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Reflecting on Weirdness
Life is really unusual. Sometimes things happen just as you would expect, with no oddities or irregularities, and this can last for months. And then suddenly, something mind-bendingly weird can get thrown your way, reminding you of the vastness and unpredictability of reality.
Oftentimes, these moments make us feel uncomfortable. There is an unusual emotive or even physical response that we can have to unusual experiences that arise, especially when they do not yield something automatically positive for us. They can make us feel scared and isolated. We are pattern-forming creatures, and so when something breaks the patterns we get so used to, it can leave us with a sense of danger. If that thing happens in a way that seems to only affect us, then it can trigger that primal loneliness that comes with assuming nobody else can relate to you.
Things like this leave a bitter taste in our mouths.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger often talked about this feeling, called unheimlichkeit. Simply put, it is the emotive feeling of unfamiliarity, and it arises quite often for us. It can happen when we look in the mirror for a split second and we don’t look like what we expect, when we visit a place that we could swear we first saw in a dream, when we try to comprehend…
