Why No One Connected the Dots Before
You may have entered this letter at a point that isn’t the beginning.
If you landed here directly, please start at the beginning.
. . .
Imagine you’re searching for your glasses.
You turn your home upside down, checking every unlikely place, growing more frustrated by the minute.
Then someone points out, “You’re wearing them.”
You feel relief and irritation at the same time.
How could you miss something that was so close?
Feeling is exactly like those glasses.
So near, so fundamental to our experience, that it becomes invisible.
It is like the air we breathe — essential for life, yet rarely noticed until it’s gone, or poisoned.
But the reasons for this collective blindness run deeper:
1. The Bias Against Subjectivity.
Our intellectual culture has a long-standing bias against subjective experience.
Since the Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to value the objective over the subjective, the measurable over the experiential, the rational over the emotional.
Feelings were relegated to the realm of the “merely personal,” as if “merely personal” wasn’t exactly what makes life meaningful.
A Constant Reminder and a Note on Responsibility.
Feeling is not a choice. Action is. Between feeling and acting, there is a space — and in that space lives responsibility.
Nothing in this text invites impulsive action. Every action assumes care — for yourself, for others, and for the world we all inhabit.
Science — despite its immense value — reinforced this bias.
It advanced by focusing on what can be measured, externally observed, replicated.
But subjective experience is, by definition, intimate, unique, irrepeatable.
You can’t measure what it feels like to experience joy.
You can only measure its neural, behavioral, or physiological correlates. This gave us extraordinary insight into how we function — but made us blind to why we function at all. We know how the brain processes emotions, yet we lost sight of the fact that processing emotions is the point.
2. The Search for Complexity.
Humans tend to assume that important questions require complex answers.
“Why do we exist?” sounds profound, so we expect an equally profound and intricate response.
The idea that the answer might be simple — that we are here to feel — seems almost unworthy of the magnitude of the question.
Thomas Kuhn showed that simple explanations often threaten established conceptual systems. We resist them. We prefer to add layers of complexity than accept that reality may be simpler than we ever imagined.
3. The Fear of Triviality.
If we’re “just” here to feel, does that make life trivial?
Does it reduce the grandeur of human existence to something basic?
This fear pushes us toward “higher” purposes — serving God, advancing civilization, discovering universal truths. But that fear reveals a misunderstanding.Feeling is not trivial. Feeling is extraordinary. It is what makes anything non-trivial possible.
Without feeling, there is no difference between saving a life and destroying one, between creating beauty and creating ugliness, between loving and hating.
Feeling is what gives meaning its meaning.
4. Confusing Feeling with Sentimentality.
When I speak of feeling, I’m not talking about emotional excess or sentimentality. I’m talking about the fundamental capacity to have subjective experience — including experiences of beauty, truth, justice, meaning. But our culture often conflates these ideas, dismissing feeling as “soft,” “unscientific,” or “non-intellectual.” In reality, feeling is profoundly intellectual.
Even the most “rational” work is guided by feeling — curiosity, aesthetic satisfaction, discomfort with contradiction.
5. The Problem of Language.
Our language struggles to describe subjective experience. When I say feeling, you might picture dramatic emotions. When I say experience, you might imagine specific events. But I’m talking about something deeper — the basic quality of being conscious,
of having a point of view, of experiencing the world from the inside.
Philosophers tried words like “qualia,” “phenomenal experience,” “consciousness”— but those technical terms push us further from the simplicity of the lived experience itself. They make it sound like an academic puzzle, not the most intimate, immediate fact of your existence.
6. Resistance to the Obvious.
We have a psychological resistance to truths that are obvious. When we’ve invested centuries searching for complex answers, we feel almost betrayed when the answer is simple. We protest internally: “It can’t be just that. There must be more.” But sometimes the truth is exactly what it appears to be.
Sometimes the deepest answer is also the simplest one.
The reason no one connected the dots before is simple: we were searching for something larger, more complex, more distant than the experience of searching itself. But the answer was always there — in the curiosity that made us ask the question, in the satisfaction we feel when we discover truth, in the frustration we feel when we don’t.
The answer was in the feeling of looking for answers. And now that you’ve seen it, you will never be able to unsee it.
I promised you that, as you moved through this open letter, you would be able to confirm the truth I’m presenting — directly, immediately, in your own lived experience.
Would you like to do that now?
