I love learning new things and understanding how things work. I love to observe human things to find connections and infer patterns and models. Finding some sort of order in something apparently chaotic is so satisfying. When it happens, it is as if everything suddenly makes sense.
For a long time, I thought that if I knew how something worked or behaved, I knew what it was.
Oh boy, if I was wrong.
Just because you can understand how things work, causes and effects and figure out patterns and regularities, it doesn't mean you know their underlying nature.
I feel we made this mistake too often. We study something or someone's story afterwards to extract patterns and models (in the book Subtraction, we call them Configurations). Then, we hope that by knowing and applying those patterns and models, we can recreate the same story.
But we don't.
There's a fundamental element missing: the underlying nature of something or someone, the who within the what and how, the essence.
But that essence can't be modelled or replicated. It can't even be objectively understood, only subjectively experienced.