Beyond Making Sense

Abstract

I used to find home aquariums deeply disturbing. People said they were soothing and that watching the fish move around made them calm. But that’s precisely what I found disturbing, the fish gliding from this side to that and back, between the plants, not avoiding each other but not making contact either, incessantly moving around in this very constricted space, not exactly in circles, but with very few possible variations. It wasn’t the thought that they might be bored or that the lack of variation might drive them insane that disturbed me. (I don’t know what makes fish happy.) Rather, it was the fact that they seemed perfectly content with doing absolutely nothing day in day out besides moving around. What exactly, I thought, distinguishes us from these fish? We do lots of different things, our radius is much larger and so is the scope of activities we engage in, but does that actually amount to anything more than this senseless motion, here and there and through the middle and back, until we move no more? There is sense, yes, enormous amounts of it, intricate and sophisticated, but does that really change anything?