Mon, 29 Apr 2024 - Revised as of Wed, 12 Mar 2025
Nature abhors a vacuum? No. Nature is primarily a vacuum. A vacuum is a state of overwhelming absence, which—as it turns out—describes the vast majority of physical space in the observable universe. What nature actually abhors is a binary. In direct contrast to a vacuum, binaries exist virtually nowhere rather than pretty much everywhere.
In such a spectral universe—full of gradients, sliding scales, and degrees of measure—it strikes me as not insignificant that we humans are the only creatures who place descriptive value on binaries. Indeed, we are also the only creatures that describe things. What other creature spends any time whatsoever arguing whether this or that is feminine or masculine? Straight or gay? Neurotypical or neurodivergent?
It's just us.
Most of nature exists on a continuum, an undulating wavelength, a constant state of algorithmic creation based upon myriad inputs and outputs. And so do we humans, to be clear. In our case, though, we're cursed with this wretched thing called metacognition, with self-awareness, self-consciousness.
Whereas our animal sisters, brothers, and others exist on an if-this-then-this basis, we are cursed to both exist on such a basis and be aware of it.
I'm just as driven by the unconscious forces of biology, physics, and history as a butterfly is driven by instinct. The primary difference, insofar as I'm existentially concerned here, is that I belong to a species plagued by this experiential construct we like to term "free will" or agency. I make decisions, and that leads me to the conscious perception that my hands grip an agentic steering wheel of sorts. Strip away the layers upon layers of variables that go into any individual decision I make, though, and you quickly realize free will is a superficial and cosmetic emergent property.
I feel like this may be more of a hot take than I think it is, but from where I’m sitting, free will is a hallucination that arises out of a complex system comprised of body, mind, and environment. And for every point on the decision tree of my life where I selected one option over another (or others, as the case may be), there are infinitely numerous unconscious processes ongoing in the background over which I have no control or awareness. And those processes inform, prevent, or dictate the terms for any decision I might otherwise feel is under my jurisdictional purview.
Do I focus any attention on how I make my thyroid gland function? What about my digestion? Or perhaps when I enter REM sleep? Did I choose the moment and location of my birth? Opt for the intelligence I was born with or the educational opportunities available to me? Control the winds of shifting demography or the tempest of political tumult?
Am I not subject to the whims of all the above and so much more?
I digress. Back to binaries.
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Binaries are useful only insofar as their descriptive power allows them to be. It is helpful to know whether something is hot or cold before one physically interacts with it. It is helpful to know predator from prey, healthy from poisonous, correct from incorrect. It is helpful to know “this” from “that”, but not because “this” or “that” matter as absolute values unto themselves. On the contrary, binary differences only matter because contrast is necessary for definition.
Without darkness, light is a meaningless concept. That doesn’t mean the only states of existence possible are total darkness or unobstructed light. Gradations between these two maximal states exist, and it’s in that intervening liminal space where we find words like dim, gloaming, or incandescence.
The problem with the majority of our uniquely human binary constructs is that they are not descriptive so much as they're restrictive. At best, they're vestiges. They’re forcing us into boxes that can never appropriately fit any of us. All of us exist entirely on a series of inexact locales across a much more variable spectrum than is individually comprehensible.
We have the tendency to place value upon binaries as such. Rather than using superficial descriptors as a starting point, we use them as an end point. But like with the void of space, nothing exists within a vacuum; none of our identities exist but for their relationships to the identities of others. And the dynamism of the human experience is full of myriad contradictions. We often have an emotional preference for either/or, but the human condition is consistently both/and. Until we embrace our natural intermediary realities, we will consistently trap ourselves and each other within the prisons of our own limiting descriptions.
Indeed, even the very arrangement of the letters of my name, "Jesse Timm," are only valuable to the extent that they serve as a linguistic placeholder for the concept of a particular human individual. For those who know me, “Jesse Timm” will conjure a particular association (one over which I have only indirect influence). And like most humans who have ever existed, I am not distinct from any of the billions of individuals who make up the whole of human history, whose names I will never know. Beyond my direct social circles, “Jesse Timm” is just two first names, and one of them is misspelled.
But like all the rest of humankind, I am no less an integral part of history than anyone who came before me. Less consequential than some, perhaps, but no less integral.
Using myself as a fulcrum at the center of a corporeal spectrum that extends infinitely in all directions, I look inward and I see an incomprehensibly complex system of relationships between small things: atoms, molecules, cells. From the same vantage, I look outward and see staggering questions: what is my body but one of millions of bodies comprising a similarly complex system of relationships we call society? And beyond that, what are those societies but the constituent parts of a dizzyingly elaborate web of fragile geopolitical and ecological relationships the world over?
And if I add up the sum total of all these terrestrial relationships to set my sights even further out, what arises is a unified planetary system related to a solar system related to a galaxy, and on and on into the infinite recesses of the observable universe as it expands, racing to meet the heat death of all material things past, present, and future.
We humans are not separate from nature, from the universe. We are not the lone creatures to which binaries apply. As Richard Powers says in The Overstory, “There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing.” That’s no less true of us.
It’s interconnected and inextricable relationships all the way down.
Nothing is static. The universe loves a spectrum as much as it loves vacuum; you can tell because binaries don't exist, and even the vacuum of space is not a perfect vacuum.
You are every version of you that will ever exist, all at once.
And you are none of them.
And that is enough.