The Limitations of Linear Thinking and Being

How focusing too heavily on an endpoint obscures some of our most fundamental capacities

As a philosophy student in the modern academy, I was trained to think and write linearly—explaining how one point leads to the next in a logical sequence until a conclusion is reached. Each step in the sequence gains its value insofar as it brings us closer to this endpoint. It seems to me that we aren’t only taught to write linearly in the US: we are taught to live linearly, organizing the steps of our education so that they lead us to our career, or structuring the activities of our day to further our long-term aspirations. Although skepticism of a hyper-focus on productivity is not new to me, some experiences I had this summer and a recent book I have been reading, Sand Talk by Aboriginal thinker Tyson Yunkaporta, have provided insight into the consequences of a linear, future-oriented attitude on both our social structures and our bodies and minds.

It is a recurring theme in my Substack that our everyday hopes and fears, the horizons of existential meaning available to us, and the metaphysical foundations of our culture’s worldview all mutually constitute and reconstitute each other in a feedback loop that reflects the same patterns of meaning at varying levels of our experience: cultural, social, familial, and individual. Having these patterns of meaning reinforced at all these different levels often generates the impression that one particular culturally conditioned way of living, being, and thinking is simply the way things are and always have been. Yunkaporta likely has a similar understanding in mind when he riffs off Aristotle's theory of value and the Second Law of Thermodynamics—two principles historically considered metaphysical truths in the West—to illuminate how linear thinking manifests as a consistent pattern of meaning within modern communities and individuals.