by Leroy on January 16th, 2026.
For some reason that I don't understand I've always been searching for something. This need to search has always been present within me but I can't quite put into words what it is that I'm searching for, whether I will ever find it, or if the search will ever finish. Well, I can always find words to describe it but they do a poor job and never capture the depth of what I want to find, if it's even possible to find: I'm always searching for the connection of how my humanity relates to the mystery of all the different lives that have ever lived.
While I can't speak for any other experiences first hand, I can say that without this search my life would be dull. This search has led me to some to break through my wall of genre prejudices, to learn to accept art as it comes, and it has caused me to foresake my needed for absolute meaning over being moved, but it wasn't always that way.
My search had me venture deep into areas of expertise only to return empty handed. Learning computer science as a whole was a large motivator early in my life because I likened the intricate and complex systems of computation to the all-encompassing systems that govern humanity. Even before learning to program a computer I could see the systems that we live beside, and under, and thought that by studying such systems I could glean a glimpse into the mysteries of life.
Luckily for me my search is as wide as it is deep, so while I was lost in the study of computation I was was never too lost to stop searching. I kept my search by going to the store and choosing music albums based soley on their cover and being completely blown away by the differences in my expectations and what I heard. I kept my search by reading books which are mentioned in other books I've read so that my reading has its own genealogy. And often my friends would search for me by recommending movies, shows, and books so that we could share that experience together.
But there was a time when I was totally lost because I was enraptured. My search wasn't wide because it was only for the same kind of story and my search didn't go very deep because the depth offered was a shallow facade instead. I searched only for the kind of "deep" stories that seemed to be exclusive, stories that required you to "get it". There seemed to be a prerequisite of intelligence to understand these stories, so I was compelled to see if I could "get it". Naturally, I didn't at first, but instead of this pushing me away, it drew me in because I thought that if I "got it" then the story would reveal some truth of the mysteries of life to me. Perhaps it was the presentation of these kinds of stories that sold me -- they often came decorated with rich symbolism and adorned in grand philosophical ideas -- but I mostly sold myself this idea.
I had a presumption that the deep knowledge of life would be difficult to grasp, difficult to convey, and would be dripping in symbolism. I'm not sure why I thought this, or how I picked up this presumption, but these kinds of deep stories cemented this presumption as fact in my mind. As I started reading these stories and found that I didn't understand them immediately, that only fueled my ambition to understand them more. Despite not understanding them, what kept me addicted were all of the parts that I could piece together, point to, and say to my friends, "Hey, look at how deep this all goes."
It didn't matter what medium -- movie, show, or book -- I loved this kind of story because of the sprawling details, the web of intricacy, and how deeply it was all connected. When a detail I recognized popped out at me I got a surge of excitement. I loved being able to recognize character motivations by knowing their secret allegiances I'd picked up from clues in other scenes. When subtle symbolism made its way into the frame or onto the page through motifs or music or anything at all, I made it a point to connect all of that too. But at some point I began to question whether that depth would bottom out. Eventually I started searching for the bottom by looking for concrete answers.
I went online to find a simple synopsis only to find there was never anything simple. Everything was round-about, circumstantial, and unclear. I read evidence from the text only to find that the text itself could be invalidated because of untruthworthy narrators. An untrustworthy narrator was just another theory posited by other parts of the text. A scene could have many different interpretations because there was never enough concrete evidence to make a clear assertion. Parts of some stories were so vague that interviews with the author became canon just to provide clarity.
I came looking for a summary for what the author was attempting to convey but could only find never-ending analysis that reflected the never-ending depth. I thought it would be inevitable that there would be differing opinions of the narrative, but not to the extent that the entire story was in question. At some point I realized that these stories were meant to be a fun exercise for the reader and the author.
It's really my fault that I expected anything greater from what amounts to just entertainment media. I thought the depth of these stories masked some truth that I couldn't grasp because the artistic intent was to say something so ineffable that it required this kind of obfuscated narrative. I wanted there to be a reward for finally piecing together these works. I thought the reward would be a glimpse of the unknown, some artifact of insight lying behind the construction of these stories. Instead the reward was knowing about fictional events, fictional characters, and the intricate, but fictional, story that wove both together.
Fiction was what rang out in my head above all else: this was all just fiction and so I swore off fiction entirely. Looking back, this moment was a pivotal part of not only my search but of my life. Before this moment I truly thought that fiction could outright teach me experience rather than show me experience. Before this moment I truly believed that truth was so fragmented that it had to be picked up in pieces. I became one of those people who says, "I don't read fiction." I took the wrong lesson away from this experience, but that didn't stop me from searching.
