embracing mystery
on accepting the unknown and hating partiful
At risk of exposing myself as a person who watches and editorializes my life from a distance, I admit that sometimes I like to parse out themes that color periods of my life. 2022 was a year of Abundance. 2024 was a year of Movement. What I keep circling back to these days is Mystery.
I have been watching The Leftovers on HBO on and off for 2 years. The episodes don’t have a ton of momentum, so I often take long breaks between them, but some quality keeps pulling me back to the show. The premise is that 2% of the population suddenly disappears into thin air. Characters respond to this event in several ways: religious fervor, scientific inquiry, obsession, nihilism, denial. Whenever I tell someone about the premise, they usually say, “Do you ever find out why they disappeared?” I answer, “That’s not what it’s really about.”
The showrunner Damon Lindelof worked on Lost, which was my favorite show in high school, despite its divisive ending. My problem with Lost, like most fans, is its lack of satisfying answers. When I put these two shows beside each other, however, a cohesive message begins to emerge: It’s not about answers, it’s about the human response to mystery.
Because really, all that humans do is in response to mystery. The little ones – Do they like me back? Should I take the job? How will that test go? – and the big, existential ones – What is the meaning of all this? What will make me happy? How can I stay safe?
My old boss once told me that I should never say, “I don’t know.” This admission would cost me credibility as a young (, female) engineer. Instead, I was to say: “I’ll look into it and get back to you.” Ironically, I got this job by admitting what I didn’t know. During my interview, for which I was woefully unprepared, instead of answering the technical questions correctly, I described the process by which I would approach a problem I didn’t know the answer to. I’d start with the givens, compile relevant data, and ask a lot of questions.
Not knowing is a generative state. Everything worthwhile happens en route to the answer. This journey can be playful (I can brainstorm with friends about the answer), reflective (I can think about how my past experiences inform the situation and question at hand), humbling (let go and let God). I believe we cheat ourselves out of experience when we shorten the journey between question and answer.
Which is why I lament the lack of mystery in modern life. When it comes to pursuing instantaneous answers, I have little restraint. I will pull up the Wikipedia page of a movie when I am halfway through its runtime. I have not seen an episode of Yellowjackets, but I know everything that happens throughout its three seasons. I can pull up the menu for a restaurant and decide exactly what I’m going to order before I even walk in the door. When I was still dating strangers from the internet, I used to dig through their digital footprint, finding relevant information like high school track and field records and honor roll lists. All this digital archaeology is compulsive and does not bring any meaning to my experience.
When I found out that the founders of Partiful previously worked at Palantir, I was filled with the delicious righteousness of finding moral justification for a dislike previously fueled by aesthetics. I hate Partiful because I do not want to know who is coming to the party, who is a maybe, who has declined. Where’s the romance in that? Half of the fun of a party is guessing what enemies or acquaintances might turn up. I don’t want to live a life with no surprises. I want to live a life requiring endless boredom, faith, and uncertainty.
At risk of exposing myself as a kids-these-days boomer shaking his fist at the sky, I admit that I fear AI might eradicate, along with everything else, mystery. It seems like a sizable portion of the population is using ChatGPT and other tools as a magic 8 ball-style answering machine. If there is something you want to see, it can show it to you. But I don’t want a computer that spits out Lady Gaga covers in the uncanny, reproduced voice of Homer Simpson. I want an unemployed comedian in Brooklyn to give that same prompt their best shot.
In all seriousness, once a person has successfully located their responsibilities and interests offsite — hired a robot ghost writer for emails and texts and essays and novels, a robot artist for drawings and unsettling photoshop, a chatbot therapist, a robot nutritionist for recipe and meal plan development, a reader that spits out plot summaries and talking points — once the delay between question and answer has completely disappeared, once a person has saved all the time there is to be saved, just what will they do with all that time leftover? Just what will be left of life?
At this point, maybe I am getting off topic, stretching the word ‘mystery’ past its load-bearing capacity. I am talking about embracing the unknown, but I am also talking about valuing process over results. I am talking about living slow. I am talking about loving friends and strangers enough to prioritize our collective right to privacy and agency over the very human desire for more certainty, and with it, more surveillance.
I had an interesting conversation with my boyfriend’s aunt recently, who is a professor of English. Her dissertation was about detective fiction. She described crime fiction to me as a very “conservative” genre. These narratives have straightforward answers, clear perpetrators, and objective truth. Time after time, certain types of characters are rewarded, and certain types of characters are punished.
When I reach the end of a plot-driven, engrossing story, often I feel overcome with an emptiness. The mask-off moment, the big reveal, is rarely as epic or comprehensive as I hungered for. I am dissatisfied with narrative answer keys. When I think of my favorite fictional endings, the final scenes or sentences that sit like a pit in my stomach, they all share a certain destabilizing, ambiguous quality. As I wrestle with an indeterminate ending, somehow the story lives on forever.
I feel grateful for mystery, in its simplest definition. Thank God there are still things I don’t know. Thank God The Summer I Turned Pretty Wikipedia pages are incomplete, that I can watch this horrible love triangle unfold without knowing the ending.