The Seemingly Insignificant Lego: A Philosophy of the Obvious

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“We don’t need no stinking instructions!” I said to the enjoyment of my son. “A trained chimpanzee could figure this thing out. Right? Give me some!” I said slapping skin with my son after we ripped the cellophane away and cracked open the little package inside to begin our Lego adventure. We felt like pioneer adventurers going it alone, because that’s just what we do. We’re the types who venture into dark forests without a map just for the adventure and just to say we did it.  

For those of us who aren’t great at building things, putting big blocks together correctly provides a sense of satisfaction so complete that it just feels so me and so right. “It looks just like it does on the cover,” we say, sharing a smile.

This idea, and I’ll say it, the fun of this adventure all comes crashing down about a fourth of the way through when one of the other large constructs doesn’t snap into another quite right. It makes no sense. It makes so little sense that we drop the ego and consult the instructions. The instructions inform us that we will now have to tear all of our hard work apart to insert a crucial tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent Lego. In our frustration, we wondered why the Lego designer didn’t just include a little extension on the larger piece to render the little, yellow Lego unnecessary. 

After we complete the reassembly, and our frustration subsides, those of us who seek philosophical nuggets wherever we can find them, think there might be some sort of philosophical nugget in the requirement of the seemingly insignificant Lego. Some call these moments Eureka moments, or epiphanies, but we prefer to call them “Holy Crud!” moments. “Holy Crud, there might be a philosophical component behind the Lego designers making the tiny, yellow piece so mandatory for completion.” Movies might depict this as the lightning strikes moment, or they might put a cartoonish lightbulb above the head of the main character that leads them to look at the camera and say something to viewers at home that break down the fourth wall. 

The little philosophical nugget we thought we discovered, or imagined, that day was that in most real-world constructs, little parts are as important as the big ones, and sometimes they’re more important. The spark plug might be one of the smallest parts on a car, for instance, but if it’s not firing properly in a spark ignition system, proper combustion is not possible, and our car won’t run properly. Do Lego designers have an unspoken philosophy that they want to share with their customer base that some of the times, the seemingly insignificant is just as relevant and more vital at times?

“The unapparent connection,” Heraclitus said, “is more powerful than the apparent one.”  

“Life is filled with trivial examples,” Dennis Prager once wrote. “Most of life is not major moments.”

When developing a personal philosophy, some of us prefer to go it alone. We don’t want to follow instructions from our parents, or any of the other authority figures in our lives. We prefer the adventure of going it alone for the philosophical purity of it that often leads to greater definition on the other side. “We don’t need no stinking instruction manuals.” We enjoy putting large concepts and constructs together to figure various situations and matters out, and we want to design our own philosophies that discount the need for tiny, seemingly insignificant ideas. Do we make mistakes, of course, but they only provide lessons we can learn and greater philosophical purity and the resultant definition. This can also lead to individualistic ideas that might not be earth-shattering to you, but they lead us down paths we never considered before, and we take great pride in informing anyone who will listen that we arrived there all on our own. 

About a fourth of the way down that path, we make other mistakes, and those mistakes begin to compile, until we realize with frustration that we might need to consult our instruction manuals. At some point, we realize we might have to tear our big ideas apart to allow for the crucial, unapparent connections we failed to make the first time through. The frustrating part is that when we learn the solution to what ails us, it was so obvious that it was staring us in the face all along. We then wonder how much easier our lives might have been if we discovered it sooner.

The Philosophy of the Obvious

The philosophy of the tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent Lego suggests that while big philosophical ideas and profound psychological thoughts often lead to big accolades, the philosophy of the obvious states that those advancements may not have been possible without the “Well, Duh!” or “I can’t believe you didn’t know that!” ideas that litter philosophy.

We can’t believe we didn’t know these ideas either, so we compensate by convincing ourselves that we knew them all along, and we make such a clever presentation that not only do we convince ourselves we always knew this, we can’t remember ever thinking otherwise. Yet, we lived a chunk of our lives without knowing anything about the tiny bricks in our foundation, and our mind somehow adjusted to those deficiencies.

