I get a visceral glee from learning that a commonly accepted truth is actually bullshit. You don’t need to drink 8 glasses of water a day. The “obesity epidemic” is much more complex than we’ve been taught. So is “sex trafficking”. You are probably hurting your skin by putting soap on every inch of it every day. Ergonomics is has little to no scientific backing. Etc. Etc.
Like most of us, I clearly love to be right. I’m also fascinated by learning about how things work—it’s one of the reasons I like writing. But my desire to understand everything, and unearth falsehoods, can become compulsive. If I can’t “get to the bottom” of something from reading a few meta-analyses or calling a few sources, if there is no obvious answer, I start to feel like I’m losing my grip on reality.
My ultimate fear isn’t that I’m wrong, but that the truth doesn’t really exist. Just like conspiracy theorists and religious people, I long to live in a world that makes sense. But ours refuses, no matter how many studies I read or experts I interview. On the day after Trump was elected in 2016, in my hung over and sleep deprived state, I sobbed and repeated the phrase “nothing is true” until my partner shook me out of it.
These days, things feel more chaotic and incomprehensible than ever. My media diet still largely consists of journalistic podcasts, articles, YouTube videos and TV shows that feed my desire for understanding, and though I enjoy them greatly, they also can increase my anxiety. Sometimes I need a break.
For several months, director David Lynch has uploaded two videos to his YouTube channel every day. One of these videos is a weather report. Lynch sits in his workshop at his home and describes the current weather and the forecast for the rest of the day. As he lives in Los Angeles, these reports are eerily consistent. Nearly every day, he reports in his imitable style that the rest of the day will include “blue skies and golden sunshine, all along the way.”
In his second video each day, Lynch stands outside holding a plastic container with a screwed on cap. The container holds ten ping pong balls labeled with numbers from one to ten. Reciting the same speech every day, he swirls the balls and draws a number, revealing it to the camera. Then a slide flashes on the screen: “WHAT WILL TOMORROW’S NUMBER BE?”
My partner and I have watched both of these videos nearly every morning for several months, as we’ve been stuck at home in Melbourne’s endless lockdown. Unlike most of what I see on my computer screen, they make me feel calm, safe, and sometimes even giddy.
The beauty of his videos is in their meaninglessness. The weather report is simply a description of the current conditions in LA, which are almost always the same. Unsurprisingly, a culture of speculation has developed around the number of the day (and the conspicuous lack of sevens). But no matter how hard people look, I believe that the point is that there’s nothing there. Lynch is simply drawing a number between one and ten. That’s it. There is no mystery to be solved. There’s nothing to learn or investigate. Unlike the other many other distressing numbers I see every day—case numbers, test positive rates, polls, CO2 concentrations—this number is just a number.
I hope one day I manage to internalize Lynch’s teachings in these videos. I spend so much time trying to give meaning to chaos, but the chaos doesn’t care. It exists regardless. There is no ultimate truth to be discovered, only our endlessly unfolding experience. Our reality resembles the number of the day much more than it does a puzzle to be solved.
Swirl the numbers. Pick a number. Golden sunshine. Blue skies. All along the way.