Some time ago—I’m not sure when exactly—my car started rattling. It would only rattle:
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When the engine was on, sitting idle, or
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When accelerating with just the right amount of throttle.
This rattle, I did not like it. It sounded like a tiny spoon in a garbage disposal. Which can’t be good, can it? But I exist only in the world of ideas and couldn’t summon the executive function to do anything about it.
Eventually, the future Dynomight biologist rode in the car, and we had this conversation:
Dynomight biologist: What’s that sound?
Dynomight: Rattling!
Dynomight biologist: (Pause.) Huh.
(In the “Huh”, I could sense overtones of, “How interesting that you would choose to live like this.”)
Time went by. I kept reminding myself that selfhood doesn’t exist and therefore we all have a moral responsibility to be kind to our future selves and that future me wouldn’t be any more enthusiastic about having this rattle situation dumped on them than I was. So I spent many irreplaceable hours reading about the many, many possible causes of rattling.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t rattling, but rather incomplete fuel combustion. I put in high-octane petrol, convinced that would make the sound would go away. But it didn’t.
So I spent more hours reading. Maybe it was a problem with the catalytic converter? Rod bearings? Heat shield? Maybe it was incomplete combustion, but I’d let it go on so long that the car was damaged? Nothing seemed to exactly fit the symptoms.
Finally, after several years, I decided try something crazy: I started the car, lay on the ground, and tried to look for where the rattling noise was coming from. When I did that, I immediately saw an extremely rusted piece of metal dancing around on a pipe. I pulled on it, and this thing fell off the car:
And the rattling stopped.
What is this disease? (Cf. my stupid noise journey.) Maybe it’s that if you spend all your time trying to understand complex systems, then when you face a complex system that isn’t behaving like you want, you naturally… try to understand it. But that’s not necessarily smart. Often, “understanding” is weak. Thinking is weak. The world is chaotic and not easy to simulate inside a brain. Often, you want to resist the urge to understand and simply gather more information. Instead of thinking, look. Maybe that’s the bitter lesson for real life.