How often do we subconsciously adjust to limitations or deficiencies? To answer that question, we ask ourselves another question, how many of us didn’t know we were colorblind, until our eighth grade science teacher instructed us to complete her colorblind test? Our eighth grade teacher gave us images and asked us to whisper to her what colors existed in the photo, and some of us failed it. Some of us learned we were incapable of properly distinguishing the color red for example, and we adjusted to that new reality going forward. We all talked about this test later and Pat Murray informed us that he failed the red portion of the test. Prior to that test, he admitted, he didn’t know he was colorblind. I heard him say this, but the full import of it didn’t register initially. As I gnawed on what this test revealed, I could not maintain a polite, sensitive stance.

“You had no idea that you were colorblind until today?” I asked. He answered that question and the string of questions that followed. He grew defensive the more I questioned him, but he did not grow angry. I don’t know if he thought I was making fun of him in some way, but I wasn’t. I was stunned that he had no idea he was color-blind for fourteen years prior to that day. My questions alluded to the idea that if I just learned, as Pat had, that I had been unable to distinguish red for fourteen years, it would rock my world. “Now that you know you’re colorblind, do you think back on all the adjustments you’ve made through the years?” How often did he adjust to his inability to distinguish red for fourteen years without knowing he was adjusting? What kind of adaptations did he make, in his daily life, to compensate for something about himself that he didn’t know. How many times did he leave his bedroom with mismatching colors on, only to have his mom say, “Um, no, you are not wearing that today, Pat, it doesn’t match.” How many times was he surprised? How many times did he say, “I thought it did.” Were there so many arguments on this topic that he just learned to concede, or did he always concede? We might say Pat figured he was just a dumb kid who didn’t know any better, and his mom always forced him to check with her before going out, but how did the mom not know? Did she just think he was a dumb kid who didn’t know any better? I know Pat had, at least, two brothers. Did she have to do the same with them, was there a pattern with her sons on this topic, or was Pat an aberration in the family? Either way, she probably should’ve noticed something. On that note, how long do some suffer through school before discovering that they suffer from some level of dyslexia? As one who was fortunate to have never suffered such deficiencies, I think it might find it earth shattering to learn such things after suffering in the dark for so long.  

The mind-blowing reactions I’ve witnessed from people like Pat is that they don’t have much of a reaction. Our instant assessment must be that the reason they act blasé about it, or attempt to downplay the news is to avoid any teasing or condemnation. I can tell you that with Pat, and the others I later met, who experienced what I would consider mind-altering information is a quiet and unassuming acceptance. They treat it like a person might when finding out they’re one of those who can’t roll their tongues.

“It makes sense now that the reason I was having trouble reading,” they say, “or the reason I couldn’t match my clothes well … was based of a deficiency.” I would’ve been so flabbergasted by the findings that I would’ve asked for a retake. I would’ve considered the tests flawed, but my personal and anecdotal experiences with sufferers is that they  don’t think about all the struggles they’ve endured, and they don’t think about how learning the diagnosis would’ve made their lives easier if they learned it earlier. They don’t consider the information impossible, flawed, or earth shattering, they just move onto the next phase of life that involves them approaching such matters with the diagnosis in mind.

How many tiny adjustments did we make prior to discovering the philosophical equivalent of the tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent block? How many things do we now view in hindsight thinking if I just knew that sooner, I could’ve saved myself a lot of heartache and headaches? How are we going to use this information going forward? Most of us just adjust, adapt, and move on. “Nothing to see here folks, just a fella doing what he does.”

Regardless how we arrive at this place, or exit it, we gradually move to the philosophy of the obvious. It can take a while to uncover what we’re trying to write about in an article, on a website, but some of us uncovered our whole modus operandi (M.O.), or our raison de’etre (our purpose) while trying to do something else, something as relatively trivial as cobbling a bunch of Legos together. This otherwise trivial experience in my life proved a humbling and illuminating experience, and it changed the manner in which we think about such matters.  

We all have these moments that some call epiphanies, and others call “Holy Crud!” moments, that change the way we approach situations, philosophical conundrums, and life in general. These moments don’t move most people, as they illustrate what an adaptive species we are, regardless the circumstances. Some of us, perhaps those of us who can be too introspective at times, can easily be shocked by a unique approach to a common dilemma, a fascinating outlook on life we never considered before, and people who just think different.

