Your knowledge shapes you
When I was a kid I watched cartoons so much I started to find reality unpleasant. Live-action shows made me feel anxious or queasy. People in character costumes or heavy makeup was depressing. Muppets was eerie, it seemed like their skin had been ripped off from a creature, and was worn by a hand. Movie sets was confined and claustrophobic. The real world seemed dull and gray. Movies with flesh and blood actors looked like the people on the news.
But cartoons felt real. They didn’t pretend to be anything more than they were. Cartoons felt like a world that actually existed inside the television. Just like I thought fish belonged in aquariums.
My view on reality was also shaped by cartoons. I had a pseudo-scientific explanation of physics, before I even knew there was such a thing as physics. I thought the outlines of cartoons must somehow also exist in real life. In cartoons they held the colors together, so I thought in our world they must be what holds physical-matter together. I thought outlines were sorta like a plastic bag enveloping everything, which made sure stuff didn’t float around like water in space.
Sometimes I would look really hard at things to try to see the outlines. I thought they must be there, but very thin. I was sure that if I pushed my eye just a tiny bit closer to my knee I should be able to see them. I felt like it confirmed my theory when shadows fell in the right way around contours.
At some point I stopped looking, assuming they must be so thin that I can’t see them with my naked eye.
People try to make sense of reality from the limited information they have. Anything that wasn’t cartoons frustrated me, because it was beyond my understanding. Cartoons was all I knew about. They felt safe. For some people that might be a religion or science. I’m glad I learned some things since then and got used to looking at reality. Otherwise I might have started a religion called “cartoonity.”
Since then my mind has changed quite a bit. I do a lot of game development now so I often joke about the world in terms of level design and graphics. What knowledge shapes you?
Thank you to Arman Khodadoost and Leo Ariel for the feedback on this essay!
