Neil deGrasse Tyson said this somewhere in the last decade, and the line has, since, become one of those quotes that circulates in the way scientific aphorisms tend to circulate, attached to photographs of galaxies, inscribed onto various wellness-adjacent products, deployed in late-night arguments about whatever the current cultural controversy happens to be. The line is, in its standard circulation, treated primarily as a witty corrective to scientific illiteracy. The corrective is: stop expecting the cosmos to conform to your intuitions. The cosmos does not, in fact, owe you that.
I want to take the line seriously in a slightly different register, because I think the line is, on close examination, doing something more interesting than its standard circulation suggests. The line is not, primarily, a corrective about scientific illiteracy. The line is, more accurately, a general statement about a particular kind of cognitive expectation that most adults carry, mostly without realizing they are carrying it, and that produces, across an adult life, a great deal of unnecessary suffering when the expectation goes unexamined.
The expectation is that the world is, in some basic sense, supposed to make sense. The supposed-to is operating at a deep level. The supposed-to is the implicit assumption that, if one investigates a situation carefully enough, the situation will eventually resolve into a coherent explanation that one’s apparatus can accept as adequate. The assumption is not, in itself, articulated. The assumption is the background condition of how most adults approach the various confusing features of their lives.
Where the assumption comes from
The assumption that the world owes us coherence is, on close examination, a residue of childhood. The child learns, very early, that adults can produce explanations for almost any phenomenon the child encounters. Why the sky is blue. Why the dog needs to eat. Why grandma is not coming over. Why the car will not start. The explanations are, in most cases, adequate to the child’s level of inquiry. The world, accordingly, presents itself to the child as a place that has reasons for its features, and the reasons are available to anyone who asks the right adult.
The child grows up. The assumption persists. The persistence is, in some real way, structurally invisible, because the adult continues to operate in environments where most of the questions that arise can, in fact, be answered. The why-the-train-is-late question. The how-the-microwave-works question. The what-the-side-effects-of-this-medication-are question. The various small confusions of daily adult life are, in most cases, resolvable through ordinary inquiry. The resolvability reinforces the underlying assumption that the world is, by its nature, a place that owes us coherence.
What the adult does not, in most cases, register is that the resolvable questions are a particular subset of the questions one’s life will eventually present. The resolvable questions are the ones whose answers happen to be available within the explanatory frameworks the adult has access to. The questions that are not resolvable in this way are, by structural design, less visible until they arrive. By the time they arrive, the adult has, in most cases, been operating on the assumption of coherence for so long that the arrival is genuinely disorienting.
The questions the assumption cannot handle
The questions that the assumption cannot handle are, on examination, the questions that constitute most of the actually difficult material of adult life. Why the person one loved died at forty-two. Why the marriage that, by every external measure, should have worked, did not. Why the career one had planned for did not produce the meaning one had expected it to produce. Why some children, raised in roughly identical conditions, turn out to be roughly identical, and other children, raised in roughly identical conditions, turn out to be entirely different. Why one’s own internal weather, across decades, has not always corresponded to anything one can identify in one’s external circumstances. The list goes on.
These questions are not, on close examination, questions in the same sense as the why-the-train-is-late question. The why-the-train-is-late question has an answer, available to anyone with access to the train operator’s incident log. The why-the-person-I-loved-died question does not, in any deep sense, have an answer of the same kind. The why-question is, more accurately, a particular kind of demand that the apparatus is making for coherence in a situation that does not, by its structure, contain the kind of coherence the apparatus is calibrated to expect. The demand is not, in itself, illegitimate. The demand is, however, miscalibrated. The miscalibration is the source of a great deal of the suffering that surrounds these kinds of events.
Tyson’s line, in this register, is not primarily about cosmology. The line is, more accurately, about this miscalibration. The line is saying, in a particular way, that the assumption of owed coherence is the wrong assumption to be operating on. The universe, in this reading, includes the small features of one’s own life that one has been demanding coherence from. The universe is not obliged to produce the coherence. The universe is, in some real way, just operating, and the operating is not, in most cases, organized around the apparatus’s expectation of being able to understand it.
What the alternative configuration looks like
The alternative to the assumption of owed coherence is not, on close examination, despair. The alternative is not nihilism either. The alternative is, more modestly, the willingness to engage with situations as they actually are, including the parts of them that do not, in any honest accounting, make sense.
The willingness is, in itself, a small piece of cognitive work that most adults have not, on examination, fully performed. The willingness involves the recognition that one’s apparatus is, by its design, going to keep producing the demand for coherence in situations that do not contain it, and that the recognition is the first step toward being able to operate around the demand rather than being controlled by it.
I have, in my own life, started practicing this in small ways. When something happens that the apparatus is demanding an explanation for, I try, in selected cases, to notice the demand rather than to attempt to satisfy it. The noticing is not the same as suppressing the demand. The demand continues to operate. The noticing introduces, however, a small space between the demand and my response to it. The space is what allows me to sit with the unresolved material rather than to keep trying to force it into a coherence it does not have.
The sitting-with is uncomfortable. The sitting-with is also, on the available evidence, considerably more useful than the alternative, which is to keep generating partial explanations for situations that do not, in any honest accounting, admit of full explanation. The partial explanations are, in most cases, more painful than the original confusion, because they purport to make sense of things that cannot be made sense of, and the purporting produces, in the apparatus, the additional weight of explanations that one is not able to fully believe but is also not willing to fully discard.
What Tyson’s line, in its fuller meaning, actually offers
What the line offers, in its fuller meaning, is, on close examination, a particular kind of permission. The permission is to stop demanding coherence from situations that do not contain it. The permission is structurally available. The permission is also, in most cases, not granted by anyone other than oneself. The wider cultural register is, in fact, almost continuously demanding coherence on behalf of its participants. The grief narratives. The success narratives. The relationship narratives. All of these are calibrated to produce, after the fact, the coherence that the situation itself did not contain. The producing is what the cultural register does. The producing is also, on close examination, often a piece of work that the situation does not, in any honest sense, warrant.
The permission to operate without owed coherence is, accordingly, a small piece of internal independence from the wider cultural register. The independence is not heroic. The independence is, more modestly, the willingness to allow that some of the most important things in one’s life are, in some real way, not going to make sense, and that the not-making-sense is not a failure of one’s apparatus but a feature of the situations themselves. The features are what they are. The making-sense is, in most cases, something one’s apparatus has been doing for decades on autopilot, in situations where the activity was, on examination, mostly fictional.
Tyson is, I think, gesturing at this in his line. The line sounds, in its standard circulation, like a witty corrective. The line is, more accurately, a structural observation about how most adults engage with the world, and about a particular cognitive habit that, when retired, allows a different and more accurate engagement to become available. The retirement is partial. The retirement is also, on the available evidence, one of the more useful pieces of internal work available to anyone who has been operating on the assumption that the universe owes them anything in particular.
The universe does not. The universe is, in some real way, just operating. The operating is sometimes terrible and sometimes wonderful and almost always not, on close examination, organized around the comfort of one’s particular apparatus. The accepting of this is, in my honest accounting, one of the more important pieces of adult work I have, in the last few years, started to take seriously. The accepting is, by no means, complete. The accepting is, in some real way, never going to be complete. The starting is what is available. The starting is what I am, slowly, attempting to do.