We’ve catalogued the weird individuals we’ve met in life, but where we started cataloguing these weird people, and their strange ideas, for immediate entertainment. The more we wrote on the topic, the less rewarding that theme became on every other level. There were too many tiny adjustments to log here, but suffice it to say that we went from weird for the sake of being weird to understanding that some people genuinely think so different from some of us that the greater question is why. To make such a progressions, we initially considered it natural to move to large philosophical concepts and profound philosophical constructs, but as the philosophy of the tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent Lego taught us, some of the times these progressions require us to move downscale to the tiny, little nuggets found in the philosophy of the obvious.  

Guy no Logical Gibberish V

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We’ve discussed the idea that the human inferiority complex could drive our belief that aliens from another planet are intelligent beyond our comprehension, but we’ve never discussed the basis of our comprehension. The natural instinct when discussing intellect is to gauge it by comparing it to our own. We could achieve some level of comparative analysis by giving the aliens an I.Q. test, but we might consider that an unfair standard by which to judge someone or something from another planet, depending on the test. Another definition of intelligence might be the ability of a being to harness their surroundings to use them for a designed purpose. An example of this might be when humans use every natural and manmade element at their disposal to create a product. When an alien aircraft lands on earth will the product that transports them be born of greater intelligence or just different intelligence, based on different elements from their home planet?  

Abbot and Costello vs. The Alien Amazons

Are individual, modern comedians funnier than the comedians of, say, the 1930’s? Or are they just different? When we watch Abbot and Costello today, we probably don’t find them as hilarious as our grandparents did. A current teen, who has an altogether different frame of reference, might not even find them humorous. Some comedy is timeless, such as the Who’s on First? routine, but Abbot and Costello had a different frame of reference, a different base, and a different mainframe from which they operated.

When a radically new comedian, such as a George Carlin or Andy Kaufman took the stage, they were so different initially that we consider them brilliant and ingenious. Are they that brilliant and ingenious, or do they just change (sometimes radically) the landscape and language of comedy?

Is a Jimmy Fallon that much funnier than Jack Benny was, or is the comedy of a Jimmy Fallon more of a product of a different era that Jack Benny helped define in some ways? If we were able to flip them around on the timeline, and Jack Benny was everything the modern Jimmy Fallon is, would we regard Fallon as funnier than Benny? This switch would have to incorporate the time and place elements of comedy, the influences that led Fallon to the stage, and all of the prior comedians who changed the face of comedy prior to Fallon. If we incorporated all that into a more modern Jack Benny, would we regard him as funnier than a 1960’s Jimmy Fallon?

When the aliens touchdown on our planet, will they be superior intellects, or will their knowledge be so different that we don’t know how to comprehend their intellect? Will they be carbon-based, as we are, or will they be silicon-based, as some science fiction films theorize? Some scientists deem that impossible, as a Scientific American piece suggests that “silicon oxidizes, and it cannot support life.” What if the aliens introduced us to their line of alien products, our intrigue would initially lead us to believe that they’re intelligent beyond our comprehension, but what if their home planet operated from an entirely different periodic table? We assume that all life, comes from the shared mainframe of the periodic table, but when we find out that’s not the case, it will shock us, and lead us to marvel at whatever they do outside human comprehension. When, and if, we find out our assumption that all life operates from a shared premise was incorrect, we’ll be shocked into believing that they’re better and superior, when it could be as simple as just being different.

***

If you’ve read as many interviews with musicians as I have, you’ve run across the one-more-song phenomenon. I’ve read numerous musicians say they sweat blood and tears to compile enough songs to complete an album, only to have some record executive say, “It’s great and all that, but there’s something missing. We need an oomph song to put it over the top. Do you have one more song in you? We want another song to help unify the album thematically. Put simply, we want a hit.”

The musicians greet this directive with resentment and disdain, as they regard the exec’s request as flippant, as if it’s so easy to just write another song, and a hit song at that. The idea that the record exec would approach the main songwriter in such a flippant manner builds resentment between the two, until the songwriter approaches the other musicians and the producer with the request, “It looks like we need to go back to write another song,” in tones that mimic and mock the record exec. “We need a hit, so let’s go back to the studio and write a hit, because we obviously didn’t do that the first time out.” If you’ve read as many interviews as I have, you know that this musician eventually reconvenes with the other players in the studio, and they resentfully write “another song to appease the masters of their universe” and they haphazardly, and almost accidentally, create a song that ends up defining their career.

