of a mathematician with that of a person with a great ability to make something by hands, for instance, or compare the latter’s one with that of a great artist or musician, we realize that each of these definitions is somewhat lacking. 4

In other words: there are many different kinds of intelligence and they vary greatly. There is no single way to determine if someone is “smart” or “stupid.”

From what I understand Nabeel also agrees with this statement — but he (again) draws an inconsistent conclusion. Parts of his essay emphasise the importance of thinking for yourself, of drawing your own conclusions. 5 And yes, being able to do that is in line with the definition above.

But overall, at its core Nabeel’s essay deals with knowledge acquisition, with learning, just as its title (How To Understand Things) suggests. And mixing this skill with a cognitive human quality is problematic. Now, for some (and I do think a large part of the Substack community is part of that demographic) that are eager to learn and, let’s face it, are probably also good at it, this might be an encouraging message: Here’s how you learn things, the one and only way to increase your intelligence. You don’t have to be stupid (aka. not know certain things), you teach yourself to be smart.

But what about people who enjoy reading popular science books (that, according to Nabeel, may make them stupider)? People who are for example excellent mediators or incredibly skilled carpenters — are they hopeless cases, because they don’t enjoy learning as much, or just don’t have the resources for it the way Nabeel and his audience do?

Nabeel’s essay may mean well, but it propagates an elitist version of intelligence, that only serves a small, educated and privileged group with a very specific skill set.

3. The Essay's Conclusion — When in Doubt, Go Closer — Lacks Perspective.

Just as in the sections before, let me clarify again what I agree with: Doubt is an important driving force in personal understanding and in science. By questioning what we are trying to understand, we are forced to look at it from different angles, to ultimately come to a conclusion as close to the truth as possible. But — and this is a big but for me — the extent to which Nabeel “glorifies” doubt as the centre piece of all understanding, lacks perspective. There are important limitations to his conclusion When in doubt, go closer.

We can look at the subject from several angles. Firstly, there is obviously the personal one. We all have our personal relationship with doubt and uncertainty. For someone who is religious, for example, doubt might bring different associations with it than for someone who is not.

For me, doubt and I have a unfortunate but intimate relationship with each other. As someone with OCD, also known as the (dramatic inhale) doubt illness, I know what it’s like to doubt everything you know, you feel, you think. So when I read an essay where the author proposes a loop of asking do I really understand this? as the best approach to becoming “smarter” it does ring some alarm bells for me. 6

Saying, that Michael Faraday believed nothing, without being able to experimentally demonstrate it for himself, is not only most likely not true. 7 I have not met the man, but I am very certain he believed things without doubting them, or otherwise he would not have been able to come up with any scientific discoveries at all (“Is this really a copper halfpenny? Do I know that for certain?”). Even the person Nabeel describes as an example in the beginning of his essay: coming up with different solutions is fine, but when you never come to accepting the solutions you have, you will never move on to the next question.

Doubting has to have an aim, a purpose. And when it does, it can be extremely constructive. When it doesn’t, it can lead you down a very dark path I really wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

I am aware that I might have a somewhat tinted view onto the subject and that most people reading Nabeel’s essay, who don’t have OCD, will intuitively know that there has to be an end to doubt at some point.

But doubt is also not as unambiguous in an academic or scientific context, as it may seem in Nabeel’s essay. In fact, much about scientific work is about clearly outlining areas of doubt and areas of certainty. Anyone who had to every write an academic or scientific paper knows how much time it can take to clearly define the terms you are working with, to outline your methods and to explain limitations of your approach. And what you’re doing is nothing other than deciding on a basis of truth you build to be able to experiment with doubt.

Nabeel uses a lot of math examples to prove his point, which amused me a little, because especially in math, it is important to decide on a minimum of truth, an axiom, you build you theorem upon. 8 In the words of Kenny Easwaran (emphasis is mine):

One initially plausible story about the role of foundational axioms is that they are intuitively obvious statements that we can use to establish our theorems with epistemic certainty. Feferman quotes the Oxford English Dictionary defining an axiom in mathematics as “A self-evident proposition requiring no formal demonstration to prove its truth, but received and assented to as soon as mentioned.” 9

An axiom is your anchor of truth, your starting point. As a matter of fact, you don’t only need a reliable starting point, you want to (ideally) also have an outcome as close as possible to the factual truth. To find objective truth, that is what science is about. And that is why questions such as “Do I really believe this is true, deep down?” entirely miss the point. 10 The question should be: Can I prove, without any doubt, what X is? Science is not about feeling if something is true or not — maybe that’s your initial motivation, but if it’s your final output you took a wrong turn somewhere in your process.

