“Still, American television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they're good people? No again. The truth is they don't want anything from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is all they want in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that's all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be worshipped.”

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

coherence is for marketing. coherence is in service of explainability. do you want to be explaining?

the desire for coherence reduces us to our most explainable parts. there's this idea that subjective attractiveness in people scales with increasingly average facial features. the demand for coherence in writing, in image, or in actions is much the same, smoothing out irregularities in favor of some predictability. somehow perceiving objects/people/ideas producing little cognitive friction or strain emerges as this comforting sensation—the feeling of coherence. when our minds can grasp something easily, we mistake that ease for truth or rightness or beauty. it's just our mind subtly refusing additional work.

conversely, we treat cognitive dissonance as if it were some complex coherence time bomb, but it's like trying to piss while taking a shit—not really that difficult and happens all the time. unexamined, it's unremarkable. the discomfort comes not from the mental process of maintaining the dissonance, holding two competing thoughts or identities simultaneously, but from some insistence that we shouldn't be doing both at once.

so, i contend that coherence is not owed and we should not acquiesce. we are not obligated to smooth every tension to reduce friction in understanding. and embracing incoherence and having it embraced can be really intimate.

at some point in your usage of social media, i'm sure you too felt it. algorithms jumped from prediction based on coherence to embracing incoherence.

the earliest predictions of user preferences used to be demographically based. they worked ok but discovering really niche things that seemed tailored to you was a relatively rare phenomenon. now, feeds are influenced by your past activity and have become increasingly competent in identifying your specific in and out groups, in large part due to massive amounts of available data. you get mukbangs, horse riding, and vegan recipes in one feed. but that feeling of the algorithm seemingly embracing your incoherence is what provides that underlying sense the platform understands you. it's not just the sense that they know a lot about you (they have a lot information and knowledge, sure) but that they also embrace your incoherence. you get the sense they really fucking know you.

having acknowledged that coherence is a performance designed to make us more explainable and marketable, you might think the solution would be to stop performing altogether. to simply write and think and express without constantly justifying apparent contradictions. but i keep finding continued resistance: we develop new performances of non-performance. aloofness. authenticity. spiritual materialism.

i've learned to couch statements in elaborate displays of uncertainty, to hedge every claim with epistemic humility: i don't have all the knowledge, i don't have all the answers, so let me leave you with some questions.

so like why do i feel uncomfortable expressing strong opinions? why do i rush to resolve my incoherence? what should