The Cost of Not Noticing

Lately I've been reading and thinking a lot about science. I was never any good at science in school. Chemistry class was a total disaster and my math skills weren't much better. I managed to get through physics class okay, and actually enjoyed dissecting the frog in biology class. It seems that I had no aptitude for the subjects that required an ability for purely abstract thinking, as opposed to the ones in which I could relate to something physical. It's a regret that I decided early on, with the encouragement of my high school teachers, that I couldn't 'do' science, because to this day I enjoy learning about how the universe works, what it's made of, and in fact what we're made of. Fortunately, there are a ton of terrific books and online information that make even the most complicated science accessible to regular people of average intelligence like me.

What science teaches, to my mind, is that life is always more intriguing than we thought. I love the way scientists are trained to think. Their foremost skill (and it's not algebra) is that they notice things that most of us don't, from (very) small things to (very) big things, and they pause to inquire about what they notice. I think we live in an age of not noticing, and not inquiring. And this is partly because modern life overwhelms us, not in terms of so much to do (work/life balance etc.) - we probably have more leisure time than any people in history - but in terms of being surrounded by technology. We take more for granted than ever before, and with every advance in technology we take even more for granted. For example, we all carry in our pockets devices that harvest and manipulate the mysteries of subatomic energy. We never think about what makes these devices work, even as we rely on them every minute of every day. We have become so accustomed to the magic brought to us by advanced science for daily living that we hardly notice it anymore. In a way, you might say that we've gotten used to not noticing because if we noticed and stopped to think about all the miracles we live with every day, it'd be hard to just get on with the routines of an ordinary day, because actually, no day is 'ordinary'. 

There's a cost to accepting so much about 'ordinary' life that we don't understand, even as we become increasingly reliant on it. For one, I think it makes us more susceptible to lies. All kinds of lies: Little ones and big ones, white ones, untruths, exaggerations, stretches, misinformation, misdirection, and the more recent innovations - truthful hyperbole (a la trump), and alternate facts (a la Kellyanne Conway). So my sudden new interest in science? It's not nostalgia for high school chemistry class, that's for sure. I think it's because I want to connect more deeply with genuine, authentic living. I'm looking for solid ground to stand on, some truth, as an antidote to the era of obfuscation, misinformation and lies. If science is about anything it's truth-seeking, independent of belief, politics etc. These days it feels like we are surrounded by liars and subsumed in electronically conveyed lies 24/7. It's cynicism-inducing on an unprecedented scale.