Now, you might say I talk about science now, but Nabeel’s essay is about understanding things, not science. My answer to that is that science is the ultimate attempt to understanding the world around us (and within us, see psychology for example). And understanding things just for yourself, even if you are not going to write an essay or a paper about it, that is at its core — when approached systematically, as Nabeel suggests — something like “mini science.”

Let me give you one last quote to illustrate my point (emphasis is mine):

Science, which is nothing more than organized skepticism—skepticism with rules to live (decide) by—is in our opinion the imperfect but best tool available for trying to reduce uncertainty about what we do as special educators. 11

Nabeel got the first part right: the art of understanding (aka. science) needs doubt —but doubt with limitations. To understand things, you have to jump into the sea of uncertainty. And if you forget to put on your floaties of truth, sooner or later, you will drown. And you probably won’t even understand why.

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1. And to be fair, this is not something I have seen in only this essay.
2. side note: I don’t think listing “thinkers, calculators, readers” in one breath and opposing it to “slow” people is appropriate. Trust that I can read think pretty fast (not always a great quality) but don’t you think I’m a fast reader or calculator — I am not.
3. Linda Susanne Gottfredson, “Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial with 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography,” Wall Street Journal, 1994, cited in Dario de Judicibus, “The Definition of Intelligence,” Cognitive Science 16 (2015): 107–132.
4. Dario de Judicibus, “The Definition of Intelligence,” Cognitive Science 16 (2015): 109 f.
5. Compare Section VI. for example.
6. Quote from Section II.
7. Quote from Section III.
8. Compare Section IV. for example.
9. Easwaran, Kenny. ‘The Role of Axioms in Mathematics’. Erkenntnis (1975-) 68, no. 3 (2008): 383. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40267364.
10. Quote from Section V.
11. Kauffman, James M., and Gary M. Sasso. ‘Certainty, Doubt and the Reduction of Uncertainty’. Exceptionality 14, no. 2 (2006): 117. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327035ex1402_2.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months listening to and reading about Sinéad O'Connor. I grew up hearing her music; my dad’s been a fan of hers since he was my age, in the Chicago punk scene in the 80s when The Lion and the Cobra first came out. (My dad is the coolest person I know). I’d never really paid attention, the way you do when you've been hearing something your whole life. The Nothing Compares 2 U video still transports me back to being four years old; I vividly remember watching it play on our big, chunky old Mac, determined not to miss the exact moment the tear fell. My parents told me more recently about burning Feel So Different onto tapes, back in the day; I put it on on a road trip and they exclaimed delightedly over one of their old favorite songs. Every time I hear it it feels like home. But it was Christmas Eve in 2023 when I stumbled over Drink Before the War.

The 24th of December is my grandpa's birthday. He'd passed away that same year. So had Sinéad. I was sitting there, bundled in a Ravenclaw scarf my cousin had just brought me (he apparently remembers my mortifyingly dramatic Harry Potter phase of a decade ago), having drunk way too much hot chai and attempting to power through the most intense writing session I'd attempted thus far. I love browsing music while I’m working on my computer, often trying new, unfamiliar tracks and adding slowly to my monstrously long time-capsule playlists when I find something I like. I clicked randomly on Drink Before the War that afternoon, recalling vaguely that Sinéad O’Connor had an incredible voice and thinking about the impact it'd had on my dad when the news of her death broke. He... doesn't tend to have much of a reaction to these things, usually, but he talked about it for days after Sinéad passed. Mainly he said that he missed her, that he felt for her, how keenly it felt that someone was gone.

My mind was blown. I had it on repeat for the rest of the day.

At the end of last year, I found myself in a situation where some of my biggest deeply-buried fears were brought rather unceremoniously to my attention. It was a crossroads, of sorts, a point where I knew what decision I was making but was faced with doubt and questions from almost every angle. Everywhere I turned. I had to come to terms with the idea that the cost of being uncompromisingly myself might potentially be loneliness. That no matter how much I loved people, and they loved me, they might never understand me.

(Maybe they do. I believe that someone does, that some people do. But it was the possibility, really, that had to be dealt with).

That was about when I came across Sinéad's performance at the Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, in 1992.

I've watched it more times than I can count. It still fills me with an emotion I can't quite and haven't really tried to explain. She was so young. Sinéad in blue, surrounded and yet a lonely figure on that stage. That bald-headed girl, the look in her eye and the lift of her chin. The noise. Her sheer, blazing defiance, against what must have felt then like the entire world. She wasn't untouchable, or invulnerable. The drastic opposite. She was staggeringly beautiful.