The conditions of the creation of this throwaway song are such that the artists involved often end up despising it throughout their career. Almost every musician wants the deeper cuts they spent decades compiling to define them and their brand, yet every audience member wants to hear “the hit” that the band probably spent three days writing, composing, and singing. The song has no meaning to them, yet they’ll spend the next twenty years playing it in concert so the audience will feel like they got their money’s worth. 

I’ve read about this happening so often that I think there’s something to it. It can be as simple as the difference between writing a complicated song about the fall of the Roman Empire and a simple ditty they write about their walk to Burger King. For some reason the Burger King piece hits, and their artistic dissertation on the Fall of Rome falls by the wayside. I don’t think it’s breaking news that most silly, little ditties about love and rocking every day and partying every night sell well and the important pieces usually do not. It might have something to do with the fact that people work so hard in their daily lives that when they get off work, they don’t want to think anymore. It might have something to do with the messenger, as opposed to the message. “Who’s this guy, a rock star? I’m not going to take the views he develops between bong hits too seriously.” The difference might also have something to do with the artist, as they try so hard to write an important piece that they try too hard, and it shows.    

It’s so difficult to predict what will hit, and most of my favorite artists often say they don’t even try anymore. They probably started out trying to appeal to our interests, but they realized that the best course of action is to create the best art they can, and if the audience loves it that’s gravy. When it happens with a song, story, etc., that didn’t require any effort on their part, the artist can feel the frustration in their answer. The complicated, brilliant works required them to jump through all the hoops of creative expression, and it was as difficult for them to be covert as it is to be overt at times, so they seeded and spruced their creation through the gestation cycle, until they decided it was ready to enter the birth canal. Pffft. Nothing. Then they wrote that little ditty about something interesting that happened to them on a walk to the local Burger King, and everyone went crazy. Writing the former was hard, as the perspective changed six different times, and the artist went through as many as twenty-five edits before they finally reach some form of satisfaction. When they wrote the Burger King ditty, they did it in a day, and they didn’t care about it as much. They’re all their babies, of course, but the artist works so hard on some of their material that they find it depressing when no one recognizes them for how important, intelligent, and well-informed they are. What does any of this mean? No one knows, and fewer care. As I wrote, it might have something to do with an artist trying so hard to write important and meaningful art that their effort shows. It might also have something to do with the fact that these simple little ditties, filled with silly and stupid lines, are more pleasing to hear, and read, because all we really want in life is to do is dance.  

Have Bus, Will Travel

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“Hold on a second, wait, wait, wait, did I just hear you say that you’re choosing to travel by bus?” I asked a fella named Rudy who was speaking to another group of people behind me. I interrupted Rudy. It was rude, but I couldn’t hide my amazement. When I asked him if his decision was based on finances, the fact that he didn’t have a fully functional automobile, or a fear of flying, he said no to all of the above. “Then, I don’t get it. Why would you choose to travel by bus?” I asked.

“I want to see the country,” he said, “and I feel like I’ve never truly seen the country before.” When I mentioned that he could see the country by driving in an automobile, he said, “That pesky chore of having to pay attention to the road gets in the way.” When I said he could take turns driving with his girlfriend, he said, “Long story short, I’ll be traveling alone.”

“Have you ever travelled on a bus before?” I asked him.

“I haven’t,” he said, “and that’s part of the allure for me.”

“Before you purchase a ticket go smell a bus,” I said. “Ask the company if you can have a smellment inside a bus to inhale the interior. Walk around the depot and smell some of its passengers. Have you ever smelled pungent B.O. before? Now imagine that smell crawling all over you for nine hours.

“I jabbed a stick into a bloated, roadside opossum one time, and I could smell the noxious gases that came out of it a week later on my skin, in my hair, and in the clothes I decided to pitch,” I continued. “Even that putrid, eye-watering scent couldn’t prepare me for the smells of the guy who sat in J-4. If we could bottle J-4’s unique combination of gangrene, attic, and a slight touch of what can be huffed on an emu’s undercarriage, after an extensive workout, I think we might make a dent in any overpopulation fears we might have.”