History was an obvious next step for me, so I dove right in. I read and watched and, for a while, I enjoyed these works. The juxtaposition between a history book and a modernist novel was stark. The text was so straightforward and clear that it was like going from reading academic papers to reading children's books. There is something special about historicals which lay themselves out readily to be understood: an event leads a person to do something which leads to another event and so on and so on. The only fiction is in its presentation and narrative, to make it palatable, and, most importantly, to make it not boring. But after having consumed many of these books, supplemented by a documentary here and there, I came away with the impression that these works wouldn't contain even a single fragment of truth, only facts.
My search took me back to the bookstore and probably into the least fruitful period of my search. If you subtract fiction and history, there's not much else left in a bookstore except toys (for whatever reason), self-help, popular science. That sounds like a lot but that's usually only four or five bookcases compared to the twenty or thirty that holds everything else. The self-help books I perused convinced me that the "self-help" genre would be better named "motivational." There's no truth in these books, but there's a sprinkling of facts on top of a mountain of positivity. I hoped that these books would at least attempt to get at the root of the human condition, but they never did. I felt similarly about popular science which, at the time, seemed to overlap with self-help quite a bit because psychology seemed to be the popular science.
Eventually the straightforward, linear path of facts in the history books, the loud positivity at the loss of the full spectrum of human emotions found in self-help, and self-help disguised as science, these all left me wanting. While I enjoyed some of my time with these kinds of works, they mostly washed over me without leaving anything behind. There wasn't anything to ponder, any complexity to unravel, nor any grand epiphanies to realize. The works took me from A to B and finally to C, in that order, every time. What I came to realize is that I was attracted to complex works not only because I thought the truth needed to be complex but because I also expected a challenge.
I found myself back at the bookstore looking for a challenge in the only section left: the philosophy section. I started reading the foundational material and racked my brain trying to piece together which characters were talking, what was being said, and deciphering their arguments. I did this for a long time, trudging through each longwinded sentence at a pace that is embarrassing to even mention. The irony was not lost on me: the amount of effort I gave felt exactly the same as when I dove headfirst into those supposed deep stories which drove me away from fiction. I unravelled narratives, put ideas together, found links between parts of the text, and I felt at home because, unlike before, the depth lead to some final point.
This caused me to realize that many of those deep stories with sprawling connections that I enjoyed so much before were just imitations of the work many students had done in philosophy class. But whereas unravelling the depth of those imitations was fruitless and, to me, a waste of time, the time spent on philosophy was fruitful. The time it took me to painstakingly understand each sentence of a paragraph was never wasted because, in these kinds of books, there's epiphany with nearly each paragraph.
This kind of effort isn't necessary either. The works themselves still require a high level of intention, but most of my effort was because the translation I read was a translation of a translation, or a translation into an English hundreds of years removed from today's English. When I purchased a more recent translation I found the arguments crisp and the logic flowed as smoothly as a documentary's presentation of facts. There really is a wealth of information in those texts. I would say nearly the whole depth of human understanding can be found in philosophy, especially in moral philosophy. Humans really haven't fundamentally changed over a few thousand years, our means have just changed, and it was reading these old books that convinced me.
Truth can be found in philosophy, unfragmented and whole. Wisdom can be gained by following the path into the mysteries of life and the path is repeated over and over again waiting only for you to put it into action. However, while philosophy can be your rite of rebirth as it was mine, philosophy still has a flaw: it only talks about experience and usually never conveys experience.
After tempering my mind with philosophy that urge to search was still present within me. I started doing a lot of things I'd never done before and I entered a new era of experience that's hard to write about because the only way to write it would be to write a book. No simple article can convey the experience of doing what my younger self would describe as impossible.
But my life is only my own and I still felt the need to understand what other lives were like. I found myself back in the bookstore, this time in the literature section. After diving in I saw that these works truly put you square into the shoes of another person, to feel as they have felt, to think the same thoughts they thought, and to see what they saw, all in the context of the human experience. To say literature is just fiction is reductive and to say fiction is just someone's imagination is insulting. Some level of magic occurs when an author uses the only tools that humanity has ever owned, thoughts and words, in an attempt to recreate the gift of experience in someone else.
In hindsight it seems obvious that this should have been the center of my search from the beginning. I wish someone would have told me sooner, in clearer words, that experience is the focus of great literature and everything else is decoration. I wish when I brushed against these works in school I wasn't forced away by focusing so much on prose and style, on allegory and symbolism, and on references to older works and quotes. Maybe my journey allowed me to pickup the knowledge to make literature more readily available to my senses, but I'm not sure I agree. All I can say now is that if you've ever felt a yearning in yourself, a need for something outside of you, maybe pick up a few old philosophy books and dust off those classics.