Listening to Sinéad doesn't bring me comfort nearly as often as it does courage. (Listening to her talk sometimes brings comfort, I have to admit, perhaps because I grew up in a tattoo shop—surrounded by a bunch of rough-talking, scary-looking, leather-clad sweethearts—and listening to her merrily cussing away in that incongruously grumpy old-lady voice of her better, later years sounds like home). I have never in my life seen anyone be so fucking BRAVE. I don't understand how so much blinding courage could fit into one tiny person.

At some point I will gather the necessary courage and read her memoir in full, because I know it will wreck me. In the meantime, I've been chewing through old interviews, articles, albums.

She was hilarious. She was a mess. She was savage. A little frightening. She kept on and on doing the goddamn best she could. She was treated like shit. She was so kind to so many random people who never forgot it. She was pissed the hell off. She was HERSELF, through it all; undeniably, unapologetically, unrelentingly herself. She was just another person.

What I find most remarkable, beyond the impact she's had on me personally, is how drastically different articles written before and after her death are in tone. There has been an explosive outpouring of love for her since she's been gone. While she was here, there were lovely articles written and interviews given, among this sea of dismissive, demeaning, condescending rhetoric. I read an article by the Guardian today, from 2012, where the journalist asked her if people ever tell her she's brave.

Sinéad said, incredulously: No?

(She spoke in that same interview about being treated like she's crazy everywhere she goes. An interview from around the same time is the only time I've ever seen Graham Norton be something of an asshole.)

The biggest thing I think I've learned about Sinéad is that you have to listen to her. Not only to her voice—to her. To what she had to say. She filtered nothing; she's not always easy to hear, but she was almost always right—and what she had to say is so important. She never stayed quiet, not when it would have been easier. She always said she doesn't make sense when she's talking but she does, she does—you just have to listen for it. To pay attention.

She deserved so much more grace and respect and dignity than she got. I don't care that she was a mess. The way she was treated throughout her life says a lot about our world, I think. Our society. She was a trailblazer and a revolutionary; condemned for daring to speak truths society was afraid to hear and sneered at for her honesty, dismissed in her suffering. Sinéad O'Connor had and has so much to teach us about everything humanity is and can be; the best and the worst of us.

So many of the articles I've read since she's been gone, each of them threaded through with this deep-seated grief, come down to the same question I did. Did she know how much she was loved?

No one knows.

She said, though, that she doesn't regret a damn thing. She said, smilingly, in an interview from early 2020, that she has suffered, but that she's not suffering any more. A year later, on the Irish Times’ Women’s Podcast, she was asked if she was relieved that people were finally sitting up and paying attention to what she'd been saying all this time. She said.... No? The point was never what people thought.

She spoke consistently and continually about the importance of solidarity, amplification. Dialogue. She rejected and denounced shame in all its forms, refusing to be silenced in pain and in joy alike. She spoke, towards the end of her life, about how she’d learned to accept the darker parts of herself, to “invite them in for tea.” She told the Washington Post, upon her short-lived return to the road (before the pandemic interrupted the tour), about living with immense pain, as well as joy. That she loved her life, there on the other side of it all. Her family. She spent a portion of her later years in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere, knitting and drinking too-sweet coffee and watching detective shows. Folks who lived nearby got to know her as a person, not a celebrity, and became fiercely protective of her privacy.

She spoke when she was young about fearing death, grappling with mortality. In her fifties, she was working towards qualifications in palliative care. She explained that she wanted to help people be less afraid.

She was the definition of badass. She was beautiful. She was courageous and resilient and seems to have had a love for the dirtiest jokes and worst puns known to man. Her life breaks my heart. She was unapologetically herself, her whole life. She was condemned, belittled, dismissed, lauded, admired, attacked, scorned, and respected for it, by turns.

She’s gone. Whether or not she is acknowledged and heeded as she deserved to be, whether she is admired or appreciated or respected or heard—none of it makes much of a difference to her any more.

But it might still to us.

I had a dream, once, where Sinéad O’Connor was sitting on our couch at home, a friend of the family, telling me something about fear. Try as I might, I can't remember what it was. But I remember how it felt. The understanding that fear is not ever something I need fear.

There is often a cost to beautiful things. Courage, I suppose, is the willingness to pay it, for the sake of something that matters. Sinéad paid dearly for daring to be herself. What, though, would have been the cost of compromise?

If nothing else, this world would have been robbed of something beautiful.

It matters. It matters to me. It matters to so much more than me.

Whatever it may bring / I will live by my own policy / I will sleep with a clear conscience / I will sleep in peace.

It has been said that Sinéad O'Connor had a way of showing up when she was needed.

I think that’s still true.