[NOTE: This article is a lightly edited version of the speech that I gave at the Kennesaw State University Farewell Family Weekend Brunch event on October 23rd, 2022.]
When I was asked to come up with a message for a parent and family event here at Kennesaw State, I was a little unsure of what I could talk about. You see, I took a less than traditional path through college in a variety of ways. I didn’t start college immediately after finishing high school; instead, I took a semester off to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with my life. When I did start college, I went to Chattahoochee Tech at first and spent a year and a half knocking out core classes there until I decided on a major. Then, right before I transferred to KSU, I got offered a full-time job, meaning all of my classes would have to be evening classes or asynchronous online classes. And of course, partway through my second semester here, COVID came along and said, “Nope, any evening classes you might have wanted to take are asynchronous online classes too!”
On top of all of that, my parents took a very, very hands-off attitude towards my college journey. When I decided I was going to go to Chattahoochee Tech, I actually had my acceptance in hand and my orientation scheduled before my parents even found out that I was applying. I say that not to denigrate them but just to point out that if you are here right now at a parent and family event then you are having a very different KSU experience than I did!
So what do I have to say to you, then, if our common ground is minimal? What message do I have to share that will resonate? How can you relate to me and I relate to you? These are difficult questions that go way beyond what I choose to talk about today. College is a time where you will encounter people who are different from you perhaps more than you ever have before or ever will in the future. On top of that, our world is getting more and more diverse each day. So I realized that, instead of trying to take a specific part of my human experience and try to convey that to you, I should talk about the idea itself of relating to other people who might be different from you.
A book that really shaped how I think about this is Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s a book about a lot of things – the title alone name checks Kurt Gödel, a mathematician, MC Escher, an artist, and Johann Sebastian Bach, a musical composer. But what it really is about at its core is how a brain – something physical and concrete and unconscious – can give rise to a mind – something metaphysical and intangible and conscious. Hofstadter is really big on metaphors, but my favorite one in the whole book, appropriately for me as a Geospatial Sciences major, is a metaphor of a map.
Hofstadter says, imagine that you take two people, give each of them a blank map of the United States and tell them to fill it in with every detail they can down to the level of individual streets and buildings. It’s okay to make educated guesses or even not-so-educated guesses – in fact, if you don’t know any cities in, say, West Virginia, just make them up and fill it in as you see fit. Then, once the maps are filled, each person is magically transported to the world that the other person drew. (Instead of the USA, Hofstadter calls it the ASU – Altered States of the Union.) They now have to navigate the other person’s ASU using their own ASU map.
Now, assuming both people involved are from the United States, the big picture of each person’s ASU is going to be the same. Atlanta is going to be here in Georgia, Los Angeles is going to be on the West Coast, and so on. But depending on where they grew up and where they’ve visited, each person will have different areas filled with highly detailed, accurate mapping and other areas that bear no resemblance to reality or the other person’s map whatsoever. Of course, though, there might be overlaps you wouldn’t expect – maybe both people happened to stop in the same small town in Oklahoma on a road trip once and know where everything is there.
In this metaphor, as you may have guessed, the map is the mind. The big picture stuff, the Atlantas and Los Angeleses of the world, is the common knowledge and common experiences that we generally all have as human beings. The individual in-depth details are the specific interests and personal experiences that make us unique. And sometimes, just like in the example of two people who happened to stop in the same small town in Oklahoma, two people happen to have a very specific unique common experience – perhaps, say, they were both on Jeopardy?
But let’s zoom back out on the map metaphor. Just because two people know where Atlanta is on the map doesn’t mean that their knowledge of Atlanta itself is identical. One person may only know enough to place it somewhere within north Georgia while another may know the city down to every last Peachtree Street there is. Bringing the metaphor back to reality, one person’s experience with Jeopardy might just be knowing that it’s a TV quiz show that exists, while the other is a devoted fan who knows every rule, keeps up with every player, buys the merch, tries out for the show, and so on. When you say “Jeopardy” to those people, they’re going to think of “the same thing” but they’re going to have very different concepts of what that thing is and how they relate to it.
But here’s where the metaphor falls short of explaining the complexity of the human mind. There are about 4 million miles of roadways in the United States. But your brain has about 86 billion neurons, a number that is over 25,000 times bigger. And remember how the brain works – by different combinations of neurons firing at once that build up into the ability to think about specific things like Jeopardy. So you don’t have to just take into account the number of individual neurons but every possible combination, and if you’ve ever taken a statistics class you know that we’re now talking about incomprehensibly large numbers.
So think about the chance that two people labeling the same map would come up with the exact same final product – just about zero, right? Even if the broad strokes are the same, there will be so many little differences everywhere across the map. Now think about comparing two brains and how many differences you’re going to find, and how those add up. When I first said that you and I didn’t have that much common ground, I bet you didn’t think that we were *that* far apart! But the truth is, everyone really is that far apart.
This is where you have a few different options. One of them is to get lost in an infinite feedback loop despairing over and over about all the different ways that no one will ever relate exactly to you. Another one is to shove this idea of the unfathomable complexity of the human mind to the side and just try not to think about it. But the approach that I take – which is also the approach I want to recommend to you – is different.
When I was on Jeopardy, we had a watch party on campus for my final episode, and we had a Q&A session before the show started. Most of the questions were about my experience on Jeopardy, but I still remember that the final question, right before we all sat down and watched the show, was what my favorite book and album were. As I said back then, my favorite album is Vessel by Twenty One Pilots, but I wish I had had more time to elaborate on that answer and explain that my favorite song from the album isn’t actually on the main tracklist – it’s a bonus track from the European version of the album called Kitchen Sink.
Kitchen Sink is about exactly the conclusion that I just came to – the idea that no two people and no two minds are exactly the same. The first line is “nobody thinks what I think”. Continuing on from that first line it’s very negative, falling into that feedback loop of despair that I mentioned earlier. But then he gets to the part about the kitchen sink and he says “a kitchen sink to you is not a kitchen sink to me”. In an interview, Tyler Joseph, the lead singer, explained that something important happened to him, that he had a critical moment of understanding of purpose for his life, while standing at a kitchen sink, and because of that, a kitchen sink has a particular meaning to him that it doesn’t have to anyone else. Even if he were to explain exactly what it was he realized – which he never has – it would still be a different meaning and different experience to him, since he had it firsthand, than it is for anyone else who heard about it secondhand or thirdhand.
But you don’t have to wait for something to happen to you at a kitchen sink to derive meaning for your life. The song goes on to say “Are you searching for purpose? Write something…paint something…you’ll see purpose start to surface”. In other words, when you undertake any act of creativity – writing, painting, designing, and so on, you are conjuring into existence something that only you could have created and only you can ever fully understand because only you were there with it from the very beginning. Even if you’re struggling to get through every single day and you don’t feel like you’re in a place where you can pull something creative out of yourself, you can find that same kind of purpose just from the struggle itself. Going back to Kitchen Sink, the next lines are “no one else is dealing with your demons, meaning maybe defeating them could be the beginning of your meaning”.
That’s the attitude I want you to have towards the idea that your mind is so different from anyone else’s. Don’t despair over it. Don’t ignore it. Celebrate it and find your own meaning and purpose in it. And then, when you come back around and want to relate to someone else – anyone else, no matter how many similarities or differences they have with you on a surface level – you have both the confidence in yourself as a unique, complex individual with an irreplicable purpose and the understanding that that person is a unique, complex individual with an irreplicable purpose. In other words, they’re just like you, and what’s more relatable than that?
Thinking in Gray 