Rudy was listening with an “Okay, but,” look on his face that told me he wasn’t convinced. 

“Trains will make stops, but not at every Podunk town junction. An extended bus ride can make what might be a seven-hour trip into nine hours, which might not seem like much of an addition, unless you’re seated next to the smells of a J-4, and you can’t sleep because you stayed up all night, the night before to sleep the bus trip away.

“We all go a little nutty when we’re sleep deprived, but the nonstop bus stops can mess with your mind, as it might take fifteen to twenty delirious minutes to find sleep, until the next bus stop arrives thirty minutes later, at which point the cycle repeats. Repeat this cycle often enough, and you’ll become intimately familiar with the term hypnagogia. 

“I see it on your face,” I said. “You’ve never heard the term. I didn’t know it either, until I traveled by bus. Put simply, the mind messes with you in the hypnagogic state. I’ve read scientific descriptions that suggest a hypnagogic state can occur anytime in the brief moments we transition to and from sleep. We commonly refer to this brief mental state of moving towards sleep or wakefulness without completing the transition as being half-awake or half-asleep. In my experience, the incredibly surreal hypnagogic hallucinations are most vivid when someone or something abruptly forces us out of sleep. 

“I don’t know about you, but I wake whenever I come to a complete stop, be it after a car ride, bus travel, or anything that puts me in motion,” I added, “I saw most of my fellow passengers sleep through a stop, and I envied/loathed them for that ability. How do you guys escape the laws of nature, I wanted to ask. When I would wake with each stop, my sleep-deprived brain told me that J-4 was getting ready to do something awful to me. This cyclical drama continued for me throughout all the stops the bus made, until I reached a level of delirium where I wasn’t sure if the dead and undead passengers around me were products of my nightmares or participants in it. 

“As I slipped in and out of sleep, I ate, just to do something with my hands. Halfway through, I realized I must be pretty good at eating, because the guy in H-2 leaned up over his seat to watch me do it to a bag of Gardetto’s. I don’t know if this guy was graced with a unique ability to stare his way into dreams, or if he discovered those super powers during our little trip together, but a couple hours into this trip, I was convinced he attained a supernatural form.

“I love the smell of those things,” H-2 informed me. I wasn’t sure what world he said that in, so I gave him the rest of my bag, because I suspected his need for Gardetto’s might lead him to display his ability to alter his ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the way an octopus will to formulate an attack strategy it needs to capture the unique prey it finds.

“I thought conceding might also end the cold war I was having with H-2, until I realized that when I could only smell the Gardetto’s, it only served to increase his powers,” I said. “With the advanced state of delirium I was in, I wasn’t able to tell if I was dreaming or not, but at some point in our travel together he altered into some some form of hybrid that reminded me of a Cyclops in Greek mythology. He had the same face, and the same hands were tossing Gardetto’s back to me in J-3. He fed me in such regular intervals that I came to expect them. When it took him too long to feed me, I cheeped like a baby bird, but he did not regurgitate a Gardetto into my mouth, as I feared he might. He’d just turn around and tossed one back to me. 

“Those cheeps must’ve been aloud, because when I awoke from this half-sleep, half wake state of delirium, the passengers around me were uncomfortably quiet, and a four-to-five-year-old was laughing at me over the headrest. The kid then mimicked those cheeping sounds, while laughing at me, until his mother pulled him back.

“My grievances against bus travel date back to my teen years when my dad forced me to take the city bus to school, but it didn’t dawn on me how deep seeded my bias against bus travel was, until a man named Alex informed me that he wouldn’t walk to a Walgreens with me.

“But it’s right there,” I said, pointing to the establishment.

“I had to walk everywhere I went back when I was poor,” Alex said. “Now that I have money and a car, I don’t want to walk anymore.” I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard, and it didn’t dawn on me until later that I have a similar, deep-seeded bias against travel by bus.

“You name the method of traveling a great distance, other than walking or running, and I’ve probably tried it. Check that, I’ve yet to go anywhere by stagecoach or pack mule, but I doubt that they compare to the horrible experience you’ll have on the bus. If I were you, I would seriously reconsider another mode of transportation.”